Wounding April's pride had never been the point.
Halfway through the second turn of the dance, May's eyes caught on a figure moving along the edge of the room, and everything else in the ballroom stopped mattering.
When the music ended she stepped back and curtsied to the Duke.
"Thank you for the dance, Your Grace. Truly."
"Don't thank me," Cedric said, releasing her hand at once. "I only came because my sister asked it of me."
"Then please pass my thanks along to my master." May smiled. "I'm afraid I have something important to take care of."
She left him there and moved through the crowd, scanning heads, until she found the man again. He was making his way toward the balcony doors, unhurried, dressed as an ordinary guest and wearing an ordinary face, and no one in that entire glittering room had any idea what he was.
From the very beginning, the debutante ball had only ever been an excuse.
This man was the reason she had come.
There were two of them out on the balcony, in the cold air away from the music, and they both turned with open surprise when a young lady in a debutante's gown walked out to join them uninvited.
May's heart was going like a bird in a box. She made herself keep walking, and as she came closer she repeated in her head the thing her master had told her, the sentence she had been turning over for a year.
In a romance fantasy world built around a heroine, there is only one way to drive out a possessor.
That was why she introduced herself, here, to a man travelling in disguise.
Because he was the sovereign of their empire: Reheim Elphin, tyrant of the Elrash Empire — and the male lead of Seol Yun's story.
For an extra like May Averil, there was exactly one route to reclaiming her sister. She had to seduce the possessed heroine's male lead.
There are three classic ways to win over a tyrant in a romance fantasy story. Regression. Reincarnation. Transmigration. The usual cheat codes, handed out at the start like a purse of coins.
May had none of them.
She was an ordinary twenty-three-year-old young lady. No second life. No memory of a future. No system whispering hints into her ear at critical moments. A pure-blooded extra, all the way down.
And when you are stuck like that, there is only one desperate option left. A secret technique nobody brags about afterwards, but which everyone in a romance fantasy world knows about.
The legendary three-step combo.
May lifted her head and looked properly at the Emperor's face for the first time, and she did pause. Half a second, no more. Because he was handsome — genuinely, inconveniently handsome, in the way that makes a person forget the sentence they had prepared.
Not the time. She had priorities.
So May Averil steeled herself, threw her dignity clean over the balcony rail, and committed absolutely to behaving like a complete lunatic.
Step one: the kiss.
She grabbed him by the front of the coat, hauled herself up, and pressed her mouth to his.
His eyes twitched. Just once, at the outer corner. Even through the roar in her own ears May registered that this was not a promising sign — but the combo is a combo, and you do not stop in the middle of a combo.
Step two: the slap.
She pulled back and swung for his cheek exactly the way she had practised it in front of her mirror, a hundred times, adjusting the angle of her wrist until it looked wounded and imperious at once.
She never finished the motion. His hand closed around her wrist in the air and held it there without visible effort.
"And what," the Emperor said, "do you think you are doing?"
Which brought them to the grand finale, and the most unhinged part of the entire plan.
May twisted free, seized a wine bottle from the balcony table, and raised it over her head like a priestess about to perform a rite that had been outlawed for good reasons. Then she shouted — loudly, with feeling — something about ashes, and blood seals, and how he would never forget her for the rest of his life.
All of it, she would have insisted, strictly for the purposes of a first impression.
Unfortunately, Reheim moved out of the arc of the bottle as easily as a man stepping around a puddle, and put her out with one clean strike to the back of the head.
The next thing May knew was nothing at all.
She lay on the balcony stones while the Emperor straightened his cuff and ordered his knight, in the tone of a man requesting that a window be shut, to throw her in prison.
Later that day, Reheim lay back in his bath and replayed the whole mess in his head.
Ladies throwing themselves at him was not new. That had begun before he took the throne and had only worsened since. Slaps were not new either; he had been slapped by women who wanted something and by women who wanted nothing, and he had long ago stopped taking it personally.
But the wine bottle. That part was new.
The door opened and his knight came in with a folder under his arm — Gail Daker, loyal past the point of good sense. Gail took three steps, saw the dead assassins still lying where they had fallen across the tiles, and froze mid-stride.
"Your Majesty. Forgive me. This is my failure—"
Reheim waved a wet hand. That sort of thing happened more often than people liked to think, and he had no intention of spending the afternoon on it.
"The background check," he said. "May Averil."
Gail handed the report across, and the Emperor flipped through it with water running off his forearm onto the page edges.
The more he read, the more suspicious the thing felt.
Her background was spotless. Absurdly so. No hidden connections. No strange history. No debts, no quarrels, no convenient friends in the wrong ministries. Not one small red flag anywhere in twenty-three years of a life.
It was almost impressive.
Which left him with two possibilities. Either she had prepared this in advance — scrubbed and arranged and left out for him to find, which would mean she was a great deal more dangerous than she looked. Or she really was an ordinary noble lady who had simply lost her mind for one night.
Either way, there was only one way to find out.
He would question her himself.
Meanwhile, May's night had gone comprehensively downhill.
She was in a cold cell under the palace, on stone that had never been warm, while rats treated the place as their personal gathering hall and made no effort to hide it. She lay on her side with her cheek against her arm and thought about how deeply unfair romance fantasy logic really was.
Other female leads open their eyes in silk beds, under carved ceilings, with a physician at the door and a maid weeping with relief. That is what happens to a person who ends up in a body that is not their own. Silk. Ceilings. Attendants.
May opened her eyes to the point of a sword resting against her neck.