Her thumb dragged the last page up the screen, and her face went slack.
She read it twice, because the first time her brain simply refused to take it in. Diana walked right up to the weeping Ian Cloud and gently gave him a kiss. A kiss of forgiveness. That was the ending. That was how the whole thing resolved itself — with the heroine's mouth on the mouth of the man who had spent the entire novel grinding her into the ground.
"No," she said out loud, in the middle of a crowded street. "No. Absolutely not."
Ian Cloud was a textbook lead of the angsty-tragic-past genre. Beautiful, titled, silent, and in truth an awful man who made everyone who ever got close to him regret it. The peak of his cruelty came when he returned the heroine's birthday gift — a box she had wrapped herself, carefully, corner by corner — handing it back to her cold and unopened, trampling on the girl's sincere feelings as though sincerity were a stain on his sleeve. And that was not even the worst of it. Diana had travelled all the way to his estate just to see him, and he had left her sitting there waiting for six hours straight. Six hours, with work as his only excuse.
Then he had coldly rejected his childhood friend in order to accept an arranged marriage, and left Diana in a pain the author rendered so well that it was unbearable to read. A scene to break a reader's heart. It was no surprise at all that Diana ran off to the academy the moment the wedding was over. It hardly read like a departure. It read like an escape from the cruel reality this leading man had built around her.
Faced with that string of actions, one core question hung over the whole mysterious, darkly charismatic figure of him.
What on earth was wrong with his personality?
Oh, of course, the story explained it. Ian Cloud had suffered psychological trauma as a child. So his instinct was always to push others away, to live a life that rejected emotion, to hold every open hand at arm's length until the hand went away. That was the explanation. That was the whole of the explanation.
And the reward for all of it was a kiss.
She threw her phone.
It skidded across the pavement, and she shouted after it, right there among the evening crowd, that the author must be out of their mind to let such an awful man be whitewashed and forgiven so easily. A woman with a shopping bag stepped wide around her. She did not care.
She went and picked the phone up, and her thumb was already moving before she had straightened all the way. The comment section was a wall of praise. So beautiful. I cried. He deserved happiness. She scrolled past every one of them. Somebody had to say the unwelcome thing, and if nobody else would, she would.
Her face hardened. Her eyes blazed. She was going to war with the author and with every blind fan defending that man, and she was going to do it on foot, typing as she walked, muttering curses under her breath, entirely certain that her fury was justified by the senseless ending she had just been handed.
She would admit this much, and she typed it too, because she was fair: the author was talented. Genuinely gripping prose, the kind that pulled you through a chapter before you noticed you had started it. But the talent had been aimed in the wrong direction. Every ounce of that flourish had been poured into building up Ian's story, working overtime, night shifts, to justify his awfulness. Meanwhile poor Diana — the heroine, the actual heroine — had been left neglected in the margins. It was a truth the readers could see, and the author could see, and Diana herself, if you read her closely enough, could plainly see.
So she left a sharp comment demanding justice for fragile Diana, and finished it with a line she was rather proud of: if the male lead was that emotionally numb, he should see a doctor about it instead of passing it off as charm.
Ian's fans swarmed within minutes. Unhinged. Get help. Didn't even read the book. She paid them no mind. She was only exhausted — exhausted by the sheer size of that crowd of blind devotion, all of it lined up behind one man who had never once deserved any of it.
Standing there in the crowded street, she tried to take a deep breath. Calm down, she told herself. Find some peace of mind. It is a novel. It is only a novel.
Then she remembered that the wretch Ian Cloud was the root cause of every bit of this frustration, and her anger flared right back up, and she stomped off in a huff.
A blinding light rushed toward her.
The screech of a sudden brake tore the street in half, and she spun around in shock, and in that life-or-death instant, as her phone flew out of her hand and turned end over end in the light, one stray thought went through her mind with perfect, absurd clarity.
What if this is the legendary reincarnation truck?
And she made a silent vow. If she ever ended up inside that novel, she would destroy that man Ian Cloud.
And then, impossibly, that reckless wish came true.
She woke on a luxurious bed with her head pounding as if it had been struck with a hammer, hazily registering an unfamiliar scene around her. The room was decorated in a lavish aristocratic style — carved posts, heavy drapes, gilt on the moldings, a ceiling far enough away to hold weather — worlds away from her cramped little rental room, and the sheer distance between the two left her utterly disoriented.
She bolted upright and looked around in a panic. What on earth was happening to her?
To test whether it was real, she pinched her own cheek. Then she took a fistful of her hair and yanked it hard, and cried out at the pain, which settled the question. This was no dream.
Her trembling hand rose to her face. The confusion washing over her was so total that it left room underneath for something worse, which was fear of what she had just guessed.
She wondered whether she had truly been struck and whisked away by the legendary truck. Whether she had somehow transmigrated into another world. Her head spun as she reasoned it through: if this really was a reincarnation scenario, then she must have landed inside the very novel she had just finished reading. And if that was so, then the most important question right now was not why.
It was who.
She rushed across the room and hauled back the window curtains, hunting for a mirror, praying silently the entire way that she had not become the ill-fated heroine. As she yanked the curtain aside she muttered her refusal aloud — she would not play that tragedy-laden role, she would rather be a random passer-by in the background of chapter twelve than the heroine who spends three hundred pages being tormented.
She looked into the mirror and let out a breath of relief.
Ash-grey hair. Nothing like Diana's description, not one detail of it. Though something about the face did feel strangely familiar.
She pressed a hand to her chest and thanked the heavens. Her precious Diana was safe. She had not taken over the heroine's body.
But she looked more closely at the sharp, beautiful features in the glass, and unease crawled up under the relief. This was not the face of some nameless background character. Nobody wrote a face like this and left it unnamed.
The memories came flooding back all at once.
Eloise Anas. The Marquis's second daughter. Ash-grey hair, emerald eyes. The woman who had entered into a contractual marriage with Ian Cloud.
Her jaw dropped. She had landed in the role of his nominal wife — the wife described as being as cold and dry as her own hair colour, said by everyone to be a perfect match for the icy Ian.
The truth hit her like a bolt from a clear sky. She had married the very man she despised with every fibre of her being.
She collapsed to the floor. Her life was over. A bleak future stretched away in front of her like a corridor with no doors in it, and tears welled up, and she wailed silently inside her own head, and no matter how many times she turned the situation over, from every possible angle, her life still came out utterly miserable.
She pounded her fists against the floor. She would rather be a rock on the roadside — an ordinary rock, kicked by strangers — than bear the title of wife to that trashy male lead.
Her face soaked in tears, she looked up at the ceiling and cried out: why, out of everyone in the entire world, did it have to be her stuck in this role?
One agonising question cut straight through her.
Why did she have to be reborn as Ian Cloud's ex-wife, of all people?