The debutante ball was already loud by the time the doors were opened to the waiting girls — loud, shining, and thick with the particular pressure of a room where every future is decided in one evening. In the antechamber, a confident noblewoman clapped her hands for attention and delivered the same speech she delivered every season.
"There is nothing to be nervous about," she said. "All you have to do is take the hand of the partner I have prepared for you, and walk through that door. Easy, isn't it?"
Easy. Of course.
She flipped through her list and read out the first name.
"May Averil."
May stepped forward. She was the eldest daughter of Count Averil, and the woman with the list looked her over and told her to stand at the front, since she intended to introduce her first.
Then she moved her eyes down the page and began speaking about the next girl.
That was all. No pause, no correction, no glance back. May stood exactly where she had been told to stand while the woman introduced someone else entirely, and the arrangement of the room reshaped itself around her as though she were a pillar that had always been there.
The other young ladies noticed, naturally. Noticing was what they were for.
"That's the problem child of the Averil family."
"The one who couldn't even debut until she was twenty-three."
"Wasn't tonight supposed to be her younger sister's turn?" Someone snickered behind a fan. "She must have come out of jealousy. Her sister is famously beautiful, after all."
May heard every word. She clenched her teeth, felt the enamel grind, and forced herself to breathe out slowly through her nose.
Honestly. Why were they behaving like this when they were all stuck in exactly the same situation? Strip away the fans and the imported silk and the family names, and they were no different from her. Every one of them was an extra.
Yes. Extras.
Because May Averil was not a heroine. She was not a villainess. She was not someone blessed by fate. She was a background character in other people's romance fantasy stories — the kind who never gets chosen, never gets lucky, and never gets a shining turning point in the middle of her life.
She knew this for a reason most people did not have.
May could see titles floating above people's heads.
She had seen them since birth: letters hovering in the air above others like invisible labels, patient and unbothered, following their owners through corridors and gardens and marriages. For the longest time she had no idea what they meant. She assumed everyone saw them, the way everyone saw weather.
That changed about a year ago, when her master explained the truth to her.
In this world, everything is decided the moment you are born. Status. Wealth. Class. And above all of it, whether you are a main character or an extra — because this is a romance fantasy world, and romance fantasy worlds are not built to be fair. They are built to be about someone.
The realisation had wrecked May's entire understanding of her own life.
She used to believe that if she lived kindly, kindness would find its way back to her. Wrong. Kindness belongs to heroines. Kindness is the girl who shares her last coin with a beggar in the street and discovers three chapters later that the beggar was a prince travelling in disguise, and now he is in love with her.
Fine, then. What about hard work? Surely effort counted for something.
It did not. May had actually tested it. She had gone out and sold flowers on the street, sleeves pinned back, doing the unglamorous arithmetic of stems and coppers, thinking that at last she had found a ladder that did not care who you were. She was crushed inside a season by another girl whose business took off as though the air itself were pushing at her back — because, surprise, that girl was the protagonist of a story called In This Life, I'm a First Generation.
Opportunity, it turned out, also belonged to the main characters.
Which brought her here, to a debutante ball, standing at the front of a line she had been erased from.
A debutante ball is the natural hunting ground of the romance fantasy heroine. It is their turf. No crumbs fall here for someone like May Averil, who had not been transmigrated, had not regressed, had not been reincarnated, and had no system whispering advice into her ear.
And yet she had come anyway. She had a reason.
"May!"
April Averil came through the crowd like a break in cloud.
April was the second daughter of Count Averil, May's younger sister, and she looked every inch an angel — the sort of face that made strangers lower their voices without knowing why. She hurried over full of concern, eyes wide with worry about those nasty whispers, and pulled her sister into an embrace in front of everyone.
Then, with her chin at May's shoulder and her arms still around her, her tone changed.
"Why did you even bother coming?" she murmured. "A bug like you should know her place instead of embarrassing the family."
May did not flinch. She smiled sweetly, the way a fond older sister smiles, and reached up to touch the ribbon at April's collar.
"Your ribbon's crooked," she said. "Hold still."
And while she straightened it, taking her time over the loops, she leaned in and whispered back.
"I came to ruin your debutante ball."
Because really — of the two of them, April was the one who did not know her place.
May knew the truth. The April standing in front of her, wearing her sister's face and her sister's voice and her sister's careful posture, was not her sister at all. She was Seol Yun, a possessor, a soul from somewhere else who had taken up residence in a body May had loved since it was small enough to carry.
April's arms tightened. The angelic expression cracked at one corner.
"You're an extra," she hissed. "An extra doesn't get to—"
"Lady May Averil."
The noblewoman with the list had finally, belatedly, reached her name.
May turned toward the door. Before she went, she gave her sister a bright, warm smile, the kind that photographs well and means nothing, and made herself a quiet promise.
An extra who supposedly does not know her place is going to take everything from you.
Then she stepped into the party.
Did things improve the moment she crossed the threshold? Not remotely.
Once the ball was in full swing, May found herself standing off to one side near the wall, holding a glass she did not want, while April drifted to the centre of the floor and gathered a crowd the way a lamp gathers moths. Young men presented themselves. Older women praised her complexion. Someone laughed too loudly at something she said.
May watched and did not panic, because she had planned for exactly this.
She had a plan B.
At midnight, the doors at the far end of the ballroom swung open.
The room noticed in stages, the way a large room does — a hitch in the music, a head turning, then fifty. A tall man walked in, dark and unhurried, dressed with no interest in being admired, and the whispering that rose behind him was not the ordinary whispering of a ball.
He crossed the floor. He did not stop at the centre, where April was. He came all the way to the wall, to the girl nobody had introduced, and he offered his hand.
"May I have this dance?"
He was Duke Cedric Rishelstone, the Duke of the North — the kind of man who does not attend balls. Ever. As a matter of principle so well known that his absence was a fixture of the season, like the weather.
The whispering became something closer to noise.
"Why is he even here?"
"Why is he dancing with her?"
"She isn't pretty. She isn't famous. She isn't anything."
May put her hand in his and let him lead her out onto the floor, and under the chandeliers she allowed herself, at last, to smile properly. Her tactic had worked exactly as designed.
She did not have a heroine's spark, the invisible pull that turns every head in a room without effort. She had never had it and never would.
So she had borrowed a hero's blazing halo instead.
Every eye in the ballroom was on her now. And somewhere behind her, at the centre of a crowd that had suddenly thinned, her sister was not pleased at all.