The ache in my chest didn't fade.
If anything, it deepened.
By morning, it had settled into something worse than pain—awareness. Like a thread strung between my ribs and something just out of reach, tugging, taut and insistent.
Her.
Virelya.
The moment she touched me, something ancient had latched onto my soul. And now it refused to let go.
I stood in front of the mirror, shirt off, trying not to panic. My reflection looked normal—no scars, no sigils, no signs of binding.
But I could feel it.
Like something was watching me from inside.
That wasn't how the curse worked in the book.
In the novel, victims of the villainess's magic died without warning—quietly, gruesomely. But this… this was slow. Personal. Intimate.
Like it wanted me to fall first.
I spent most of the day avoiding her.
Easy enough—she didn't attend the afternoon gathering with the nobles, and no one dared question her absence. Instead, they gossiped.
"She gave the Chancellor frostbite last month, I heard."
"I saw her pet a wolf once. The beast bowed."
"My cousin said she cursed her entire house with silence for speaking ill of her."
I kept my face neutral, even as my pulse quickened. Every story about her added to the myth. The fear. The isolation.
But I'd seen her. In the garden. In the music hall.
And none of these stories matched the girl who played the harp like she was trying to remember something she'd lost.
That night, the dreams started.
Not mine.
Hers.
I stood in a field of ash. Snowflakes fell upward. The sky cracked with red lightning. And in the center of it all stood Virelya—her back to me, hair loose, black dress torn at the hem.
She whispered something I couldn't hear.
And then she turned—and her eyes were empty. Silver, but hollow. Like something inside her had finally shattered.
She reached out to me.
I woke up choking.
I didn't sleep after that.
Instead, I did what I always did back in my past life when I couldn't think straight.
I trained.
Swords were forbidden inside the estate, so I used what I had—wooden practice blades, weighted staffs, resistance bands enchanted for noble brats to "exercise."
It wasn't enough, but it helped.
Helped me pretend I still had control.
Until I noticed the shadows watching me.
They weren't guards.
They didn't breathe.
They flickered at the edge of my vision—shapes without forms, curling into corners where the light didn't reach.
The curse was growing.
Feeding on my connection to her. Watching.
I was being stalked by something I couldn't even name.
I confronted her the next evening.
Found her in the rose garden, sitting on a bench like she hadn't cursed me with every step I took closer.
"You look like hell," she said without turning.
"I saw shadows in my room."
Her hands stilled on her lap.
"Did they speak?"
"No. But they were there. And they weren't human."
She finally turned her head.
"That's the first phase," she said quietly. "The curse doesn't just bond us. It tests us."
"What does that mean?"
She looked at me like I was already buried.
"If your feelings are real… it lets you live. But if they're forced—fake—if you get close to me out of pity, obsession, or guilt… it feeds on you. Until you break."
My stomach dropped.
"And if I back off now?"
"It kills you faster."
Great.
"So I'm damned either way."
She didn't answer.
"Why me?" I asked. "Out of all the people in this world… why me?"
She studied me for a long moment.
"I don't think it's random," she said softly. "I think it's… correction."
"Correction?"
"I've lived this life over. Again and again. The story always resets when I try to change it. But you?" Her voice trembled. "You weren't in it before."
I stared at her.
"What?"
"You're new, Caelum. You don't belong here. And that means…"
"That means I might be the glitch."
A flaw in fate.
A crack in the loop.
My stomach twisted.
"Then maybe I can break it."
Her lips parted, hope flickering across her expression for just a second.
And then she said the most terrifying thing yet.
"Maybe that's why the curse chose you."
That night, I wrote everything down.
Every dream. Every change. Every touch that hurt. Every moment that didn't match the book.
I needed a record.
If this went the way I feared, I had to know when and how it all started falling apart.
Because I had a feeling—
This wasn't just a love story cursed to end in death.
This was a prophecy already in motion.
And I was no longer the one reading the story.
I was the one rewriting it.