Alistair's hand twitched toward her ankle. His voice came out a broken, wet rasp. "No... please... don't. Don't hurt them. I'll do anything. Anything you want. Just let them go."
Aurelia looked down at him, her face unreadable. "Anything?"
"Yes—yes, anything—I swear it—"
"Too late," she said. "I want nothing from you but your death."
She stepped back. His fingers scrabbled at the carpet, found nothing. His eyes glazed. She waited until his hand went still. Then she pressed her heel to the hilt of the blade still lodged in his ribs and pushed down one final time. His body jerked, then lay motionless.
The fire had already caught. Flames licked up the velvet curtains, climbing the walls with a hungry roar. Black smoke rolled across the ceiling.
Aurelia walked to the small chest in the corner and pulled out a simple cotton dress—the same style she had worn as a girl, before the Thorne name ever touched her. She stripped off her silk gown and pulled the old dress over her head. The fabric was coarse, familiar. She walked to the mirror beside the fireplace. The glass was warping from the heat, but she could still see her reflection. She unpinned her hair and let it fall loose around her shoulders—the way she'd worn it as a girl, before any of this began. She smoothed the front of her dress and tucked a stray curl behind her ear.
From the pocket of the old dress, she withdrew a small glass vial. The dark liquid inside smelled of bitter almonds. She uncorked it. She brought the vial to her lips and drank.
The poison seared down her throat and settled in her chest like a stone. The flames were closing in now, the heat blistering her skin. She closed her eyes.
If she could live again—
she would never go back to the Beaumonts, her birth family. She would not let them use her as currency. She would protect her adoptive parents at all costs.She would save her brother. She would never marry Alistair Thorne.
The ceiling gave way.
The fire consumed her, and the last thing she felt was strange, weightless relief of a woman who had finished her work and was finally allowed to stop.
Darkness.
A silence deeper than death.
Then, a pinprick of light. A sliver of warmth. A gentle voice, distant and muffled, calling her name.
"Aurelia... Miss Aurelia..."
She gasped. Air slammed into her lungs—violent, desperate, the breath of a drowning woman breaking the surface. Her eyes flew open.
It was not the fires of hell that greeted her.
It was the familiar, embroidered crest of the Beaumont family on a silk bed canopy.
A young maid with wide, concerned eyes peered down at her, a steaming bowl of herbal medicine in her hands.
The memories crashed over Aurelia—the blade between Alistair's ribs, the roar of flames, the poison burning down her throat. She was dead. She had died.
And yet here she was.
She struggled to sit up. Her limbs felt weak, foreign. Her eyes darted around the room. This was her bedroom in the Beaumont estate—the very room they had given her when she first arrived in the capital.
Her gaze landed on the vanity table. A silver hand mirror lay on its surface. She reached for it with a trembling hand and lifted it to her face.
The girl staring back was seventeen. Smooth skin. Full cheeks. Not the face of a woman who had endured five years in the Thorne household. The face of a girl not yet broken.
The maid's face broke into a relieved smile. "Miss, you're finally awake! You've had a fever for three days."
Three days. Aurelia remembered now. Lady Beatrice had arrived at her adoptive parents' home with little warning, declaring that the Beaumont family had finally located their lost daughter and that Aurelia was to return to the capital at once. Her adoptive mother had wept. Her adoptive father had stood silent, his jaw tight, knowing he had no legal claim against the noble blood that had come to claim her. And Aurelia—young, overwhelmed, desperate to belong somewhere—had gone. She had left the only home that had ever loved her, believing, foolishly, that her blood family might want her too. Instead, she had walked into a house of strangers who looked through her as if she were furniture. The shock of it, the grief of leaving everything she had known, had felled her within days.
Her voice came out a dry croak. "What... what is the date?"
The maid, Cora, answered without hesitation. She named a day, a month, a year.
A year that was ten full years before her death. But that wasn't what made her blood run cold.
In her past life, within weeks of this very fever breaking, Lady Beatrice had announced her engagement to Alistair Thorne. Sold her off like livestock to secure the family's standing. She had been too weak, too desperate for belonging, to refuse.
She had walked straight into the trap.
And then the Thornes had taken everything. Her adoptive father's fortune. Her adoptive mother's life. Her brother's mind.
Aurelia's hands clenched the bedsheets. She was not that girl anymore. The fire had burned that girl out of existence.
She reached for the bowl of medicine and drank it in one swallow—the same way she had drunk the poison in the burning manor, without hesitation.
"I want to get dressed," she said, her voice steady. "Then I'm going to see my mother."
Cora blinked. "But miss, you've only just woken—"
"I know." Aurelia's eyes were cold. "I need to see her before she makes a decision that will ruin my life."
She had to know if the Thorne offer had already been made. She had to gauge how much time she had to deflect it. And she had to start building her defenses before Beatrice could lock her into a cage she had already burned her way out of once.
