ADAEZE POV
The first thing was the cold.
Not the cold from the accident. Not the wet, road-spray kind that comes sideways through a cracked window on a bad Lagos night. This was different. Stone cold. The kind that sits in walls for centuries and genuinely does not care that you are there.
Adaeze opened her eyes.
The ceiling above her was carved stone with a crack running east to west like someone tried to split it and gave up halfway through. Four candles, burning low, wax pooled thick around iron holders that had not been cleaned in a while. Dark curtains on windows so tall they made the room feel like a throat.
She sat up.
Too fast. The body pushed back, muscles stiff in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, and she grabbed the edge of the bed with both hands and stopped moving. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Third year medical student. She had kept her composure through a code blue on a ward floor at three in the morning with an attending screaming two inches from her face. She could keep it now.
She looked at her hands.
They were not her hands.
Longer fingers. Paler at the knuckles. A small scar on the right index finger she had no memory of getting. She turned them over slowly, the way she turned a patient's hands over when something was not adding up, and said out loud to nobody at all, "Okay."
Just that. Okay.
She got off the bed and walked to the mirror on the other side of the room because she already knew it was going to be bad and she was not the kind of person who stood around waiting for bad things to happen.
She looked.
Zara Voss looked back.
"Oh," Adaeze said. Her voice came out lower than she expected, a little rough, like the body had been crying recently. "Oh no."
She had spent two weeks reading about this face. Oval jaw. Dark eyes. The kind of pretty that had been pointed like a weapon for so long the muscles around the mouth had learned to default to contempt even when there was nothing to be contemptuous about. Black hair loose around her shoulders, tangled at the ends.
Zara Voss.
The villainess. The woman who drank the wrong wine at a dinner in chapter three and died while a full court watched and not one person moved.
Adaeze gripped the edge of the vanity and stared at her own borrowed face and started listing what she knew, because listing was the only thing standing between her and a full collapse and she refused to collapse.
One. She was dead. Or her original body was. Something had happened on that road and she had ended up here instead of wherever people were supposed to go.
Two. She was inside a character she had read about. A character she had actually cried about, sitting on Lena's couch with chin chin in her lap, telling Lena it was not fair how Zara died. Lena had said the author needed the villainess out of the way to clear the path for the heroine and Adaeze had said that was lazy writing and they had argued about it for twenty minutes and then eaten the rest of the chin chin in silence.
Three. She was close to the edge. She could feel it the way she used to feel an exam deadline, that low buzzing pressure at the back of her skull. Three chapters. Maybe less.
She needed to know what chapter she had landed in.
She needed to know what Zara had done in the last twenty-four hours.
She turned from the mirror and started reading the room. Cold side of the bed untouched, pillow flat. Papers on the desk, three of them, one turned face-down. Scorch marks on the vanity, fresh ones, the smell of burned paper still sitting faint in the air like a bad memory. She picked up the face-down paper first.
A letter. Heavy-handed writing, the kind that expected to be obeyed. Duchess Seran's seal at the top. She knew that seal. She had read about it. The letter was a summons to a function the previous evening with very specific instructions about what Zara was and was not to say in the presence of the crown prince.
She reached into the body's muscle memory like reaching into a cabinet in the dark.
The function. A hall. Wine. Someone pressing a goblet into her hand and her not looking at who. She had drunk it without thinking because Zara drank at events like that, used the wine like a coat she could hide under. Then a letter, slipped to her before she left. She had opened it in the corridor and whatever was inside had made her angry enough to come back here and burn something.
She checked the vanity ash. Yes. Almost nothing left.
So she had drunk wine she should not have touched and burned a letter she should have kept and now she was standing in a dead woman's room at four in the morning trying to work out how many days she had left.
She crossed to the window and pulled the curtain back. Black sky, barely grey at the far edge. Two guards at the gate below doing that specific kind of standing where they were technically conscious but not really present.
She let the curtain fall.
What did Zara know. What would Zara know that she needed right now. She went through it, chapter by chapter, matching it against what the body kept offering her in small pieces. The layout of the chambers. The servant girl who brought morning tea. The locked door behind her with a key kept under the left corner of the rug because Zara did not trust the household staff.
She pulled the rug corner up. The key was there.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed going through the desk papers when the door opened without a knock.
A girl came in. Young, sixteen maybe, hair pulled back tight, servant's clothes. She stopped when she saw Adaeze sitting up fully dressed and something crossed her face fast, surprise, and underneath the surprise, a quick flash of something that looked a lot like fear.
Then she dropped to her knees on the stone floor, head down, hands flat on her thighs.
"My lady." Her voice was barely there. "I apologize for the intrusion."
Adaeze said nothing for a second. She knew what Zara would say here. She could feel it sitting in the body's defaults like a loaded word, something sharp about the hour or the noise or the girl's nerve. She did not use it.
"Get up," she said instead. "Don't kneel on stone. It's bad for your knees."
The girl looked up. Whatever she expected, it was not that.
"My lady?"
"You heard me. Get up."
She stood. Slowly. Hands still flat at her sides like she was bracing for the correction to come. "I have a message," she said carefully. "From the throne room."
Something dropped in Adaeze's stomach.
"The throne room," she repeated.
"Yes, my lady." The girl's eyes were fixed at the middle distance. Not quite meeting hers. "His Highness requests your presence. He is waiting."
Adaeze did not move for a moment. Just held the information in her chest and felt the weight of it.
The crown prince was waiting. Before sunrise. Which meant Zara had done something specific at that function last night, something bad enough to pull a summons before the palace even woke up, and Adaeze had absolutely no idea what it was.
None.
She was going to have to walk into a room with the most perceptive man in this entire story and perform being a woman she had only ever read about. A woman she did not fully understand yet. And she did not know what that woman had said last night to make this happen.
She stood up.
"Tell him," she said, keeping her voice flat and even the way she had learned to keep it flat and even during bad ward rounds, "I will be there shortly."
The girl bowed and left and the door clicked shut and Adaeze stood alone in the cold room with the candles burning almost all the way down and her heart slamming against her ribs like it wanted out.
She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose.
"Okay," she said to the empty room, to the ceiling, to whoever made this decision for her. "Okay."
She went to find something to wear.