“Orphan that you are. You should know your place. You dared to marry my son, and now you covet the position of my daughter-in-law? That is not a position someone like you can ever hold! I despised you from the very first day I laid eyes on you!”

“A penniless beggar with nothing to your name!”

“You deserve to die!”

“You at least got to live in a fine house, thanks to us. Be grateful. Where else would someone like you ever get to live like this?”

Each voice drove itself sharply into my ears. They poured vicious hatred at me, treating me like someone who had committed some grave sin.

“If I could go back to that time, I would never marry you. Our marriage was a nightmare. Evian.”

At those words, all the strength drained from my hands. All I had done was live as the daughter-in-law of a marquis’s household.

I had quietly shut myself inside the house, just as my mother-in-law wanted. I had done everything my sisters-in-law demanded of me, living like their slave. And what I got in return was ab*se, and my husband’s betrayal.

“Why……”

I had only wanted to be happy.

But happiness had never been given to me from the start.

My husband, who had declared his love for me, who had said marriage was the only way for us to be together, who had even fabricated a social standing for me just so we could wed, turned me into a criminal.

The moment the noble council branded my face with the mark of a criminal, they seized me as I tried to let go of everything and leave the marquis’s household, and forced poison into my mouth.

“Cough.”

Red blood surged out from my body as it crumpled to the floor. No matter how hard I tried to resist, the sensation of my insides dissolving made my mind go blank.

Without thinking, I clutched my stomach.

“My baby……”

I had to protect the child inside me.

But even knowing that a child of the marquis’s bloodline, a child who carried their very own blood, had taken root in my womb, they still kicked me. Without a shred of guilt, their kicks landed with brutal force, like they were striking a ball.

“Please, stop. There is a child… there is a child inside me…!”

Even if my insides dissolved completely, I wanted the child to survive. I did not want to leave this baby with such a wrongful death before it had even been born.

But my desperate plea never reached them.

“You filthy woman, no one even knows where you came from!”

“The child, at least… please, at least spare the child…!”

“And who do you think that child belongs to?”

“It is Dertosse’s… child, so why! Why won’t you believe me!”

I screamed it out, but my words only stoked their fury further. Heavy, thudding blows landed again and again, and with them came pain beyond anything I could bear.

“Ah… ah…!”

It hurts. It hurts so much I could die.

Agony crashed over me, enough to make me wish for a quick death. As I lay collapsed on my side, tears streamed endlessly down my face.

“Stop… why are you all… why are you doing this to me….”

“Die. Die already!”

Why do you hate me that much?

What did I do that was so wrong?

“Look at her, drooling and spitting up blood. Disgusting. You’re dying in filth, right to the very end.”

My mother-in-law stared down at me, her face twisted with cruelty.

“Why… it is all… over… why… I was going to leave this place… why. We were already done with each other… why are you trying to kill me….”

“And what if you walked out of here and spread ‘false rumors’ about our family?”

“What…?”

“Knowing your vulgar nature, how could I ever trust you to just walk away? You were planning to come back later with that child, weren’t you? Dragging along some brat fathered by who knows what man.”

Tears poured down my face at the absurd accusation.

Through it all, the man who had once been my husband held the woman he had been seeing close in his arms and kept saying things no different from what the others were saying. He told her not to look at such a sight, called it the end of a wicked woman.

The woman nestled in his arms, delicate and fragile like a small bird, looked down at me with a faint smirk. Seeing the contempt in her eyes, my world shattered once more.

“False rumors… my child….”

I could feel my breath catching, stuttering. My lungs, wrung out to their limit, screamed as they failed to draw in air.

“Yes, false rumors. You are so cunning, there is no telling what you might do.”

Tears of blood ran down my cheeks, wrung out by a grief too deep for words.

What had I done so wrong? No matter how hard I thought about it, I could not understand. What was my mistake? Had I truly done something terrible enough to deserve this much hatred.

“Oh my. She is crying.”

“How unpleasant, watching her cry.”

Without even a trace of sympathy for someone dying before them, they still cut into me with their mockery.

“Hurry up and die.”

“Once she is dead, throw her in the pigpen. Fitting end for someone like her.”

I will never forgive you.

Even in death, I will kill you.

“I may… die here… but I will have my revenge… on all of you… I swear it.”

“Go ahead and try. I am curious how you plan to take revenge from beyond the grave.”

Their snickering laughter drifted into my ears. My vision grew darker and darker. The unbearable pain reached its peak, then slowly began to fade.

‘I… cannot die like this.’

If I die, they get exactly what they want.

I cannot let that happen. That, at least… but my life ended there all the same.

Infinite darkness swallowed me whole.

“It is all over now.”

“Mother. Instead of a strange woman like that, I will do well by you.”

“Yes. My new daughter. What a lovely girl you are.”

They say the ears are the last to close when a person dies, and sure enough, their voices reached me until the very end. The voice of the woman who had stood beside Dertosse with that bright, angelic smile.

It made me even angrier, but my body kept sinking helplessly into the floor.

This cannot be. Dying like this is too cruel. It was already absurd enough to have died once before and woken up inside a novel, but to die a meaningless death like this. In the novel, Evian and Dertosse had clearly lived happily together for a long time, yet instead of living happily, I had been killed.

Every word he had spoken about protecting me had been a lie.

He had never once protected me. Instead, he only relayed my pleas to him, my desperate appeals for him to take my side against his unhinged mother and sisters. And after that, life in his household only grew more unbearable.

The injustice of it all made me feel like blood would burst from a body that no longer even existed. But my mind faded further and further, and in the end, my memories went dark.

‘I am sorry, my baby.’

I wanted you, at least, to grow up happy, to grow up truly loved.

When I found out I was carrying a child, I wanted even more to earn the favor of his mother, of my husband. Even if they despised me, I believed that once the child was born, they would at least love the child.

But to them, both the child and I were nothing but obstacles.

The only true family I had found in this place had to meet death alongside me, never once touched by the light.

* * *

“My lady. Young mistress. You must wake up.”

At the vivid voice reaching my ears, my mind returned. I opened my eyes in a hazy world that felt like waking from a long dream, and what greeted me was a room bathed in warm sunlight.

“The preparations must have worn you out.”

The moment I opened my eyes, I met the gaze of someone smiling brightly at me. She was a woman who felt somehow familiar, though I could not quite place her. Memories of someone smiling at me were rare things… who was she? Was I having an unusually pleasant dream?

But the stifling feel of the heavy garments wrapped around my entire body told me this was no dream.

“……Where is this?”

“You are in the middle of wedding preparations.”

“What…?”

I turned my head and looked at the mirror that surrounded the space where I sat. Beyond it, I saw myself in a pure white dress. It was unmistakably me. Evian. Or more precisely, the unfortunate woman named Evian, whose body I had taken over.

I had just died a moment ago.

I had been killed by my in-laws, and yet I woke up to find myself at a wedding?

“This makes no sense.”

But the maid tilted her head, looking even more puzzled by my reaction.

“Pardon? When you say it makes no sense… are my hands perhaps making you uncomfortable?”

At my sharp tone, the maid fumbled, and I finally recognized her belatedly.

“Karla.”

My life had been so relentlessly harsh, so empty of good memories, that I had even forgotten the one maid who had ever treated me with kindness.

Karla. She had become a maid in the marquis’s household to support her younger sibling. She was warm, and truly a good woman.

Not knowing that her feelings would lead to her own ruin, she had taken my side. Not long after the wedding, when the household turned against me, she had tried to protect me, and in the end she was the one cast out in my place.

“You are finally calling me by my name?”

Watching Karla smile, her freckled cheeks lifting with the expression, something heavy settled in my chest. Until the day she died for my sake, I had never once called her by her name.

“…I am sorry.”

“Sorry? A little nap is perfectly fine! You have had such a hard time since coming here.”

Instead of answering, I stared at her for a long moment through the mirror.

“Karla.”

“Yes!”

“It really is you, right? You are really Karla?”

“Of course it is me! It is really me!”

How strange. Could it be that I actually died at the hands of those wretched in-laws and came back to life? It made no sense, but without that impossible assumption, none of this could exist.

‘My throat still aches. I drank poison and… died. There is no way those feelings were fake.’

The pain that lingered throughout my body told me it had all been real, too vivid to dismiss as a dream. My stomach, where they had kicked me, still throbbed with a dull ache.

“Shall I continue with the preparations, then?”

“Y, yes….”

If she was here, if this really was Karla, then this place was….

Was this truly my wedding day?