She stopped crying so abruptly that the silence rang.
A flicker of hope had sparked somewhere behind her ribs. She looked down at her own hand, turning it over, studying it as if it might be dated. What if this moment came before the wedding? Novels had timelines. Timelines had gaps. If she had landed in the gap, then nothing was finished yet.
She scrambled up off the floor and went at the mirror again, telling herself as she went that if the wedding had not happened yet, she still had a chance — she could turn the whole thing around, she could rewrite this fate before it closed over her head.
The hope was snuffed out the instant she saw the mirror's frame.
The Cloud family crest, cut deep into the silver, finished and polished and permanent.
She laughed, bitterly, with the tears starting up again, and made herself accept the harsh truth. What was done was done. She really had married him. The image of Eloise standing at the altar in a bride's veil went through her mind like a cruel joke, confirming past all argument that she was, in fact, somebody's wife.
The door swung open.
A maid hurried in and stopped dead at the sight of her lady kneeling on the floor, utterly devastated, and asked in alarm what was wrong.
"Nothing," she said, scrambling to her feet. "Nothing at all. Nothing happened."
"Of course, my lady," the maid said hastily. "I saw nothing at all."
The girl had clearly just witnessed the entire strange scene, and was now swearing on her life that she had not. Fine. Good. She took a deep breath and got into character. This was simply the power of transmigration. She was a duchess now, apparently. She would have to carry herself with poise.
"It's time for breakfast, my lady," the maid said, recovering. "You should come downstairs."
"Breakfast."
"You always eat together. Both of you. It's the habit of the house."
Together. Not out of affection, she understood at once, and the memories agreed with her: the Grand Duke simply liked to settle business matters first thing in the morning, and a wife across the table was the most efficient place to put them. The maid moved behind her and straightened the fall of her dress, remarking as she worked that the two of them really were a couple obsessed only with efficiency, without a shred of romance anywhere between them.
At the words face Ian, she sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and stayed there, unwilling to confront reality quite yet.
But a promise was a promise, even a promise to a household. She dragged herself back onto her feet with a heart as heavy as if she were on her way to a funeral.
While they got her ready, she made herself recall the novel's descriptions of Ian Cloud's face, because forewarned was forearmed. Eyes as deep as the midnight sea. A sharp nose. Red lips. The author had clearly been a diehard fan; nobody spent that many adjectives on a man they were neutral about.
She frowned at herself in the glass. It did not matter how handsome he was. His rotten nature had not changed one bit, not one degree, and she absolutely refused to be fooled by a face.
Then she came down the stairs and saw him sitting there, radiating a blinding aura, and she reminded herself firmly that no matter how handsome he was, the first thing she was going to do was spit right in his face.
The sound of her own footsteps on the marble cut through that violent train of thought and dropped her back into reality, in the middle of an elegant dining room, with him looking up.
She froze.
She stood there staring in open disbelief at a face with no bad angle in it. A face she was half convinced had been rendered rather than born. This could not possibly be a real human being; real human beings had a side they preferred. Now — only now, standing four steps from him — did she finally understand why the author had been so obsessed.
The deep violet eyes came up, cold as water under ice.
"What exactly do you think you're doing?" he said. "How long do you plan to stand there?"
That snapped her out of her daze and back to reality, and the nickname surfaced at once from the novel: the tyrant prince. The devil. She forced a smile onto her face while cursing his rudeness in the privacy of her own skull.
"If you don't want to eat," Ian said, "you're free to go back upstairs."
Annoyed — she was many things but she was not going to be hungry as well — she pulled out a chair with a decisive scrape and announced that she would be eating, thank you. She picked up her fork irritably. A voice that nice, she thought, was only more infuriating for being used to say such unpleasant things.
Cutlery clinked. The room was enormous and the sound went a long way.
"Wife," Ian said suddenly.
She froze with the fork halfway up. A sense of dread told her nothing good ever followed a summons like that.
"Your staring makes me feel hurt," he said matter-of-factly.
There was not one shred of emotion anywhere in that ice-cold expression. It sent a chill straight down her spine. The table was grand, laid end to end with more food than four people could finish, and the air over it was cold and distant — exactly the atmosphere you would expect from a loveless marriage.
She ate, and while she ate she wondered: did Eloise and Ian really sit through this crushing, stomach-torturing breakfast every single morning? Every one? Without exception?
She glanced up at him, and something registered. He was dressed formally. Very formally, for this hour. He never bothered this much unless something important was going on.
"Wife," Ian said again, cutting straight through her thoughts while she was still cataloguing his collar. "It looks like you have something to say. So say it."
She shot him a look sharp enough to kill a man at that range, silently filing him under arrogant jerk. As it happened, she was simply curious.
"You're dressed unusually well today," she said. "Are you going somewhere?"
She had always had a knack for reading people quickly, and it had survived the move.
"Today is the regular meeting at the palace."
"Ah." The monthly schedule came back to her. Of course. No wonder he was in full formal dress before the sun had cleared the garden wall.
Because that was the other half of him, the half the author had drawn in gold leaf: a grand duke with noble royal blood in his veins. More precisely, the reigning emperor's half-brother — an extremely delicate position to hold within the aristocracy.
Normally a situation like that would spark a brutal fight for the throne between siblings, the sort that ended with one of them dead in a stairwell. But strangely, the current emperor had doted on Ian since childhood. Ian had shown natural talent with a sword from a very young age and had become the youngest master swordsman in history at eighteen, without ever needing a teacher, which had only deepened the emperor's admiration. The emperor favoured him so much that he had granted him the title of special adviser to the royal knights and handed him supreme military authority along with it.
She chewed and mused that the author had clearly wanted to pour every last ounce of wealth, fame and power in this world straight into Ian Cloud's hands. She clicked her tongue. That kind of favouritism was not bias. That was an obsession, and it belonged to the author.
Ian set down his napkin and stood. "I'm leaving now."
She looked up, puzzled. "Shouldn't you say something before you go?"
"I'm running late."
"Of course," she said. "You're always the one running late."
"You read me well."
That left her entirely speechless. She sat there with her fork suspended, wondering whether she had just been mocked, and his eyes gleamed with something that was equal parts scrutiny and amusement, and gave her nothing to work with.
He turned to go. Then, over his shoulder:
"No matter how good the food is, you should still wipe your mouth while you eat."
It was a stunningly embarrassing moment.
Her face went red to the ears. Her teeth ground together hard enough to hurt, and she swore to herself, with the napkin crushed in her fist, that if he were not a master swordsman she could never beat in a fight, she would have turned around and decked him on the spot.