Chapter 1

(Willow's POV)

The first thing I remember about dying was how ordinary it felt.

No swelling music. No dramatic final confession. No profound revelation about the meaning of life. Just a Tuesday, a delivery truck, and a crosswalk I should have checked twice. Then darkness.

When consciousness returned, it did so with infuriating gentleness. Warm sunlight filtered through lace curtains. Beeswax candles scented the air. Somewhere outside, birds sang as though nothing extraordinary had happened at all. The bed beneath me was softer than any hospital mattress had a right to be.

And my hands.

I stared at them, small, delicate, the fingers short and smooth, without a single callus from years of writing and ordinary living. A child's hands. Not mine.

For a long moment I simply looked at them, waiting for reason to return. It never did. Instead came voices beyond the bedroom door, unfamiliar yet strangely comforting, and memories that didn't belong to me: a grand estate, ballrooms glittering beneath crystal chandeliers, tea lessons, etiquette drills, a stern father, a mother I knew only through a portrait.

The room itself told its own story before I ever understood the one I'd been dropped into. Heavy brocade curtains, the color of good claret, hung from a canopy bed carved with the Ashworth crest, a hawk clutching a bundle of wheat. A washstand stood in one corner, its porcelain basin painted with tiny blue forget-me-nots, a silver hairbrush and comb set laid beside it with the particular precision of servants who had arranged and rearranged that exact spot a thousand times before. Through the window, once I finally worked up the nerve to look, stretched formal gardens laid out in the strict geometric patterns fashionable a century earlier, hedges clipped into spirals, gravel paths raked into perfect lines, the whole estate arranged with the exacting order of a family that had spent generations making certain nothing, least of all a daughter, was ever permitted to grow wild.

By the third day, I finally understood the impossible. I had died. And somehow, I had woken up inside another life.

My name was now Willow Ashworth. Only daughter of Duke Reginald Ashworth. Eleven years old.

And, to my everlasting horror, the villainess from Crown of Thorns.

I'd completed that otome game four separate times in my previous life. Now I was trapped inside it.

Recognition came in dreadful little pieces, the blue wallpaper in the Ashworth tea room, the portrait of the late Duchess above the fireplace, the marble corridors, the rose gardens. Every detail matched backgrounds I'd once clicked through while chasing different romance routes. I remembered them all.

I also remembered Willow's fate. Every single ending. None of them were pleasant.

In the kindest version, her engagement to the Crown Prince was broken publicly before the entire royal court, and she spent the rest of her life hidden away in the countryside, invoked only as a warning to ambitious daughters. Another ending had her accused of poisoning the heroine, stripped of her title, banished. The worst ending was execution, a public beheading for a treason she never committed. Players had argued for years over whether that one counted as canon.

Standing inside Willow's body, I decided the distinction hardly mattered. Dead was dead. Every route led to the same destination. Only the scenery changed.

"No," I whispered to the empty room. The word came out surprisingly firm for such a small girl. "No."

I had already died once. I refused to do it again simply because a story demanded it. If every path led Willow to ruin, then I would carve out an ending the game had never accounted for. I would leave the story altogether.

The chance to test that resolve arrived sooner than I expected.

I was in the tea room, pretending to read while actually cataloguing everything I remembered about the plot, when the door opened without so much as a knock. The tea room was, by some distance, my favorite corner of that vast, formal house, papered in pale blue silk hand-painted with cranes, its tall windows overlooking the same clipped hedges I'd stared out at on my very first morning. A porcelain tea service sat untouched on a low table beside me, delicate cups rimmed in gold that had, according to Willow's borrowed memories, belonged to her grandmother before her, and a small silver bell for summoning the maids sat within easy reach, though I had never once, in three days, worked up the nerve to actually ring it. Duke Reginald Ashworth entered the way he did everything, like a man who had never once considered that a room might not want him in it. Tall, immaculate, every movement precise enough to remind you he'd spent decades commanding obedience.

He set a cream-coloured invitation on the table between us. The wax seal caught the light immediately: a lion beneath a crown. The royal crest. My stomach tightened.

"The Crown Prince will visit tomorrow," he said. No explanation. No question. A statement, the way weather was a statement.

I closed my book. "I won't marry him."

He'd already started to turn away. Now he stopped, slowly, and looked back at me as if I'd spoken in a language he didn't recognize.

"What did you say?"

"I won't marry him."

His mouth curved, almost amused. "You don't have a choice."

"I disagree."

"This engagement has already been arranged."

"Then whoever arranged it can marry him."

His laugh was soft, indulgent, the sound adults make at children who've said something charmingly foolish. "I'm informing you," he said. "Not asking you."

"If that's true," I said, keeping my voice level, "then why am I even in the room?" I folded my hands in my lap. "You often tell me how much you loved Mother. That I remind you of her."

Something in his expression softened, just barely. "I do."

"Then help me understand something. Is this what your love costs?" I let the question sit before finishing it. "Because if loving your daughter means eventually handing her over as payment for political ambition, I think the exchange rate is terrible."

His jaw tightened. "That is enough."

"I'll attend the Royal Academy soon," I went on, as though he hadn't spoken. "I can work afterward. Earn my own living. If you feel raising me deserves repayment, I'll gladly repay every coin of it. I simply won't repay it by becoming queen."

His eyes hardened. "For everything this family has given you..."

"I never asked for repayment." I held his gaze without flinching. "I asked for love. Those aren't the same thing."

The silence that followed felt like it had teeth.

Then something in him cracked, not dramatically, not with shouting. Just a breath, a tightening around the eyes, the faintest twitch of his jaw. For one unguarded second he looked less like the Duke of Ashworth and more like a widower who had spent twenty years mistaking duty for love, and had never once stopped to check the difference.

"I have devoted my life to this family," he said quietly. "Everything I've done has been for your future."

"I believe you," I said, and meant it. "I don't think you're trying to hurt me. I think you believe this is the greatest gift you could possibly give me."

His shoulders eased, just a fraction.

"I simply don't want your gift."

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.

"You speak like a child who knows nothing of responsibility."

"I know enough to recognize a prison when I see one."

"This is not a prison."

"No? If I refuse, nothing changes. If I object, nothing changes. If I beg, nothing changes." I gestured at the invitation between us. "So tell me, Father, which part of that sounds like freedom to you?"

His patience finally snapped. "The engagement is final. You will marry the Crown Prince."

"I will not."

"You will."

"I won't."

"You are a child."

"And you're asking that child to sign away the rest of her life before she's old enough to spell her own title."

I stood. His eyes followed me, sharp now, dangerous.

"I've listened," I said. "I've tried to understand. I know why this marriage benefits House Ashworth. I know why it benefits the Crown. What I don't know is why no one has once asked whether it benefits me."

"Because your duty comes before your desires."

"My duty to whom?"

"Your family."

"And what is my family's duty to me?"

He didn't answer. Maybe he had one and simply didn't like the sound of it.

I walked toward the door. "I never asked to be queen. I never dreamed about crowns, and I certainly never dreamed about marrying a boy I've never met. I'd rather live quietly than rule miserably." I paused at the threshold, not quite looking back. "I hope one day you understand the difference."

I almost made it out.

His hand closed around my arm before I even registered him moving. Pain flared through my shoulder, sharp enough to steal my breath. It wasn't a cruel grip, it was worse than that. It was the grip of a man so used to being obeyed that he'd forgotten an eleven-year-old girl's arm could actually break.

"You do not walk away while I am speaking." His voice had gone eerily calm. "I am your father."

Something in me finally broke, Willow's fear or my own fury, I couldn't tell anymore, and I'm not sure it mattered. I twisted against his grip, tears burning hot and humiliating in my eyes.

"No." Barely a whisper. Then louder. "No."

He stared at me like I'd struck him.

"Not right now," I said, voice shaking. "You're not my father right now. You're the Duke."

His grip only tightened.

"I've already given the Duke my answer," I said, tears finally spilling over. "My father wouldn't hurt me just to make me obey."

For one suspended heartbeat, nothing moved. His fingers loosened. His eyes widened, just slightly, as though he were only now noticing whose arm he was holding. Then he let go so abruptly I stumbled backward and hit the carpet.

Neither of us spoke. He looked at me the way you look at something you've never quite seen before. Something like regret crossed his face and vanished just as fast.

"This discussion is over," he said, distant again. "The decision stands."

He turned and left. The door closed behind him, and the sound of it echoed longer than it should have.

I stayed on the floor, clutching my arm, and let myself cry, not because I wanted to, but because Willow's body didn't seem to know how to do anything else. The tears came fast and stopped just as fast. I wiped my face with my sleeve and made myself breathe.

Crying hadn't changed anything. The Duke still held the title, the wealth, the authority, the law. I was an eleven-year-old girl with nothing but memories from another life and foreknowledge of a story that hadn't finished unfolding yet.

That wasn't enough to defeat a duke.

But maybe I didn't need to defeat him.

I leaned back against the sofa and made myself think it through properly. The engagement wasn't really between my father and me, it was between House Ashworth and the royal family. More precisely, between Willow Ashworth and Crown Prince Adrian. And if memory served, the prince had never wanted this arrangement any more than Willow had. The game made that painfully clear. His heart had always belonged elsewhere, to the heroine, a cheerful, common-born girl who would eventually enroll at the Royal Academy and quietly dismantle everyone's carefully arranged lives.

Willow had only ever existed as an obstacle. One meant to be removed.

A slow smile found its way onto my face. Maybe I'd been fighting this wrong. I didn't need to fight the engagement. I needed the prince to end it himself. If he fell hopelessly for the heroine before the wedding became unavoidable, neither my father nor the palace could reasonably force him to the altar with me instead.

At least, that was the theory. It wasn't much of a plan, more a direction than a strategy. But it was the first plan I'd had that didn't end with my own execution.

I spent the rest of that afternoon turning the idea over from every angle I could manage, curled into the window seat of my new bedroom with its brocade curtains and its view of geometrically perfect hedges, watching the light shift slowly across the formal gardens below. Willow's memories, when I dug carefully into them, offered fragments of a childhood spent almost entirely indoors, tutors and etiquette masters and long, silent dinners with a father who mistook obedience for love, none of it especially useful for plotting a rebellion, but all of it useful for understanding exactly what I was rebelling against. This was a life built entirely for other people's comfort. I intended, from this point forward, to build one for my own.

Tomorrow, the Crown Prince would arrive at Ashworth Manor. And I intended to make absolutely certain he left with no desire whatsoever to marry me.