The executioner's blade had a nick in it. I remember that, because I had nothing else to look at.

A chip in the steel, right near the edge. Someone had used it recently, and no one had bothered to sharpen it after. I'd thought: this will hurt more than it should. And then: what a strange last thought.

I woke up with the taste of iron on my tongue.

Silk sheets. Gardenia perfume from the vase by the window. Sunlight, warm and obscene, pouring across my lap like it had every right to be there.

I sat up. My fingers wouldn't still.

Not the thin, starved hands I'd died with. These were my old hands. Unscratched. Soft from lemon-scented creams a maid applied each morning because the future Duchess of Nothing had to look the part.

The vanity mirror caught my face. Twenty-two. Not twenty-seven. Not hollowed and gray and finished. Twenty-two, with sleep still clinging to my lashes, and a pulse in my throat that shouldn't exist.

I looked away from the mirror.

The blade. I could still feel it. Not the memory of it, not the idea, but the actual cold of steel resting against the nape of my neck while the executioner adjusted his grip. The way the metal found the knob of my spine first, then slid sideways to center itself, and I'd thought: he's done this before, and I'd thought: the steel is so cold it burns, and then I'd stopped thinking because Thessara's voice came through the grate, quiet and bell-clear, saying, "It's better this way," and the last thing I'd heard in that life was my stepsister's absolution for a death she'd arranged.

My hands were shaking. Here. Now. In the silk and the gardenia perfume and the twenty-two-year-old body that didn't know yet how it ended.

But I knew.

The bedroom door opened.

"My lady." Hessa, my maid. Young, round-faced, already arranging fresh linens. "The seamstress sent the gown. The Prince's household requests you wear white for the engagement ball."

White. Of course. Thessara would be wearing gold, the color of saints. And I would stand beside the prince in sacrificial white, smiling like a woman who didn't know the altar was already built.

"Thank you, Hessa."

My voice held. Barely.

I waited for her to leave, then pressed my feet to the cold floor. The stone bit into my soles. Real. That was real. Pain was always real, even when nothing else was.

I crossed to the vanity and gripped the edge. The mirror showed me my face again, and for a single, lurching second, I saw the dungeon. Stone walls sweating moisture. The executioner flexing his hand around that nicked blade. The cold found my neck again, phantom steel against living skin, and I flinched so hard the perfume vase rattled on the windowsill.

I blinked. Just a bedroom. Just a girl.

I flexed my hand. Something sparked along my fingers, faint as a dying candle. Magic I shouldn't have yet. In my first life, the mirror magic hadn't surfaced until I was twenty-four, two years before they killed me for it.

But this body remembered what the other one had learned.

I closed my fist. Felt the spark settle into my bones like a coal that had never fully gone out.

Tonight, I would walk into the engagement ball. I would smile at Prince Corvin, whose face I now recognized as belonging to a man who had always known how my story ended. I would curtsy to my stepsister Thessara, the empire's beloved Saint, whose sainthood required a villain to function.

I had been her villain once. I'd played the role perfectly, right up until the final act, when the audience demanded blood and the playwright delivered.

Not again.

I had no allies. No one who would believe that the ambitious stepsister, the woman the court already whispered about, had woken up with five years of future memories and a dead woman's magic humming in her fingertips.

But I had one advantage they hadn't accounted for.

I knew who killed me. I knew when. I knew why. And I knew the one person in this entire empire who existed outside their careful, curated story.

The Cursed Duke. Sorath Vael. The man whose touch destroyed everything it contacted, whose political isolation was so complete that even the Script, the system that powered my stepsister's sainthood, had stopped bothering to write him into the narrative.

Everyone feared him.

I couldn't afford to fear anyone. Not anymore. Fear was a luxury for women who hadn't already died.

I released the vanity's edge. Straightened my spine. Looked at the white dress hanging from the wardrobe like a ghost of the girl I'd been.

I would put it on. I would walk into that ballroom. I would find the cursed duke standing where no one would dare approach him.

And I would touch him.

The mirror flickered. Just for a moment, just at the edge of my vision, the glass rippled like a pond accepting a secret. I turned back to it.

My reflection stared at me. Same face. Same eyes. But the angle was wrong, tilted slightly, as if whatever looked back was not quite me.

I stood very still. The reflection blinked a half-second late.

My hand rose toward the glass. The surface shimmered, warping at the edges, and in the distortion I caught something behind my shoulder that wasn't in the room. A corridor. Dark stone. The smell of cold places where no one came back from.

I pulled my hand away. The mirror settled. Just glass again. Just my face, pale and wide-eyed and twenty-two years old.

Whatever had looked back at me, it could wait. Tonight, I had a duke to find.