The hallway outside my room was too long and too quiet.
I walked it barefoot, the cold stone biting into my soles. Elena's memories supplied the layout—left at the tapestry, down the spiral stairs, through the portrait gallery—but they didn't prepare me for the weight of the place.
Verwood Duchy was old. Not "decorated to look old." Old. The stones were worn smooth in the center from centuries of footsteps. The tapestries were faded where sunlight had touched them for generations. The air smelled like cold ash and beeswax and something else I couldn't name.
Neglect. Maybe that was it.
No one stopped me as I walked. Servants saw me coming and found reasons to be elsewhere. A footman suddenly remembered urgent business in the opposite direction. A maid ducked into a closet and pulled the door shut behind her.
I was the Duchess of this house.
And I was a ghost in it.
---
The study door was oak. Heavy. Closed.
I stood in front of it for a long moment, listening to the silence on the other side. No rustle of papers. No scratch of a pen. Just... nothing.
Elena's memories told me what would happen if I knocked. He would open the door. Look at me with those cold gray eyes. Wait for me to speak. And when I inevitably said something sharp or desperate or loud, he would close it again without a word.
That was their marriage. A door opening and closing. A cycle of reaching and rejection.
I knocked anyway.
The silence stretched. Then:
"Enter."
One word. Flat. Not curious. Not annoyed. Just... there.
I pushed the door open.
Duke Cedric Verwood sat behind a desk that was too large for the room, which made him seem smaller than he should have. He wasn't. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of face that would have been handsome if it ever moved. Dark hair swept back. Gray eyes. A jaw that looked carved from the same stone as the castle walls.
He didn't look up from his papers.
I stood in the doorway. Waiting.
Elena would have stormed in. She would have demanded his attention, his time, his anything. She would have screamed until he looked at her, because even anger was better than the void.
I understood her now. I'd only been in her body for a few hours, and I already understood.
"What is it?" he asked. Still not looking up.
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
What was I supposed to say? I'm not your wife. I'm a reader from another world who knows you'll be widowed in sixty days. Also, someone is poisoning me. Also, I think I'm supposed to be the villain in this story but I'm not sure I have the energy.
"Good morning," I said instead.
His pen paused. Just for a heartbeat.
Then it resumed.
"Is that all?"
The dismissal was so clean, so practiced. He'd done this a hundred times. A thousand. I was a noise he'd learned to tune out.
Elena's memories surged. Day 412. He spoke to me today. Three words. "The dinner was adequate."
This was worse than hatred. Hatred was heat. This was ice.
I should have left. That was the smart thing. Retreat to my room. Figure out the poison. Plan my next move.
But something in my chest—something that might have been Elena's ghost or my own stubbornness—kept my feet planted.
"I wanted to ask you something."
He set down the pen. Slowly. Deliberately. Like I'd finally done something worth his full attention.
He looked at me.
Gray eyes. Flat. Empty.
"Ask."
The word was a door closing before I'd even stepped through.
I thought about the tea. The bitterness in my throat. The Head Maid's voice in the garden that I hadn't heard yet but knew was coming. The dosage in her tea is correct. She'll be bedridden by the new moon.
I thought about asking him if he knew.
I thought about asking him if he cared.
Instead, I said: "Do you remember the day we met?"
His expression didn't change. But something flickered behind his eyes. A micro-expression. There and gone.
"No," he said.
It was a lie. I knew it was a lie because Elena's memories showed me the truth—the garden party, the spilled wine, the way he'd caught her elbow before she fell. She'd laughed. He'd almost smiled.
He remembered. He just didn't want me to know he remembered.
"I see," I said.
I turned to leave.
"Elena."
I stopped. My name in his mouth sounded foreign. He never used it in the novel. She was always "the Duchess" or "his wife." A title. Not a person.
I looked back.
He was watching me with an expression I couldn't read. Not anger. Not coldness. Something else. Something that almost looked like... confusion.
"Your voice," he said. "It's different."
I didn't know what to say to that. Elena's voice had been sharp, pitched high with perpetual indignation. Mine was quieter. Lower. The voice of someone who knew she was already dead and had stopped trying to be heard.
"I'm tired," I said. Which was true.
He studied me for a moment longer. Then he picked up his pen.
"Close the door behind you."
---
I walked back to my room in a daze.
Your voice is different.
He noticed. After two years of silence and screaming and vases thrown against walls, he noticed the one thing I hadn't meant to change.
What did that mean?
Did it mean anything?
I was still turning it over when I reached my door and found Mila waiting outside. Her face was pale. Her hands were clasped so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
"Your Grace," she whispered. "I—I need to tell you something."
I stopped. "What is it?"
She glanced left. Right. Then she leaned in close, her voice barely a breath.
"The tea this morning. I wasn't supposed to bring it to you."
A cold finger traced down my spine.
"What do you mean?"
"The Head Maid—she told me to take the tray to the kitchen. To dispose of it. She said you'd refused breakfast. But you hadn't. You were asleep. I thought... I thought maybe she'd made a mistake, so I brought it anyway."
Mila's eyes were wet. Terrified.
"Your Grace, I think—I think someone doesn't want you to drink the tea. Or they do want you to drink it, but they don't want anyone to know you drank it."
The hallway was silent.
Somewhere far below, a door opened and closed.
I thought about the original novel. Page 47. The fever. The "tragic illness" that took the foolish wife and cleared the path for true love.
It wasn't an illness.
It was never an illness.
And someone in this house was making sure it happened on schedule.
"Mila," I said quietly. "Can you bring me tomorrow's tea?"
She blinked. "Your Grace?"
"Bring it to me. Before anyone tells you not to. And don't tell anyone you're bringing it."
She hesitated. Then, slowly, she nodded.
I reached out and touched her hand. Just once. Just briefly.
She flinched.
But she didn't pull away.
"Thank you," I said.
And for the first time since I woke up in a dead woman's body, I meant it.
---
I closed the door behind me. Locked it. Leaned against the wood and let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding.
The diary was still open on the desk.
I walked over. Picked up the pen.
Day 1. Evening.
The Duke noticed my voice.
The maid noticed the poison.
And I just realized something terrifying.
In the original novel, Elena died on Page 47. But the book had 300 pages. The story kept going without her.
No one investigated her death. No one questioned the fever. The Duke mourned for exactly one paragraph and then moved on.
Someone in this house is a killer.
And they've been getting away with it for two years.
I set down the pen.
Somewhere in the castle, a clock began to chime.
I counted the rings.
Sixty days.
Fifty-nine now.