Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 137017 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 685(@200wpm)___ 548(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137017 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 685(@200wpm)___ 548(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
I was Alicia; Alicia was me.
I also knew one other thing.
I knew how I was destined to die.
At least how I was supposed to die in the original story.
In all the reincarnation novels I’d read like this, the heroine was always afraid of changing the original story, but I harboured no such fears.
I was going to change the original story.
In fact, the story was already changing.
The novel hadn’t covered too much about Alicia’s life given that she was a side character destined to die, but she’d never died or even almost died at the hands of her family. They hadn’t had the best relationship from the vague insight readers had been given into her life, but abusive to the point of death?
No. That hadn’t been the case.
Which meant the world I had come to had to be different from the one I knew of.
Of course, that didn’t mean things couldn’t divert back to the original path. I couldn’t control the actions of others, so the route to my death could still be the same if I didn’t try to change the things around me.
The first thing I had to do was not marry Kalon, the Grand Duke of Stein, also known as the Beast of the Battlefield for his cold, almost tyrant-like demeanour during the Great War. He was a man known not to take prisoners and would kill traitors and miscreants on the spot, whether it be a battlefield or a ballroom, and that was exactly how the empire had conquered five neighbouring countries in a little over eighteen months.
He was the eldest son of the Emperor and the first, late
Empress, but had been all but ostracised to the northern territory of Stein after the war due to the influence of his stepmother, the current Empress.
That was how his younger brother had ended up as Crown Prince, too.
I’d drooled over Kalon in the novel—everyone loved a fictional red flag, after all—but if I married him in this life, that red flag would become my death flag.
If my father, Marquess Vermillion, was able to arrange my marriage to him before I could find my own husband that would fit his expectations, then everything would become so much harder for me.
Hmm.
Maybe I needed to jot down what I knew in case I forgot it. I couldn’t trust that my memories from my past life would remain intact as I lived this one, and I had to document them before everything became too entangled.
I got up from my comfy bed and walked over to the desk, opening one single curtain to allow enough sunlight to filter in. After locating an empty notebook in the drawer, I dipped my fountain pen into the inkpot and started writing.
In the book, Alicia died solely because of her love for Kalon.
Their marriage was wholly political, but that was perfectly normal in this world. Indeed, arranged marriages weren’t exactly foreign in my twenty-first-century life, either, but this was a setting I’d consider historical in its society.
Marquess Vermillion saw his self-absorbed eldest daughter as nothing more than a pawn to use for his own interests and married her off to Kalon, strengthening his ties with both the Imperial Family and the Grand Duchy of Stein, a self-governing territory within the empire.
All to trade in magic stones and gain yet more money and power.
Mind you, that was why Kalon himself had agreed to the marriage. It was hardly one-sided—the Vermillion Trading Group were experts in magic stones, and the more magic stones that Kalon mined from the Stein mountains, the more money that was in his pocket.
As far as marrying Alicia off went, her bloodline was exceptional. The Vermillions were an old, powerful family, and her mother had been the first daughter of a once-renowned dukedom who’d once wielded divine power.
In layman’s terms, she was more than acceptable for the Crown Prince himself as a future Empress candidate, never mind a prince who was sidelined like Kalon was.
Ugh.
My modern-day brain was never going to get used to thinking about women as property. The very thought of how little power I possessed as a woman in this world sent a shiver down my spine.
There was little I could do without the permission of my father and, later, that would be the case for my husband, especially as a member of the nobility.
In the book, after moving to the northern territory, the spoilt and snobbish Alicia fell in love with Kalon, although her affections were one-sided. Despite her best efforts to make him notice her, he wasn’t interested in having any kind of close relationship with his wife, thus making their marriage as unhappy as humanly possible.
Reason two for me not to marry that handsome bastard.
The book began approximately six or seven months after their wedding, at the Imperial Family’s annual autumn harvest banquet. That was where Lady Lillia de Armand made her belated debut and, with her innocence, caught the attention of both Kalon and his younger brother, Crown Prince Torin.