“Hmm. Looks like things have wrapped up nicely here.”

Catherine waved the freshly opened letter in her hand, her lips curling into a smile.

The letter was short, lacking both refined prose and elegant penmanship.

But to Catherine, it was better news than anything else.

That knight had finally arrived at a secluded retreat with his beloved lady.

“Yes. Rather than living an unhappy life in a forced engagement arranged by her family, Lady Mifaro is better off spending her life with a man who truly loves and cherishes her.”

The sender of the letter was Lady Mifaro’s knight.

Not long ago, Catherine had unintentionally overheard his dreamy nonsense when he visited Sillion to meet a friend.

His deep affection for his lady, his sorrow over her lack of interest in him, and his growing anxiety over her sudden engagement—

Catherine immediately recognized that this knight was the subject of the gossip that had been circulating among the maids in Sillion.

And the next thing that came to her mind was the immense wealth of the Mifaro family.

She needed money, and the knight desperately needed love.

Besides, hadn’t Lady Mifaro said she didn’t want the engagement?

In an instant, Catherine came up with a solution that would satisfy all three parties, and without hesitation, she approached the knight.

Manipulating a man blinded by love and on the brink of despair at the thought of losing his beloved was remarkably easy.

“You and I are in a similar situation, aren’t we? That’s why I understand her heart better than anyone. So, just do as I say.”

The knight listened to everything she had to say but didn’t seem entirely convinced.

That was when Catherine delivered the final push.

“Everyone deserves to be loved, and everyone has the right to live freely by their own will.”

The knight’s expression changed the moment he heard those words.

“…The freedom to be loved…”

That was precisely her intention. She had deliberately dug through Catherine’s inherited memories after her possession and lightly prodded at his past.

The knight, who had been mumbling as if repeating her words, soon asked with a hardened face,

“Can you really help me?”

His inability to trust the disgrace of the Sillion family was evident, yet so was his desperation—grasping at straws.

“Of course. As I said, I’m in the same situation.”

Catherine readily assured him of her support.

Then, she added,

“If everything goes well, you can grant me a favor or two, right?”

The knight, though reluctant, gave his word.

After that, she pushed the frustrating knight along, provided various information based on the original novel’s details, and successfully secured the ‘mine.’

Well, for now, it was only a promise from the knight, but soon, a document signed by the Lady of Mifaro would be in her hands.

“That should be enough to secure my future wealth. A win-win situation, like killing two birds with one stone.”

Imagining the mine that would soon fall into her hands, she let the corners of her lips twitch freely as she looked down at the letter.

“The damn ties Sillion discarded are proving useful to me after all.”

That knight had once belonged to the Sillion family before her possession, but he had been forced to leave after falling out of favor with the ill-tempered heir.

His skills were solid enough that the Count of Mifaro took him in, causing friction between the two families.

“But in the end, he was just a knight.”

Sillion, a rising family, and Mifaro, an old and wealthy one, soon brushed off the matter and restored their relations, treating the loss of a single knight as insignificant.

Even Catherine’s brother, who had expelled the knight, had long forgotten the trivial incident.

For the next heir of Sillion, it had been an easily forgettable matter, but for the knight, it meant being abandoned by the family he had once sworn allegiance to, forcing him to find a new home.

“…Damn this class system.”

Catherine’s eyes burned with a sharp intensity.

Having lived her entire life in modern South Korea, where equality was at least a recognized principle, she found her current reality utterly infuriating.

Unlike that knight, she wouldn’t be cast aside with just a puff of her brother’s breath.

No matter how neglected she was, she was still the legitimate daughter of Sillion, carrying its direct bloodline.

And yet, she wasn’t satisfied.

“The problem with villainesses…”

Would it have been better if this story had the hashtag ‘#RegretfulFamily’?

By the middle of the novel, the trash members of the Sillion family would all shed tears of remorse, desperately searching for the daughter and sister they had discarded—a cliché she had seen too many times.

“But Julia is the protagonist of this story.”

Even if such a tag existed, it wouldn’t have mattered to a villainess like Catherine.

As a reader, she eagerly anticipated Julia’s moment of triumph, and she was excited to see her crush, Catherine.

But now that she was Catherine, every day felt like a thousand years of suffering.

If she had to enter a novel, why couldn’t she have been the heroine, Julia?

This wasn’t even a grimdark tragedy in which the protagonist suffered endlessly—it was a straightforward romance in which the naive, bright heroine walked a flowery path.

So why was she the villainess, left to struggle alone?

From the moment she woke up to when she fell asleep, her insides burned with frustration. She lost count of how many times a day she wanted to tear this wretched world apart.

Even now.

As a direct descendant of the Sillion family, her room was absurdly empty, and though she had requested a meal over two hours ago, not a single servant had appeared.

That this was not an unusual occurrence was obvious just by looking at her emaciated wrist, the bones nearly protruding.

“That girl better hurry back.”

Rubbing her empty stomach, she waited for the maid she had disciplined after her possession, who now followed her orders like a loyal servant.

She idly flipped through the short letter from the knight, then tossed it aside and slumped onto the sofa.

“The annulment papers are late.”

She had explicitly told them to write her name on the documents, not her family’s. He would have done so without hesitation given what she knew of the male lead. But since they had yet to reach her, they hadn’t even drafted the annulment papers yet.

Thinking of Theron, she scowled before shaking her head.

Why should she care about someone else’s man?

The annulment was inevitable anyway.

Negotiations between families were matters for those acknowledged as actual household members.

Besides, she was under quasi-house arrest and ordered to stay put in her room. Even if the annulment papers arrived, she couldn’t run to the temple immediately.

“What the hell have you been doing?!”

It was an order from her ill-tempered brother, his face flushed red with rage.

He resembled her just enough to advertise their shared bloodline, but his eyes were even filthier than hers. Just picturing him soured her mood.

“That bastard. If only he were incompetent, too.”

‘If the one who shares my blood had been incompetent with nothing but a foul temper, I might have stepped forward to claim the position of family head myself.’

But character and ability do not always go hand in hand.

“Hahahaha! I trusted you! To have closed the deal under such favorable conditions—I look forward to meeting him at the next banquet!”

Even just recalling the booming laughter and praise of the head of the Sillion family, which had echoed through the mansion just three days ago, was enough to grasp the capabilities of that narrow-minded and ill-tempered man.

“I don’t need this family anyway.”

Catherine scoffed as she recalled the memories she had inherited upon possessing this body.

If Raylin could have seen her emotions and heard her monologue, she would have laughed at her.

She was exactly like the fox that, upon seeing unreachable grapes, convinced itself they were sour.

And she would have pitied the real Catherine, who had lost her body to such a psychopath.

After all, humans find it difficult to assess themselves objectively.

Though Catherine overflowed with greed and harbored lingering attachments, she never thought she couldn’t take over the family and mock them with a victorious smirk simply because she lacked the ability.

She merely convinced herself that discarding this garbage was the best option, denying her desires.

Grinding her teeth in frustration, she resented her father and brother, lamenting her miserable situation.

“Haa, does the phrase ‘equality before the law’ not exist in this world? I just want to completely ruin them through the law, maybe on child abuse charges or something.”

Of course, she said that, but she did not intend to dismantle the aristocracy.

If she had the power to split the sky and shake the earth, she might have considered it…

No, if she had such power, she could have stood above everyone, rendering the class system meaningless.

Ultimately, unless she had possessed a commoner or a slave, overturning the social hierarchy for the sake of mere humans was unthinkable.

As wretched as her current circumstances were, Catherine was still an aristocrat and a ruling-class member.

As long as she escaped this wretched household, her noble status would become a weapon and a shield.

“Tsk. I don’t like this.”

Even as she logically organized her thoughts, Catherine clicked her tongue in dissatisfaction with her current state.

Annoyed, she ran her fingers through her smooth, voluminous hair, then frowned.

Her meticulously maintained hair and nails only irritated her, contrasting sharply with her excessively thin body.

“What do they think Catherine is?”