The morning sun needled at her eyelids.
A suffocating weight pressed down on her chest, making it difficult to breathe, and she rolled over in search of relief. She burrowed into the thick folds of the blanket, searching for somewhere warmer and darker.
“Mmm… darling… can’t breathe…”
‘What? Darling?’
Her eyes flew open.
‘Good Lord. What did I just say?’
The sound of her own sleep-murmured words jolted her fully awake. Her vision cleared in an instant — and there, right in front of her, was a man so obscenely handsome that the sight of him knocked the air from her lungs. He was sleeping like a child, deeply and peacefully.
“Oh — ‘oh’—”
She slapped both hands over her mouth. Admiration and alarm came flooding out of her all at once, like water through a broken dam.
His long, fine-lidded eyes were closed to the world. Beneath disheveled black hair, a straight, elegant nose rose in perfect relief. His skin was as pale and smooth as a baby’s, yet the lines of his face were unmistakably masculine — clean, sculpted, composed.
‘What in the world. Who is this man.’
She held her breath and let only her eyes move.
One of his hands was tucked beneath her head, serving as her pillow. His other arm was wrapped firmly around her waist.
‘No wonder I couldn’t breathe.’
The man’s large frame and dense, solid muscle were pressing down on her — and every inch of her was bare.
As was every inch of him.
‘…Wait.’
She went still and, with trembling fingers, carefully lifted the edge of the blanket. Her hands shook as she gripped the fabric.
And then, below the man’s waist, something came into view.
‘Oh my — what is THAT.’
Her mind went blank. She let out a silent, internal scream and tore herself away from him as fast as she could manage without making a sound.
‘His face is like a bouquet of flowers, but below that he’s—’
The movement must have disturbed him. His brow furrowed faintly, and his thick, dense lashes gave a small flutter.
She froze, rigid as ice. The absolute last thing she needed right now was for him to wake up.
He let out a low, hoarse sound from somewhere deep in his throat and pulled her back against him, wrapping his arm around her waist again. His brow smoothed. His quiet, even breath settled warm over the top of her head.
‘…I’ve lost my mind. I have completely lost my mind, Ivelina Florence.’
She had never kissed a man. She had never even been in love. And yet here she was, waking up beside a man she had no memory of meeting, after a night she couldn’t begin to explain.
How had it come to this?
The truth was that yesterday had been the most shocking day of her entire life. Because yesterday — right there, in her presence — she had watched her own fiancé writhing naked with another woman.
‘…And I saw his moving backside, to make matters worse.’
She remembered breaking off the engagement. She remembered pouring a glass of whisky and drinking it in one furious swallow. She remembered slipping out of the ballroom—
And after that, nothing. A clean, total blank.
Whatever had happened next would have to wait. Right now, there was only one priority.
‘Get out. Now.’
The man’s body was wrapped around her like a vice — if she pulled away all at once, he would certainly wake. She held her breath and moved with the most painstaking care she could muster, extracting herself from the warm fortress of his arms and limbs the way a survivor might claw free from the rubble of a collapsed cave. Every motion was deliberate, measured, impossibly slow.
She could not let him wake up.
At last, she slipped free of the bed and moved quickly. Her entire body ached like she’d been beaten with a club, but she bit down hard and darted about the room like a flying squirrel, snatching up her scattered clothes.
The room was a disaster.
It looked as though someone had swept an entire tabletop onto the floor — objects lay strewn everywhere. A chair lay on its side. Cushions had been knocked away from the sofa.
‘Where on earth is my underwear?’
Something glinted on the tabletop.
“…”
It was a scrap of lace. Her underwear from yesterday — in pieces.
There was no spare. She snatched it up and stepped into it, then threw on her dress, gathered every last one of her belongings, and stood looking around the room.
She picked up a fallen quill and a loose sheet of paper from the floor and scrawled a quick note.
‘Oh. Right. What does the room cost?’
Even at a glance, this was clearly an expensive hotel. She scraped together every last coin she had on her person and placed them next to the note on the table.
‘It was a lovely evening. Thank you so much. Please get home safely!’
* * *
Eight o’clock in the morning.
Two hours had already passed since she arrived back at the estate.
She had slipped past the servants and gone straight to the bath — only to recoil in horror when she caught a glimpse of herself. Her upper body was covered in marks. Mottled, unmistakable bruises. Fortunately, her nightgown covered them all.
Once the tension drained out of her, she felt boneless and slow — but sleep refused to come.
Because she could not stop seeing his face. That face, and everything beneath it.
‘I’ve never seen anyone that handsome in my entire life. Not even His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince comes close.’
She had only seen him asleep — but the memory of those impossible features was already burned into her mind with startling clarity.
Where the Crown Prince was handsome in a conventional, perfect-portrait way, this man was beautiful like something that had no business existing among ordinary people. Like a devil that had learned to wear human skin.
‘Who is he? I can’t even remember his name.’
He had smelled extraordinary, too. A cool, deep woody scent that seemed to radiate from him — the kind that made a person want to press their nose against his throat and breathe him in.
Until this morning, her heart’s quietly hopeless preference had always been the Crown Prince. Kind and handsome — a completely impossible dream, but a pleasant one.
And he was, without question, someone she could never pursue.
This seemed like a good time to acknowledge a simple, somewhat dull fact: not long ago, she had recalled a past life.
The Crown Prince was — of all things — the male lead of a novel she had read in that previous existence. A novel rated for mature audiences, in which a handsome Crown Prince would one day cross paths with the heroine and, through much suffering and grace, come to love her.
She herself was an extra so minor she hadn’t even been given a name.
‘Still. It’s better than waking up inside the body of the villain.’
The novel — whose title she couldn’t quite recall — began when the heroine, Princess Reina of the Kingdom of Calon, appeared at a banquet held in honor of the Crown Prince’s birthday.
Princess Reina was the third daughter of Calon’s king, born of a royal mistress. Her two elder sisters and the queen had made her life a misery of cruelty and contempt. In the end, she had been driven out of the kingdom and sent to the empire in a position not far removed from a hostage — and the Crown Prince’s banquet had been her very first public appearance.
They met. They fell in love.
That part sounded like a simple Cinderella story — but the trials awaiting them were anything but simple.
Because this novel had a villain of truly extraordinary menace: the Duke of Hardeion.
That man had to be avoided at all costs. Under no circumstances was she to speak a single word to him. Simply being noticed by him could get someone killed. He had once grown fond of the heroine — and coolly arranged for his own contract lover to die in what looked like an accident, simply to clear the way.
The people of House Hardeion were, without competition, the most brutal and depraved characters she had ever encountered in any novel.
Even in real society, the truth about the ducal family was veiled in shadow. Almost no one knew what they were actually like — only rumors, circling endlessly. But she had read the novel in full, and she knew just enough about them to make her skin crawl.
The Duke himself, yes — but his sister, his parents. All of them treated murder and live burial as personal hobbies. As though killing were the only thing that sated whatever was wrong inside them.
‘The Dowager Duchess bathes in the blood of young maidservants, they say. The rumor about her preference for young servants — that one’s not an exaggeration.’
In the novel, every member of that family had been described the same way: skin like white marble, eyes like dark red wine. Beautiful enough to bewitch, yet somehow deeply, instinctively unsettling. And among all of them, the most striking of all was Kael Hardeion — the Duke, the shadow at the story’s heart.
She had never seen him. But based on how the novel described him, she imagined he must look frightening in the extreme. More than a few characters in the story had lost control of their bladders simply from looking him in the face.
He went on to kidnap and imprison the heroine. To gaslight her, to manipulate her — and to do far worse things besides. That was precisely why the novel carried an adult rating.
‘…I need to avoid the heroine too. The extras who picked fights with her all ended up found dead under suspicious circumstances.’
Because of the Duke — who, in his obsession with his cousin’s woman, committed crime after crime without a flicker of remorse — a great many people were going to die in the months ahead.
‘I must not so much as brush a fingertip against either of them. I’ll keep my head down until the story reaches its end.’
In fact, it might be worth telling her parents and retreating to the countryside estate for a while. If they refused—well. She had just broken off an engagement. Claiming she needed time to recover her nerves was a perfectly reasonable excuse.
“Haaah…”
The last of the tension left her in a long exhale. A drowsy warmth rolled over her in waves, and she pulled her blanket up to her chin as her eyes began to drift shut.
She was just slipping under when —
‘Knock. Knock. Knock.’
The crisp, clear sound pulled her back from the edge of sleep.
* * *
