The Editor Dies First

The last thing I did as Hana Seo was leave a comment in the margin of chapter forty.

"Seraphine's execution is too clean," I typed at 3 a.m., the office dark except for my monitor. "No reader will buy it. Give the villainess one good reason to live."

Then my chest folded in on itself like wet paper, and the cursor blinked, and the world went out.

When it came back, I was wearing a corset.

I knew the corset. I had edited the paragraph that described it. "A bodice of Valois crimson, boned so tightly the duchess seemed to breathe out of spite." I had cut the word spite and the author had put it back. We'd fought about that word for an hour.

Now I was wearing it, and I understood the fight from the inside. You really did breathe out of spite.

"Your Grace." A maid hovered at the edge of the mirror, hands twisting in her apron. "The Grand Duke's carriage has been sighted on the north road. He'll arrive before the bells."

The Grand Duke. Kael Ardentis. Male lead. The man who, in roughly thirty-nine chapters, would stand in a snowed-over courtyard and read aloud the list of my crimes while a crowd I had taxed into hatred screamed for my head.

I knew his crimes too, the ones the narrative forgave him for because he was beautiful and sad. I had a whole document of notes about how the author let him off easy.

"Your Grace, you've gone pale. Shall I call the physician?"

"No," I said, and my voice came out as Seraphine's. Low, cut-glass, built for ordering people whipped. I hated it. I was going to need it. "Bring me every book in the east library that no one has touched in a year. And tea. The strong kind. The kind that's rude."

The maid fled.

I sat down (carefully, because the corset had opinions) and reached for the one thing that had crossed over with me. It had been on my desk: the manuscript, four hundred pages, bound in a black clip. It was here now, tucked into the duchess's escritoire as if it had always belonged, its title stamped in the author's awful font: The Saint and the Snow.

I opened to chapter one. There I was, described from the outside. Seraphine Valois was the kind of beautiful that made servants apologize for existing. I winced. I'd flagged that line as melodramatic. The author had ignored me. The author would never know they'd won.

I flipped forward. Chapter forty was still there. The execution was still clean. My margin comment was still there too, in my own handwriting, which should have been impossible. "Give the villainess one good reason to live."

So I gave her one. I picked up the duchess's pen, found the blank space under the comment, and wrote: She doesn't die. She's going to fix this.

The ink sank into the page. Then, very softly, like frost spreading across a window, the words on chapter forty began to move.

I watched the execution rewrite itself in real time. The clean beheading smeared, dissolved, reformed. New sentences crawled into place. I read them with my heart climbing my throat.

In the new draft, Seraphine Valois did not die in chapter forty.

She died in chapter twelve.

And it was so much worse.

The bells began to ring. The Grand Duke was at the gate. I closed the manuscript with a hand that did not shake, because I would not give Seraphine's body the satisfaction.

"Okay," I said to the empty room, to the author who couldn't hear me, to the story that had just shown its teeth. "Okay. You want a reason. I'll be the reason."

I had eleven chapters. I had read the book. And for the first time, the book was reading me back.