THE VILLAINESS'S SYSTEM

Victoria's POV

I knew the exact date I was going to die, and it was printed on page 412.

That was the thought in my head when I opened my eyes. Not where am I, not who is touching my shoulder. Just that cruel little line from a novel I had thrown across my apartment two weeks earlier. Victoria Ashford was found at the bottom of the Sterling staircase on the night of her first anniversary, and no one in the story cried for her.

"Miss Victoria? Miss Victoria, please. The stylist has been waiting for an hour."

A woman in a gray uniform was bent over me, her hand trembling against my arm. Behind her, the ceiling was higher than my entire old kitchen. A chandelier hung over the bed, scattering light across silk sheets the color of cream.

I sat up. My head did not pound the way it had for months, the way it always did after double shifts and cold coffee and the smell of hospital corridors. My shoulders did not ache. My hands, when I lifted them, were smooth and pale, with nails painted a soft pearl pink I would never have paid for.

These were not my hands.

"What day is it?" My voice came out lower and smoother than I remembered, and the maid flinched as though I had slapped her.

"It is your wedding day, Miss."

Of course it was.

I pushed the sheets aside and walked to the tall mirror at the far end of the room, my bare feet sinking into carpet so thick it swallowed the sound of my steps. The woman in the glass had long dark brown hair that fell past her waist, hazel eyes rimmed red from crying, and a face so beautiful it looked unfair. A white silk robe hung from her shoulders. A diamond ring the size of a grape sat on her left hand.

I touched my cheek. She touched hers.

Victoria Ashford. The villainess of The Billionaire's Beloved Wife. The woman I had cursed at for three hundred chapters, who begged a man to love her until the day she was dragged out of his story like a stain.

I laughed. It came out cracked and wrong, and the maid took a careful step back.

"I'm dreaming," I said.

"Miss, please sit. You have not eaten since yesterday."

"I'm dead, actually. I think I'm dead."

The maid went white. She crossed the room in a rush, poured water from a crystal pitcher with unsteady hands, and pressed the glass into my fingers. I drank because it gave my hands something to do. The water was cold and tasted like money.

Then the air in front of my face split open.

[DING!]

Pale blue letters spilled across my vision, glowing against the wedding flowers stacked by the window. The maid did not react. She was staring at her own shoes.

[HOST IDENTIFIED.]

[WELCOME TO THE VILLAINESS SURVIVAL SYSTEM.]

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE THE STORY'S ORIGINAL ENDING.]

[SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: RECLAIM YOUR LOST VALUE.]

[WARNING: YOUR HUSBAND'S AFFECTION IS NOT REQUIRED FOR SUCCESS.]

I dropped the glass.

It shattered across the marble in a bright spray, and the maid gasped and dropped to her knees to gather the pieces. I stood very still, my heart slamming against my ribs, and read the next lines as they unfolded.

[HOST: VICTORIA ASHFORD]

[CURRENT STATUS: ABOUT TO MARRY ALEXANDER STERLING]

[ORIGINAL FATE: DIVORCE, PUBLIC DISGRACE, FINANCIAL RUIN, DEATH]

[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 12%]

Twelve percent.

I had once read a hospital bill with worse odds printed on it. I knew what to do with numbers like that. You did not panic. You gathered information, you found the exits, and you decided what you were willing to lose.

"Leave me for ten minutes," I told the maid.

"But the stylist..."

"Ten minutes. Please."

She went. The door clicked shut behind her, and I pressed my back against the wall and made myself recite the plot the way I used to recite medication schedules.

Victoria Ashford marries Alexander Sterling on the fourteenth of June in a church that costs more than a small town. Alexander does not love her. Alexander loves Isabella Moore, the golden girl who left the country five years ago and will return within days of the wedding, wearing white and tears. Victoria spends one year humiliating herself for a man's attention. Isabella is wounded, Victoria is blamed, and the story closes on a courtroom, a scandal, and a staircase.

Page 412. The staircase.

I looked at the blue letters still hanging in the air and said it out loud, because there was no one left to hear me.

"I am not going to die for a man who doesn't even know my favorite color."

The letters flickered.

[MISSION ONE: SURVIVE YOUR WEDDING WITHOUT LOSING YOUR DIGNITY.]

[REWARD: ACCESS TO THE HOST'S HIDDEN FINANCIAL RECORDS.]

"Fine," I whispered. "Fine. Let's go."

I let the stylist in. I let them pour me into a dress that cost more than my mother's entire treatment plan, and I sat perfectly still while someone pinned a veil into my hair. I watched my own face in the mirror and practiced what the original Victoria never had. A calm mouth. Steady eyes. Hands folded in my lap, not wrung into knots.

When they finally left me alone again, a knock came at the door.

It was not a polite knock. It was one sharp rap, the knock of a man used to doors opening before his knuckles landed.

I knew who it was before the handle turned.

Alexander Sterling stepped into the room in a black tuxedo that fit him like a threat. He was taller than the novel had described, with dark hair swept back from a hard, handsome face and gray eyes so cold the room seemed to lose a degree of warmth when they landed on me. He did not look at the dress. He did not look at the flowers. He looked at my face for exactly two seconds, the way a man checks the time.

"You have four minutes," he said. "If you have something to say before we go down, say it now. If you plan to cry, do it here. I won't have a scene in front of two thousand guests."

In the novel, this was the moment the original Victoria seized his sleeve and begged him to give their marriage a chance. This was the moment he looked at her with disgust and decided she was exactly the kind of woman he had always believed she was.

[WARNING: THIS IS THE SCENE THAT SEALED THE HOST'S ORIGINAL FATE.]

I folded my hands in front of me and met his eyes.

"I have nothing to say that requires four minutes."

Something flickered across his face. It was brief and sharp, gone almost before I caught it. He had come braced for tears, and I had handed him a closed door.

"I understand what this marriage is," I continued. "A merger with a ring on it. You will keep your life, I will keep mine, and neither of us will pretend otherwise. I won't ask for anything you haven't agreed to give."

His jaw tightened. "That's remarkably reasonable."

"I'm a reasonable woman."

"You were not yesterday."

"Yesterday I was mistaken about a great many things."

He studied me with narrowed eyes, as though looking for the trap. I let him look. I had spent years reading faces across hospital desks and loan offices, and I knew what a man looked like when his expectations had just been dismantled in front of him.

He turned toward the door. Then I remembered the reception, and the details I had skimmed over three hundred chapters ago because they had seemed so unimportant.

"Alexander."

He stopped but did not turn around.

"Have the white lilies removed from the ballroom before the reception begins."

"Excuse me?"

"The lilies on the head table and around the stage. Remove them. Today."

He turned slowly. For the first time since he had walked in, the careful ice in his expression cracked.

"Why?"

"Because your sister is going to walk into that room in about three hours, and she's going to stop breathing."

The silence that followed was so complete I could hear the string quartet warming up two floors below.

Alexander crossed the room in three strides and caught my wrist in a grip that was not cruel but was absolutely unbreakable. His gray eyes had gone dark and dangerous, and underneath the fury I saw something I had never once read in the novel.

Fear.

"Lily has a flower allergy," he said, very low. "A severe one. She was diagnosed three weeks ago. The doctors, my mother, and I are the only people who know. She asked me not to tell anyone, because she was ashamed of being fragile."

His fingers tightened.

"So tell me, Victoria. Who told you?"

[DING!]

[THE ORIGINAL STORY HAS JUST CHANGED.]