Eloise Anas. Second daughter of the Marquis Anas, of one of the ten founding noble houses of the empire. Known everywhere as the belle of high society, and known just as widely, on account of her cold manner, as the ice princess.
Her marriage to Ian Cloud had been purely for the family's benefit. Both houses had come out of it with the emperor's backing, and Eloise had simply been a useful piece in that particular game of political chess — set down on the square that gained the most ground.
Marrying him was the price we paid to expand the family business, she thought bitterly, remembering. A shrewd deal, the kind you cannot find anywhere else.
That was what the original Eloise had said. Out loud. Approvingly. And her father, the Marquis, had sold off his own daughter without a shred of mercy and written it up as a triumph.
Quite the wonderful father-and-daughter pair.
Back in her room she sat down at the desk, pulled a sheet of paper toward her, picked up a pen, and began seriously recalculating the timeline.
This year was Imperial year 273. Ian and Eloise had married in March, two years ago. Which meant they had now been married exactly two years and two months.
She sighed at the number. The word newlyweds did not fit a couple this cold and this distant, no matter how you did the arithmetic.
More importantly — and here the pen moved faster — according to the plot, the heroine Diana would return in the summer of Imperial year 274.
Which left roughly one year.
She looked at the calendar on the wall and settled on that one remaining year: the last stretch of this marriage she had to endure before the main storyline came crashing down on top of it. Then she slumped face down onto the desk and lamented aloud that of all the places to land, she had landed precisely at the two-year mark of this dreadful marriage.
She groaned into the wood. She had no interest whatsoever in getting tangled up with Diana under this cruel plot. She wanted nothing in the world except to help the heroine.
After a good round of grumbling she pulled herself together and settled on a goal.
Wrap everything up neatly within the next year.
Because according to the plot, only six months after Diana returned, Ian would realise his true feelings and unilaterally force Eloise into a divorce to end the marriage. That was how the book handled it: one paragraph, one signature, a wife removed like a chair from a room.
The trouble was those six months. Six months of waiting on divorce papers, during which the heroine Diana would endure endless suffering from his coldness and his returned gifts. And the part that troubled her most was that all of the heroine's pain got pinned on somebody — and that somebody was the woman carrying the title of the lead's wife.
She clutched her head in despair. Should she just disappear now and be done with it? She felt like nothing but a burden standing squarely in the way of her favourite character.
So she began to plot it out. A clean divorce inside the year. Vanish without a trace before Diana even made it back to the capital. Leave the stage swept and the lights up.
Her hand froze halfway through the sentence.
A spark went off behind her eyes. This bleak situation was a golden opportunity in disguise.
She sat up and did the calculation properly, and the number came out the same both times. She had a full year, starting now, before Diana officially returned to the capital.
A full year. And the power of a Grand Duchess to spend on it.
If she made good use of that power, she could completely reshape every one of Ian Cloud's bad habits in that time. All of them. Systematically. She might not be able to turn her rotten husband into a genuine prize catch — she was ambitious, not delusional — but she could at least drag him out of the discount bin.
Fired up, she wrote it at the top of the page and underlined it twice. She would reform this hopeless case of a man into the perfect gentleman, one worthy of Diana, before Diana ever showed up.
And she could do it, too. She knew the saintly heroine Diana like the back of her own hand. She also knew every last detail about that awful man Ian, down to the way he held a teacup, for the simple reason that she had read this novel more times than she could count.
She lifted the hem of her dress and strode across the room with her chin up. Wait for me, Diana, she said silently. I'll clear the way. Everything will be ready by the time you come home.
Then she laughed, triumphantly, and vowed to prove to the whole world that even trash like Ian Cloud could be recycled into something useful.
The maid came in timidly at her call and stepped forward, hands folded, waiting.
"Tell me your name again," Eloise said gently. "I want to be sure of it."
The girl was caught completely off guard. "It's — Bibi, my lady."
Eloise silently cursed the original owner of this body. A maid who had served her for two entire years and she had never bothered to learn the girl's name. No wonder people found her strange. No wonder people found her worse than strange.
"Bibi." She smiled. "I've just heard a rather interesting story, and I'd like to verify it with you."
"My lady?"
"I want you to tell me, in full detail, the rumours currently going around the capital about me and the Grand Duke."
Every drop of colour went out of Bibi's face. She stammered, having clearly never expected her lady to know such things existed, let alone to sit there and ask about them directly.
"Is that really so hard a request?"
"It — it's all baseless gossip, my lady, it isn't worth worrying about, truly—"
Eloise's expression turned stern. "Is this a forbidden topic? Something I'm not permitted to hear in my own house?" She let that sit. "You know I dislike repeating myself. I want every single scandal attached to me and to my husband. All of it."
Bibi dropped to her knees.
"My lady, please, kill me instead. Please don't make me say such words out loud."
Seeing the girl's extreme reaction, Eloise softened her tone at once. "I promise you won't be punished. Whatever you say. You have my word."
Bibi did not move.
"Although," Eloise added gently, "if you keep silent, I'll be disappointed in you. And I expect I'd grow rather distant."
That worked where the promise had not, which told her something about this household. Bibi trembled and, at last, spoke.
People called her lady an empty shell. Or worse — a bitter ghost, haunting the Grand Duke's estate.
Eloise listened calmly, chin resting on her hand.
"Is that all?"
Any other noblewoman in the empire would have needed smelling salts. She simply looked mildly disappointed by the quality of the material. Bibi remained prostrate on the floor, shaking, apologising over and over, convinced she had committed a grave sin merely by shaping the words with her mouth.
Eloise waved a hand. "You've done nothing wrong. It was I who gave the order." She rose and dismissed her. "Thank you for your honesty."
There was no small amount of calculation hiding inside that smile. Bibi did not see it; she went out breathing a sigh of relief and thanking heaven that her lady had been gracious enough to forgive her.
Left alone, Eloise sat for a long time without moving, and finally muttered the nickname to herself, tasting it.
The ghost of the Cloud estate.
Then she clutched her own cheeks in both hands and laughed, coldly.
"Ian Cloud," she said. "You are dead to me."
The anger came up boiling, and with it the memories.
In her past life she had been a legendary keyboard warrior. She had waged war across every forum worth the name and had never once, not a single time, backed down from a fandom. She remembered the internet's iron law of numbers — that the sheer weight of numbers always wins in the end — and she remembered how many times she had beaten it anyway.
Ten years hardening herself in the brutal world of online fandom wars, against the biggest communities there were, had forged her a will of steel.
But this time her opponent was Ian Cloud, and Ian Cloud was the toughest case of all — harder than anyone she had ever gone up against. He was stubborn and set in his ways to a terrifying degree, a man who had buried his own feelings for thirty years rather than move one step past a childhood he refused to leave behind.
And there was worse. The rumours currently aimed at her would, at this rate, eventually swing round and take aim at Diana instead. As a true and loyal fan, she was not going to let that happen.
A spark of resolve flashed in her eyes. She sprang to her feet and slammed the sheet of notes down on the desk with a sharp, decisive thud.
She was going to teach her nominal husband a lesson he would never forget.
She laughed out loud, heartily, and went to war for Diana's sake.