The poison was in the wine.

It had come as an imperial gift, served in a gilded silver cup, its rim still beaded with the first cold of early winter. That bead of moisture should have been chill, but when Isabella reached for it, her fingertips met an unnatural warmth. Someone had warmed the cup before it was brought to her.

She remembered smiling then.

Imperial Marshal. Silver-Eagle Duchess. The greatest general of her age, the woman who had shattered the northern barbarian horde. And in the end, she had died with dignity: a warm chamber, a charcoal brazier, a cup of warmed poison, and a decree stamped with the Emperor's seal.

"Treason."

When the envoy read those two words aloud, her adjutant drew his sword, her guards went red-eyed, and every soul in the room waited for her to say the word — "Rebel."

She did not.

Because every last member of House Asgard was already kneeling on the execution ground outside the city walls, waiting for her.

She drained the cup. The poison hit her throat bitter, then burned — searing from her gullet down to her heart, as if she had swallowed a bar of red-hot iron. She fell to her knees, silver hair spilling loose, her sight dissolving into grey. The last thing she saw was the snow outside the window, and the rows of fresh blood on that snow — the blood of the Asgards, still warm.

Thirty years old. Too much merit for a subject to survive. Her entire family executed.

She had thought she would die hating. But what rose up instead was a regret so vast it threatened to tear her soul apart.

If she had known loyalty ended like this, she would never have been the blade that was used and then broken.

Isabella woke gasping.

She bolted upright, chest heaving, the phantom burn still scorching her throat. Cold sweat soaked her shift, clinging cold and slick to her skin. Her fingers clawed into the bedclothes until her knuckles turned white.

A dream.

No — a memory. Carved into her bones. The memory of the corpse she had once been.

She dragged in several slow breaths, forcing herself still, and only then did she truly open her eyes.

Morning light leaked through the gap in the brocade curtains and fell across a four-poster bed draped in gauze. The air smelled of sun-warmed linen, and beneath it, the faint sweetness of rose oil. The scent was so familiar it made her heart seize.

This was the Asgard ducal manor. This was her room.

Her room at fifteen.

Isabella went rigid. Slowly, she lowered her gaze to the hands resting on the bedclothes — slender fingers, soft palms, no calluses from a sword hilt, no old scars from the battlefield. A girl's hands.

She threw off the covers and crossed the cold floor on bare feet, steadying herself against the full-length mirror on the wall.

The face that stared back was painfully young. A tangled mane of silver-white hair, features not yet sharpened, the faint roundness of girlhood still on her cheeks. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the skin beneath bruised with sleeplessness, as if she had been crying for a long time. Fifteen.

She stared at the reflection. Then, after a long moment, she laughed — a soft sound, but threaded with a cold that did not belong on a young girl's face, a cold steeped in blood and snow.

She was back.

Truly back.

She had not died. No — she had died once, and returned to fifteen. Returned to a time when everything could still be undone.

But was it really in time?

The face in the mirror cooled. Isabella closed her eyes and forced down that final scorching ache from her past life. Then she began to search her memory, fast and furious — what had happened in the year she was fifteen?

She remembered.

This year, her father, Siegfried von Asgard, had been framed on a charge of "secret dealings with the North" and thrown into the imperial dungeon.

This year, House Asgard lost its head. The cadet branches stirred, retainers scattered, and the servants panicked.

And in her last life, she had done nothing but cry.

She remembered crying night after night until her eyes swelled like walnuts, powerless to change a single thing. It was her father's old comrades who had fought and schemed to keep him alive, though they could not save the family's military power. Later, to atone for her father and to survive, she had cut her hair short and walked into the army that devoured people.

This life, she would not cry.

At that moment, hurried, stumbling footsteps sounded outside the door, followed by a young maid's voice, lowered but trembling uncontrollably.

"My lady! My lady, are you awake? Something terrible — the steward — he —"

Isabella did not answer at once. Her eyes swept the room, past an ivory comb on the vanity, past the extinguished silver lamp at the bedside, and settled on a letter-opener lying at the corner of the table.

She crossed to it and slid the slender blade up her sleeve. The steel was cold against her wrist, and her racing heart slowly steadied.

"Come in," she said.

Her own voice startled her. It was too calm, too steady — far too steady for a fifteen-year-old girl who had just lost the pillar of her family.

The door opened. A round-faced maid stumbled in and dropped to her knees, tears streaking her face. "My lady, Steward Duroc — Duroc emptied the treasury in the night and fled with the account books! The second lady and the young lords of the cadet branch are in the front hall, shouting about dividing the house, saying the Duke will never come out this time—"

Isabella listened in silence, not interrupting.

In her last life, she had been woken just like this, by this very maid, Marta, in tears. She had panicked, clutching at Marta and demanding, "Will Father die? Will he really die?" And then her aunt and cousins had handled her like useless furniture.

This time, she did not panic.

She asked a single question — one she would never have thought to ask in her last life.

"Marta," she said, "how many days has my father been taken?"

Marta blinked, wiped her face, and counted on her fingers. "Th-three days, my lady, more or less. The men who came that night were the palace guards. They said they were acting on a star-decree — no, on orders from above — and took the Duke away for questioning..."

Three days.

Isabella's mind worked quickly. Three days — it matched her memory. Her father had been falsely accused of conspiring with the northern barbarians. The evidence was a forged letter hidden in a secret compartment of his study. That letter would be "conveniently discovered" in seven days, and it would become the iron proof that condemned him to death.

She still had time. But not much.

And the most urgent thing right now was not the letter, nor the cadet branch shouting about dividing the estate in the front hall.

It was surviving tonight.

She remembered it clearly: on the third night after her father's arrest, a squad of masked assassins would scale the manor walls. Their target was her. Because she was the firstborn daughter of House Asgard, the granddaughter of the late Emperor, and in the eyes of certain people, a root that had to be cut down completely.

In her last life, Steward Duroc had held the assassins off and smuggled her out through the secret passage. It had cost him half his life. But this life, Duroc had already fled with the treasury the night before.

The butterfly's wing had barely trembled, and already it had quietly changed the direction of the wind.

"Marta." Isabella's voice was even. "Go tell the people in the front hall that I will be there shortly. Then gather everyone still left in this house into the main hall. Every single one. Not one missing. And remember—"

She paused, holding the maid's eyes, and spoke each word like a blade being drawn.

"Tonight, this house will see death. Those who want to live will listen to me."

Marta was struck dumb by the sudden, knife-cold light in her mistress's eyes. She nodded frantically and scrambled out, nearly falling over herself.

Alone in the empty room, Isabella gripped the letter-opener in her sleeve.

The body was weak. She knew that. This fifteen-year-old frame ran out of breath after a few steps. It could not kill — it could barely even grip a knife. Thirty years of battlefield killing had left her nothing but the instincts etched into her very marrow.

But she had never survived on strength alone.

In her last life, she had gone to war at seventeen in her father's place, and she had survived on her wits, on tactics, on that cold clarity that squeezed every last drop of strength from a desperate situation.

This body was weak. But the assassins coming tonight were no barbarian cavalry.

She walked to the window and threw it open. The morning wind rushed in, tossing her silver hair.

In the distance, the capital's bells tolled low and slow — one peal, then another, startling the crows from their roosts across the city.

Isabella gazed toward the vast, mist-shrouded silhouette of the imperial palace, her eyes cold as a blade.

In her last life, she had drunk that poison on her knees.

This life, she would stand — and she would cut off, one by one, every hand that had ever offered her that cup.

And it would all begin with surviving tonight.

She let the wind die, and she drew the shutters closed, and for a long while she stood in the grey half-light of the room, breathing, thinking, letting the plan take shape behind her eyes.

The house was nearly empty now. Her father's soldiers were scattered or dead or too frightened to stand. The servants who remained were loyal only so long as they were fed and safe. The cadet branch would be back, she knew, with their lawyers and their claims and their slow, patient knives. And somewhere in the city, the High Pontiff's men were already counting the hours until dark.

She had nothing. No army. No allies who would move openly. No sword-arm strong enough to hold a blade against a trained killer.

And yet.

She crossed to the vanity and looked at the girl in the mirror — the girl who, in another life, had wept through this night and every night after, until the tears ran out and only the fear was left. That girl had believed the world would be kind if only she were good. That girl had died in a dungeon, alone, with nothing to her name but a borrowed name and a borrowed grief.

This girl would be different.

This girl had already been different, from the moment she opened her eyes and remembered the poison. She had seen the shape of the future, and she had seen the price of weakness, and she had made her choice before the first tear could fall.

She would not weep. She would not kneel. She would not wait for the assassins in the dark like a lamb for the knife.

She would make the dark her own.

The letter-opener was still in her sleeve, cold against her wrist. She turned it over in her fingers, feeling its weight, its edge, the small, familiar comfort of steel.

It was not a sword. It was not an army. But it was enough to begin with.

And tonight, when the killers came, she would show them that the daughter of Asgard did not die easily — not in this life, and not in any other.