Instant bad-ending atmosphere.
The Emperor stood over her with a lazy smile, and said her name the way a man reads an item off a list he has already grown tired of.
"May Averil."
He reminded her, pleasantly, that attempting to assassinate the Emperor was a crime. That the attempt alone was sufficient. That he was entitled to have her executed on this floor, in this cell, at this hour, and no one in the empire would ask a second question about it.
May, who had spent the night being walked over by rats, was now shaking like a puppy caught with something stolen in its mouth. She could barely get air past her own throat.
And the worst part — the genuinely humiliating part — was that yesterday's madness had not been her real personality at all. The kiss, the slap, the bottle raised above her head: every movement of it had been drilled in front of her mirror, over and over, until she could do it without hesitating.
Her actual nature was that of a complete coward.
Reheim tilted the sword a little, just enough for the tip to brush the skin of her neck, and wondered aloud, in an idle sort of way, what a man was supposed to do with a woman who behaved like an assassin one night and a well-mannered noble lady the next.
That small movement of steel sent May straight into panic.
He could really kill her. Not as a threat, not as a lesson — he could simply do it, and go to breakfast. Inside her head she was tearing out her own hair by the fistful.
And still she made herself move.
You can do this. You did it once already. For April. For your one and only younger sister.
With both hands trembling so badly the blade rattled against her fingers, May pushed the sword away from her throat and blurted it out.
"If you kill me, you'll regret it for the rest of your life."
That, finally, got his attention.
"On what basis," Reheim asked, still smiling coldly, "does someone in your position say a thing like that to me?"
May swallowed. She straightened her back against the cell wall, which cost her more than the sentence did.
"Because I am a special person," she said. "I can give Your Majesty exactly what you need most."
He allowed her to continue. The permission came with an unmistakable condition attached: if what followed was nonsense, she would die where she sat.
May gulped once. Then she spoke.
"Pull out the weeds. Sow the seeds. Only a wise woman can unravel the secret of the red stone."
Behind the Emperor, Gail Daker went rigid.
Those words were taken directly from the secret will of the late ruler.
In truth the riddle was not complicated, once you knew what the pieces meant. The weeds were the corrupt ministers. The seeds were the loyal subjects who would take their places. The wise woman was the Empress. And the red stone pointed to the Flame Knights — the secret knight order that had once answered directly to the late Empress Agnes and to no one else alive.
Put together, the meaning was plain enough. Only after tearing out the corrupt nobles, gathering loyal allies in their place, and standing beside a proper Empress could Reheim take the Flame Knights into his hand.
And for an emperor whose power base had been unstable ever since his mother's sudden death, that kind of power was beyond price.
Then May did something considerably crazier than anything she had done on the balcony.
She staked her family's entire future, and made a direct proposal to the tyrant.
"I will place the Flame Knights in your hands," she said. "In exchange, I want one thing. Accept me as your fiancée."
Because the third step of the romance fantasy three-step combo had never been about knocking out the male lead with a wine bottle.
It had always, always been the fake engagement.
Reheim looked at her without moving. Then he asked whether she truly believed she was in a position to bargain with him at this moment.
The look alone was enough to make most people fold in half. May felt her nerve start to go and rushed to speak before he decided she had crossed the last line available to her.
"You've misunderstood," she said quickly. "I'm not trying to become your Empress. Not at all. I only want to be your fiancée, and only for a short time. I'm asking to borrow the position. Temporarily."
Reheim scoffed.
He pointed out, without any particular cruelty, exactly how small and insignificant her house was. A county on the edge of nothing. A name that appeared in no important ledger. Did she really imagine the Emperor of Elrash was desperate enough to cling to a promise made by someone like her?
May swallowed her fear whole and went all in.
She offered assets. Her father's seal. The land deeds of the Averil family, every one of them, laid down on the table like coin.
And then she raised the stakes past anything a sensible person would gamble.
"Announce our engagement," she said, "and within three days I will remove every traitor gnawing at your power base. Every one. If I fail — annul the engagement, seize my family's wealth, and if you feel like it, take my life as well."
She had nothing left to put on the table. Everything she owned and everything she was, was already on it.
All that remained was for the Emperor to decide.
Reheim was quiet for a long moment. Then he smiled, and it was a different smile from the one he had come in wearing.
"May Averil," he said. "You're interesting."
And with that, the empire detonated.
The official announcement went out the next morning: His Majesty the Emperor was engaged to Lady May Averil, eldest daughter of Count Averil.
People lost their minds.
Nobody could make it fit. That ugly, ill-tempered noble lady? The one who was skipped at her own debut? Some assumed at once that there had to be a deal behind it, some arrangement of debts or land nobody had made public yet. Others complained openly that if the Emperor had decided to marry into the Averil family at all, he should at least have chosen the second daughter.
The angelic one.