Peter Edencrown watched blankly.

  In his entire life — through every humiliation, every snide remark, every pointed silence from people who thought an illegitimate child wasn't worth the air he breathed — he had never felt quite like this.

  What is this.

  The woman named Josephine von Konrow.

  He'd had a clear image of her before. Everyone did. The villainess. The one who made Adele's life a misery for years — petty, cruel, the kind of noble woman who wielded status like a blade and aimed it at anyone she could reach. Peter had hated her on principle without ever having met her. That was how straightforward it was supposed to be.

  And then he saw her eating in the garden.

  Just — eating. Happily. With an expression on her face so completely unguarded that he'd stopped and stared like an idiot because that face didn't match anything he'd been told.

  How does a villainess make a face like that.

  He couldn't let it go. That was the problem. Peter Edencrown was not a man who let things go.

  So he challenged her to a duel.

  And she beat him.

  "I lost?" he'd said, out loud, to no one, standing in the training ground looking at the dirt.

  He, one of the finest swordsmen in the kingdom. She had beaten him in pure swordsmanship without breaking a sweat and then looked mildly annoyed about the whole thing.

  Just who the hell are you.

  He started digging. Background checks, intelligence networks, every source he had access to — and what came back was staggering. Multiple dealings in the underworld. An arranged engagement to Marquis Jhake. The fashion designer Nephi. The alchemist Montgomery, considered the most skilled in the kingdom.

  All the same person.

  All her.

  How is this woman not known.

  It didn't make sense. Someone with that many threads running through that many different worlds — she should have been impossible to hide. And yet she'd been sitting in a spare mansion at the edge of the Konrow estate, eating in a garden, and nobody had been paying attention.

  Why would she hide all of this.

  He kept watching her. Kept telling himself it was reconnaissance, intelligence-gathering, a means to an end. And the more he watched, the more his image of her kept quietly dismantling itself.

  She was living far from the main mansion. People spoke badly of her as a matter of habit. Her family had never looked at her — not once, Adele had confirmed it with something that might have been satisfaction and might have been guilt, and Peter had filed that away to examine later.

  She was just trying to get her family to notice her.

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  Like him.

  He'd sat with that for a long time and hadn't liked it.

  He'd proved himself. Clawed up from the bottom through talent and force of will and the sheer refusal to be discarded. He had his position now. He had recognition. But he knew — in the part of himself he didn't examine closely — that without the talent, it would have gone differently. Without the talent, he would have been nothing. Overlooked. Thrown away.

  Just like Josephine.

  I'm going to confront her, he'd decided. Once and for all. Resolve this.

  So he went.

  And she was different.

  Not in a way he could point to immediately — her face, her voice, the way she held herself — all of it had shifted somewhere he couldn't quite name. Just different. The aura of someone who had been through something and come out the other side of it changed.

  "She's strong," he thought, and felt the difference from their first clash bone-deep.

  He apologized. Reluctantly. He'd expected her to do something with it — laugh, hold it over him, use it. She didn't. She just — accepted it and moved on, like it wasn't worth savoring.

  What is she playing at.

  Then: isn't that the only reason you came?

  He'd been dumbfounded. He hadn't planned past the apology, if he was being honest. Hadn't really thought he'd get this far.

  Most convenient excuse—

  Swordsmanship.

  Genuinely, truly — there was no one else. No one in the empire would teach him without an angle, without a price tag attached to it. And this woman was better than anyone he'd ever fought. If she agreed, he could learn. And if she was still the Josephine he'd been told about, he could flip it — use what he learned to help Adele take what she was owed.

  That was the plan.

  He was wrong. Again.

  You must not approach Adele for the duration of your training.

  He hadn't seen that coming. Couldn't speak during sessions either, which was its own specific torture. In exchange: lodging, meals, silence. Her silence, specifically, about any of it.

  He agreed. Part gamble, part morbid curiosity.

  What is she playing at.

  Training under Josephine was hell.

  Specifically — it was a strange kind of hell that he almost didn't mind, which confused him more than the bruises did.

  She was inconsistent. Unpredictable. Her style shifted constantly, no pattern he could lock onto, and every time he thought he had her rhythm she changed it. Mornings were exercise. Exercise meant she beat him. Then she handed him a towel and food and told him to stop sulking.

  Harsh. Unreasonably reasonable. Somehow both at the same time.

  He kept catching himself watching her when he should have been focused.

  She looked cold, from the outside. Untouchable. But the things she did — the food, the towel, the way she told him to stand up without raising her voice — those weren't cold. He didn't know what they were. He didn't have a word for someone who knocked you to the ground and then made sure you got back up.

  Why does everything she does seem so...

  He stopped that thought before it finished.

  One afternoon — his body one continuous bruise, his dignity somewhere on the training ground floor — he hit the wall. Couldn't get up. Didn't want to.

  "Stand up."

  He kept his head down.

  Then she started speaking.

  He didn't understand it at first. The words were strange, rhythmic — something about roads uphill and funds running low. He looked up at her, confused, and found her looking back at him with an expression he'd never seen on her face before.

  Like she meant it. Like she actually meant every word.

  Rest if you must. But don't quit.

  Something cracked open in his chest and he couldn't close it.

  Because those were the words. The exact words. The ones he'd needed as a child and never gotten — not from his father, not from anyone in that palace, not from a single person who had watched him fight his way up from nothing and said I see you, I know what this costs, keep going.

  Josephine von Konrow said them to him like they were obvious. Like he deserved to hear them.

  "You can do it."

  Peter's hands were shaking. He didn't let himself look away.

  He was weak. He knew that. But he also knew — clearly, immediately, without the usual noise — what he wanted.

  I want this woman.

  The feelings he'd carried for Adele — the ones he'd built his entire identity around, the ones that had been his justification for everything — dissolved quietly, like they'd never been load-bearing to begin with.

  I will make her mine.

  He was certain.

  He was also, though he didn't recognize it yet, completely and entirely in over his head.