Todos los capítulos de The Villainess rewrites her fate : Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

Chloe caught the error at 6:40 in the morning, twelve minutes before the Whitcombe Tower client walkthrough, and she caught it the way she caught most things: by refusing to let a number sit wrong in her head until she chased it down.The atrium beam spec was undersized. Not by much. Enough."You're supposed to be checking your tie, not the math," said Priya, dropping into the seat across from her with two coffees, sliding one across without being asked. "Feng's already downstairs greeting them.""The beam's off by eight percent.""Is it going to fall down in the next two hours?""No.""Then tell him after. Not during. Not in front of the client." Priya tapped the side of her own cup against Chloe's, a small ritual they'd built without ever discussing it. "You've got good instincts. Use them on people too, not just steel."Chloe closed the file. She'd send the note to Feng at eight, gently, the way she always did, framing her own correction as a question so a man twenty years her seni

The seamstress arrived exactly on time, which turned out to be the easiest part of the morning.Chloe stood on a low fitting stool in the center of a dressing room three times the size of her old apartment's living room, arms held out at her sides while a woman with a mouth full of pins circled her in silence, and tried very hard to look like someone who had done this a thousand times before. The dress being adjusted around her was ivory silk, heavier than it looked, embroidered along the bodice in a pattern that must have taken someone weeks."The waist is still a touch loose, Miss Amber," the seamstress said, not quite meeting her eyes. "Same as last time. Shall I take it in again, or would you prefer I leave it, given the circumstances?"Chloe had no idea what circumstances meant. "Leave it for now," she said, because it seemed like the safer answer, and the seamstress's shoulders relaxed a fraction, as though she'd been braced for something sharper.That was the pattern of the who

She wrote the rules down that night, finally, on a single sheet of paper she planned to burn in the fireplace the moment she'd committed them properly to memory.*Don't chase Tony. Don't fight Sophia. Don't repeat her mistakes. Watch everything. Trust nothing until it's earned.*It looked absurdly simple on paper, the kind of list a person made when they didn't yet understand how many ways a household could test each line of it before breakfast. She found out exactly how many the very next morning, when her father summoned her to his study before she'd finished her tea.He was a broad, greying man who filled a room simply by choosing to stand in the center of it, and Amber's fragmented memories of him carried a particular flavor Chloe was still learning to brace for: not warmth, exactly, but a kind of careful, transactional attention, the sort a man gave to an asset he intended to manage well rather than a daughter he intended to know."You reworked the seating chart," he said, withou

She agreed to meet him in the small conservatory behind the east wing, chosen for its distance from the rest of the house rather than any particular charm, and spent the hour beforehand telling herself this was reasonable, ordinary, the kind of thing any daughter might do before a dinner where a stranger had already asked twice about her mother.She didn't quite believe herself. She went anyway.Marcus Kesworth was younger than she'd pictured, somewhere in his early forties, with the kind of composed, unhurried bearing that made a room feel smaller the moment he entered it, not through size or volume but through the sheer economy of his attention. He rose when she came in, inclined his head with exactly the correct degree of formality, and gestured toward the chair across from his with a courtesy that felt, somehow, like the opening move of a longer conversation rather than a simple pleasantry."Miss Amber. Thank you for making the time.""Your note was fairly direct about wanting it.

She waited until the house had gone fully quiet, well past one in the morning, before she made her way back to the east wing library with a single candle and the small brass key still warm from being carried in her closed fist for hours.The library felt different at night, shadows pooling in the corners the pale afternoon light had never reached, and Chloe crossed to the cabinet beneath the window with her heart beating harder than the errand strictly justified. She was, she reminded herself, only opening a piece of furniture. It didn't feel that way, standing in front of it. It felt like standing at the edge of something considerably larger than a locked drawer.She'd nearly abandoned the idea twice on the way there, once outside her own door, listening for any sign the household was still stirring, and once again at the top of the stairs, where a floorboard groaned under her weight loud enough to make her freeze for a full minute before continuing. It occurred to her, standing ther