Chapter 1: Death Wasn’t the End

When Rika opened her eyes, she wasn’t supposed to be alive.

She remembered it clearly—

The truck.

The screech of tires.

The cold, numbing impact.

And the warmth that followed… not from blood, but from regret.

She was twenty-two.

A failed romance novelist with an inbox full of rejection letters.

Alone.

Forgettable.

She’d cried her last tears on the pavement.

But now… she was in a grand bed, velvet sheets tucked under her arms, sunlight streaming in through a window far too elegant to belong to any hospital.

“Miss Rika, are you awake?”

A voice. Sweet. Nervous.

She turned her head to see a girl no older than fifteen, dressed in what could only be described as a maid uniform from a fantasy drama.

“Where am I?” Rika asked, her voice hoarse.

The girl curtsied.

“The Rosewing Estate, of course. You’ve returned.”

Returned?

Rika sat up, her heart pounding.

Then she saw it—her reflection in the polished mirror across the room.

Blonde hair.

Violet eyes.

Not her own.

Someone else.

Someone beautiful.

Someone dead.

That’s when the memories started flooding in.

Not her memories.

But the girl’s. The body she now inhabited.

Lady Seraphina Rosewing.

Noble daughter.

Engaged to the cold and terrifying Crown Prince.

Murdered.

Poisoned on the eve of their engagement ceremony.

And now… Rika had taken her place.

‘I died and woke up inside a dead girl’s body?’

No.

A villainess’s body.

One who everyone hated.

One whose death no one mourned.

‘This isn’t reincarnation,’ Rika thought.

‘This is a punishment.’

But the moment her hand curled into a fist and flames sparked between her fingers, she realized something else:

This body held magic.

Powerful magic.

And maybe, just maybe…

A second chance.