#01

A month after Peter vanished without a word, Shiloh finally found him standing outside his own house.

“Break off the engagement.”

“……”

The blue eyes of the rain-soaked woman trembled faintly.

“I can’t marry a poor woman. I don’t want to get tangled up in all that mess with your family.”

“But……”

BOOM.

Lightning split the dark blue sky like a crack through glass.

“You know, Peter…… without you, I……”

Her knees dropped into the muddy, sodden ground.

“I’m sorry, Shiloh. The more you do this, the more it puts me off.”

Peter held out a black umbrella to the dazed Shiloh. It was a shabby thing, oiled paper stretched over bare wood.

“Stop wasting your time. Take this and go home.”

THUD.

Click.

“……”

She stood motionless before the closed door, then pressed her hand over her own trembling lips and turned away. The worn umbrella he had given her, his one and only offering, lay face-down in the mud.

Peter was the son of a ruined viscountal family and despised his circumstances with everything he had. With nothing to rely on but a passably handsome face, he wanted a woman who could be of use to his name. Enough to throw away three years with Shiloh in a single moment.

‘I’m always on your side.’

The memory of those sweet lies clawed painfully through her chest.

While Shiloh choked down her sobs in the rain, another woman sat on Peter’s bed. She had the same blonde hair and blue eyes as Shiloh, but her expression was brighter, more open, and her hair gleamed with a healthy shine.

“Done?”

“Yeah. Settled it cleanly.”

“Good.”

The woman wound both arms around his neck and smiled wide.

“We can hold our heads up now. Both of us.”

Her lips, curved in a coy smile, drew close until they almost touched his.

Peter stared at her mouth with hungry eyes and whispered low.

“Your lips are the best thing in the world.”

He swallowed her half-parted lips roughly. His hot tongue coiled around hers and sucked greedily. The woman, Rowella, tipped her chin back, and her lips, jaw, and collarbone grew slick with his saliva. Clothes dropped one by one onto the bedroom carpet. The two of them, stripped bare and ravenous for each other, tangled together on the bed.

Peter gazed at her heaving chest with a hazy, covetous look, then grabbed it roughly. He tilted his head and circled her n*pple with the tip of his tongue before taking her flushed br*ast fully into his mouth and sucking hard.

Rowella moaned and gasped. He didn’t stop, dragging his mouth downward, lavishing devoted attention on every inch of her body all the way down past her navel.

Peter buried his face between Rowella’s spread thighs. Every time he moved, her knees jerked and twitched. She writhed and cried out while beads of thick sweat dripped from his hair.

“Put it in. Now.”

Startled by her demand, Peter lifted his head and pressed his c*ck, rigid and straining, against her inner thighs.

His whole body shuddered as he forced himself inside her, the heat of him almost unbearable.

Once Peter began to move, Rowella gazed down at him through half-lidded eyes and exhaled in ragged bursts.

“Hngh.”

The pace quickened, the wet slap of skin against skin filling the room in a lewd rhythm. The old bed creaked under the weight of their hot, damp desire while thunder and lightning crashed beyond the window. The sounds the two of them made bled through the noise of the rain.

*

Shiloh was the only daughter of a baronial family, barely half a year away from graduating from the Magic Academy. Then one day, her birth father, Baron Hamford, lured people into investing in a fraudulent venture, then abandoned his wife and daughter and disappeared.

The shock worsened her mother’s illness. Peter, who had sworn his love, turned his back on her. Before long, rumors reached her that Peter was seeing Rowella. Rowella was Shiloh’s closest friend and the daughter of a wealthy comital family.

Shiloh, once a top student at the Magic Academy, gave up her studies when her family fell into ruin. To care for her ailing mother, she entered the underworld, scraping by on the dark side of the city, using black magic to fulfill the shadowy requests of clients.

Then she sold an “illegal substance” to a client of unknown identity and was condemned as a traitor who had tried to assassinate the emperor. She was executed.

Rowella, meanwhile, the woman who had stolen her friend’s man, one day fell into yet another love with the emperor and became a cherished wife and empress. (The End)

“Wow…… that ending is brutal.”

Sojin finished reading the adult novel ‘The Perfect Woman’ all the way to its conclusion and hurled her phone onto the bed in irritation.

Four years she had been working as a bakery baker, building experience toward opening her own place. Right now she was seriously considering quitting because her boss refused to pay overtime. The man was insufferable, selling bread that was going stale to customers while bragging about the luxury car he had just bought.

“Ugh. What is this.”

She had picked up the novel to escape her headaches for a while, and now she felt worse. It had pulled her in completely because it felt so much like her own life, and she had raced all the way to the ending. She regretted every page.

Five years ago, Sojin had dated a man from her own company, and he had jumped from her to a colleague she was close to. She never told anyone what had really happened and left the company as if she were running away. The shock and the wound ran deep, and she had wanted to scream at both of them, but she couldn’t bear the thought of being pitied behind her back by other colleagues.

Done with men, she threw herself into baking as a new hobby and ended up earning a certification. She was working toward the dream of one day owning a wildly successful bakery, but the road was long.

「Author, shouldn’t a commercial novel have something called ‘poetic justice’? I put up with the cliff ending, but who even likes this kind of suffocating frustration?」

That day, uncharacteristically, Sojin fired off a string of angry comments and fell asleep with a stiff expression on her face.

The next morning she woke up not in her studio apartment but to the sound of a foghorn disrupting her sleep, seated in a creaking wooden chair inside a timber-framed house.

BWAAAAH.

“Shiloh, my darling…… could you bring me the painkillers on the shelf?”

A pale woman lying in bed reached weakly toward her.

Shiloh flinched and stood up from the chair, instinctively stepping backward.

‘Shiloh?’

In a daze, she brought the painkillers and a glass of water from the shelf to the middle-aged woman and helped her drink, then wandered through the unfamiliar house in a stupor, taking in every corner.

On the desk in the study she found an envelope stuffed with debt collection notices and picked it up. The name on the front read ‘Sir Hamford.’

She let out a hollow breath and only then caught sight of herself in the mirror on the right wall. A young girl with disheveled blonde hair falling to her chest stared back at her with wide, round eyes.

‘What is this?!’

Her mouth fell open.

It took her less than half a day to realize she had transmigrated into Shiloh, the very character from the novel she had such a complicated relationship with.

Was it punishment for getting too absorbed in a story? Had the author, furious over her angry comment, cursed her?

She opened the old window and let the salt-tinged sea breeze hit her face, squeezing her eyes shut against the bleakness of her situation. She tried to dismiss it as a dream she couldn’t afford to take seriously, but the foghorn sounded at the same time every day without fail, and eventually she had no choice but to accept the truth.

SHHHHHH.

Heavy rain poured for several days. She couldn’t leave the house. The food had run out, and she had to tend to the bedridden patient upstairs, Shiloh’s mother, while enduring her own hunger.

This was the point in the story just after Shiloh’s broken engagement with Peter, when she and her mother were left alone together.

She searched desperately for a way back and grew more exhausted with each passing day, until at some point she found herself praying for the pale, ailing woman beside her to live.

When the rain finally stopped and the household belongings were auctioned off, she used the proceeds to have a proper meal for the first time in what felt like ages and sat down to think clearly.

First, she needed to find somewhere to move. Her father had absconded after the investment fraud, the house had been forcibly auctioned, and she had received notice to vacate as quickly as possible. The one small mercy was that once the house was sold, there were no further debts to manage.