1. The Villainess Wakes Up

Sia’s POV

I woke up choking on perfume.

Strawberry, sweet and cloying, the kind that coats the back of your throat. Underneath it was something sharper, like smoke, and my first groggy thought was that the neighbors had burned dinner again.

Then I tried to roll over and couldn’t, because I was holding something.

It was pressed flat against my chest, both arms wrapped around it so tightly my fingers had gone numb. The way a kid hangs on to a stuffed animal during a thunderstorm. I opened my eyes and looked down.

A small pink book with a brass lock.

The hands gripping it weren’t mine. The nails were long, filed into neat ovals and painted a pale rose. Mine had been chewed down to nothing ever since my last deadline.

I let go so fast the book bounced off the sheets and thumped onto the floor.

Silk sheets. A pink ceiling with an honest-to-god chandelier. A vanity buried under so many bottles and brushes and glittering little boxes that it looked like a department store had sneezed on it. This was not my apartment.

“Okay,” I said, and the voice that came out was soft and a little breathy and also not mine. “Okay. Okay, okay, okay.”

A cracked phone on the nightstand lit up all by itself.

[EMERGENCY ALERT: Containment failure in Sector 4. Infection spreading. Remain indoors. Do not approach affected persons.]

Outside, a siren started up, then another, until the whole city seemed to be wailing. Somewhere a woman screamed. A second later something enormous crashed down a few streets away, and the floor shook, and every bottle on the vanity rattled against the next.

I knew that alert. I knew that crash. I’d read both of them hours ago, in another life, a few pages from the end of the book.

“Shit,” I whispered. Then louder, as if volume could fix it: “Shit, shit, shit!”

This wasn’t happening. People didn’t wake up inside novels. I threw off the covers and started to pace, because standing still felt like falling. Window, door, window, my fingers knotted in my hair. A dream, that was it, a very detailed one. I’d read an article once about lucid dreaming. All I had to do was wake up.

‘Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.’

On my third lap, my bare foot came down on something hard and flat, and the floor slid out from under me. I grabbed the edge of the vanity just in time to keep from cracking my skull on the carpet. When I looked up, a girl in the mirror was clinging to the vanity right back.

She was staring at me. Delicate face, big dark eyes, a cloud of soft brown hair, and a small mole under the left eye. She was beautiful in a way that looked expensive. I knew that face. I had hated that face for three hundred chapters.

The villainess.

The spoilt, clingy, vicious second female lead of Ashes of the Last Dawn, the apocalypse novel I had stayed up until four in the morning to finish, mostly so I could be angry about it. The girl who obsessed over the male lead and, according to every character in the book, murdered his girlfriend Mia out of jealousy. The whole city hated her. And in chapter three hundred, the hero walked into her bedroom while the world burned outside and strangled her to death, and the comment section had cheered.

“No,” I told the mirror. “No, no. This isn’t real.”

Her lips moved when mine did. I pinched her arm and it hurt. I slapped her cheek, harder than I meant to, and that hurt more. Hurt meant real. Hurt always meant real.

“Why her?” My voice cracked and shot up an octave. “Three hundred chapters, forty named characters, a whole city of nobodies who die on page two, and I get her? I would’ve taken the maid! I would’ve taken the guy who gets flattened by a bus shelter! Why the one who gets strangled on the last page?”

The mirror girl gaped at me. I gaped back.

So, great. I was in her body, on her last day, with a big pink target painted on my back.

And she had earned that target. The book had been very thorough about that. This was the girl who’d had a lab assistant fired for spilling coffee on her shoes. Who called the cafeteria staff “the help” to their faces. Who had started the rumor that turned half the research building against Mia, and then smiled about it at the staff party. Everyone in the city had a story about her, and not one of them was kind.

I made myself stop pacing and breathe. Panic wasn’t going to help me. The last chapter was about to catch up with me, and I had maybe an hour to do something with what I knew. If I could write it all down, every plot point, every death, every locked door, I might have a chance. I needed a pen. I needed paper.

The only paper I could see was a little pink book on the floor, the one I’d slipped on.

In the novel, the diary had gotten exactly one line: ‘found clutched in her arms.’ Nobody ever opened it. Nobody cared what was in it. Honestly, I’d always wondered why it existed at all. A girl like her, who had a maid for everything, kept a diary? What would she even write in it? A list of enemies? A ranking of who to ruin next?

Still, it was a book, and it had pages. I picked it up. The brass lock hung open, bent a little, as if she’d been reading it right before she fell asleep. 

I opened the cover.

The handwriting was round and careful, the kind girls practice in school. I expected poison. Gloating, maybe, some petty list of people she hated. What I found instead was a name I knew, on almost every page.

[March 3. Skyler said good morning today. Not to me, exactly. To the room, and I happened to be standing in it. I’m counting it.]

[He takes his coffee black. When he’s exhausted he adds three sugars and acts like nobody notices. I notice. I know how that sounds. I can’t make myself stop.]

[Left soup outside his door again. He gave it to the intern. I laughed about it for about a second, and then I cried in the bathroom for an hour.]

[Everyone says I’m a spoiled brat. They’re not wrong. When you’ve only ever been handed things, nobody teaches you how to ask for the one thing you actually want.]

I turned the page and my hands had started to shake.

[Mia smiled at me in the corridor today. She said my hair looked nice. I tried so hard to hate her. I couldn’t. She’s just kind, and it would be so much easier if she weren’t.]

[He looks at her the way I look at him. I know exactly what that look is. I’m the world’s foremost expert.]

Four years of it. Four years of watching someone who never once turned around.

For three hundred chapters she was a shrill, ugly little shadow that existed so the heroine could look good, and not one author or reader had bothered to ask what she was actually like when no one was looking. She was lonely. She was so lonely she’d turned a man’s coffee habits into scripture.

My throat hurt. I flipped to the last page. The ink had smeared in two places, round and blotted, the way ink does when something wet lands on it.

I had read this girl wrong. The whole book had.

[They’re saying I killed her. I didn’t. I swear on everything, I didn’t. But he won’t listen, and he’ll come tonight, and I don’t think I’ll be able to say it fast enough. If anyone ever reads this, please tell him I never wanted her gone. I only wanted him to see me once.]

I sat very still.

She had known exactly how it would end. She’d written it down anyway, and then she’d gone to sleep holding it like it could keep her safe.

The door slammed open.

I looked up.

Skyler stood in the doorway, and he was taller than the book had made him sound. Black hair, shadows under sharp eyes, a white lab coat streaked with soot. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in days and had stopped expecting to. His eyes were the coldest thing I’d ever seen.

And I remembered.

This was the scene. Chapter three hundred, the one the readers had cheered for. The male lead, still grieving, finally confronts the woman who destroyed his girlfriend.

He didn’t say a word. He crossed the room in four steps, and I opened my mouth, and his hand closed around my throat.