Afternoon Tea Disaster

I choked on soup and died.

This is how my life ended. It was neither in a battle for kingdom nor glory, but over a mug of lukewarm spiced broth read over by a trashy romance novel in the middle of the night until the letters melted and my eyes burned.

However, I awoke.

In a corset, which was currently trying to kill my ribs.

"My Lady? My Lady, are you well?"

The words swam into my view along with a flustered looking face with big, wide eyes topped by a frilly maid's cap. She looked absolutely terrified.

I sat up and the world spun. Walls gilded in gold, a four-poster bed, a mirror as large as a carriage door... And my own reflection.

Long black hair that cascaded down my back, skin as pale as paper and lips as blood red as a wound.

A stare of murder. The expression on those eyes could've been the definition of malice, the embodiment of a schemer plotting three different schemes before breakfast.

Oh. Oh, no.

"I... I'm alright," I stammered, my voice as smooth and silky as poison.

The maid breathed a shaky sigh of relief. "Thank god. Her engagement ball is tonight! Your Ladyship cannot fall sick."

Engagement. Ball. Tonight.

My mind was a blank. Utterly blank.

Because I know the story. I've read it before. Even though I've already died.

'The Duke's Rejected Bride', a bard's love story every noble lady at court was desperate over.

I was the villain. Lady Seraphina Vance. The girl who dies in Chapter 3; killed by a dose of poisoned wine at the engagement ball.

The poisoner?

That was TBD, but personally I put money on "just about everyone who has ever looked me in the eye."

"Water please," I croaked, my throat rasping.

The maid rushed out and I stumbled to the mirror. Seraphina was undeniably beautiful, almost impossibly so. But her face held a sneer that could curdle milk, the very visage that belonged to someone who delighted in wrecking other people's weddings.

No longer though.

I had a new plan: 1. Don't die; 2. Discover how I got here and why; and 3.

Perhaps attempt not to be evil?

Was that even permitted here?

"My Lady, your bath has been drawn along with the red gown, Your Ladyship looks stunning in it," the maid reported cheerfully as she returned.

Red. The same gown worn by Seraphina when she so cruelly humiliated the heroine. Absolutely not. "Burn it," I declared.

The maid paused, blinking at me. "... Pardon, My Lady?"

"Burn it. The red gown. And the corset, and any part of it that might choke me in my sleep.

We're opting for cream.

Cream cannot get you poisoned."

She looked as if I had sprouted two horns. Fair enough; in the original story, Seraphina once managed to set a convent ablaze because the singing was off key.

The hot bath was very soothing-no one and nothing attempting to kill me-and once I stepped out, the gown still loomed, waiting.

It was blue, not red thankfully, but 17 layers was considered appropriate, along with a neckline that should have been illegal in most civilized countries. "My Lady, you look divine," the maid gasped, then, "The Duke will not approve."

Right. The Duke. Duke Cassian.

The darkly brooding, heartbreakingly handsome, cold as ice, deeply unhappy hero of the story.

He was meant to be betrothed to Lady Elara-the heroine, the embodiment of sunshine and goodness-tonight. Except that at the engagement party, Seraphina throws a tantrum and makes a public scene which lands her in trouble and later on dead in chapter three.

New rule: NO SCENES. Absolutely none.

I practiced in the mirror, smiling blandly at my reflection before practicing to nod and fade into the background. "I am a potted plant, a very beautiful but extremely quiet potted plant."

The carriage ride to the palace was filled with a silence too thick for me to breathe in comfortably, my eyes darting between the seats looking for a possible dagger under them. The maid continued to throw glances at me every now and then: "My Lady... Are you unwell? You're not laughing in a very mad way."

"I do not do that," I replied defensively. "You did yesterday, when the baker's boy dropped the pastries."

... Touché.

The ballroom glittered. Jewels winked, music soared. Nobles in finery circulated like fish in a brightly lit aquarium, and in the very center of the opulent chamber... Him.

Duke Cassian.

So impossibly tall and lean, dressed immaculately in black, jaw sharp enough to slice glass, and eyes that burned into me as if I were a problem that needed solving. He was meant to be looking at Elara-sweet, blonder, and standing right beside him in white-but he wasn't.

He was looking at me. And frowning.

"Oh, no," I whispered, "he recognizes me."

"Recognize what, My Lady?"

"That this isn't how I was supposed to act until chapter seven."

I needed a drink. Something hydrating. Water preferably, but anything.

A servant with a silver tray gracefully approached us.

It held two glasses, both filled with a deep ruby red wine.

Perfect. Hydration.

I started to reach out, but stopped. Because chapter three, line two read, and the words etched into my memory:

'Seraphina lifted the wine to her lips. It tasted of bitter almonds and death.'

Bitter almonds. The poison.

My hand hovered, an invisible force holding me back. The servant's eyes were fixed on me, and so was the entire ballroom, or it felt like it. I was damned if I drank the wine, as I was already dead from it once before; I was suspicious if I refused.

My brain worked frantically-

I sneezed. A loud, embarrassing, violent sneeze.

I "accidentally" knocked both glasses to the floor. Wine gushed over the marble, saturating a fern next to us in dark liquid. The fern immediately withered, then blackened, then died.

The music stopped. The ballroom went stone silent.

The servant paled. Cassian's eyes narrowed further. And I, Lady Seraphina Vance, the villainess who was supposed to have died tonight, broke into floods of tears.

"I am SO sorry!"

I wailed, my voice shaking with "grief." "I'm just so NERVOUS about the engagement!

Is it normal to be this nervous?

The court physician said I should be concerned with my mental state, whatever that meant!"

Elara blinked. Cassian stared. And somewhere in the silent ballroom, a goblet clattered to the ground.

I had survived chapter three.

But as I mopped my eyes with a lace handkerchief, I felt it-a cold stare from the back of my head. Someone's eyes, utterly devoid of emotion. Someone's gaze fixed solely on me.

And a whisper that was no louder than the rustling of a silk gown, yet somehow I heard it perfectly clearly:

"That was not meant to happen."