Death came suddenly for Amera.
One instant she was on the crosswalk, phone in hand, and the next—screeching tires, blinding lights, the crack of impact. Her body went numb, her thoughts scattering like glass shards.
She thought that was it. The end.
But when she opened her eyes again, she wasn't lying on cold pavement. Instead, she was staring up at a ceiling painted with gold and ivory swirls, a chandelier dripping with crystals glittering overhead. The sheets beneath her were silk, the air filled with the faint burn of cigar smoke and roses.
"Huh?"
Her voice.
It was deeper. Lower. Smooth.
Her eyes widened, and she clutched at her throat. Her hands—larger than before, with longer fingers—trembled. Panic rose in her chest as she scrambled upright and stumbled toward the mirror across the room.
What she saw made her world spin.
The reflection wasn't her.
A boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen, stared back at her. His hair was pale blonde, slightly tousled as if he'd just woken. His skin was porcelain pale, his frame lean but strong, clothed in a silk nightshirt far too expensive for anything Amera had ever worn.
But it was the eyes that made her knees weaken—wine-red, sharp, glinting with a cruel sort of beauty.
"This… isn't me." Her voice cracked. "This—this is impossible."
Memories not her own surged like a flood. A name. A legacy. A family steeped in shadows and gunpowder.
Rosario Bleubellé De Lobélia.
Heir to one of the five most feared mafia organizations in the world.
Amera's stomach twisted. She knew this. She knew this world.
The novel. The BL tragedy she had been reading before her accident. Blood, betrayal, and two star-crossed leads fighting to survive in a pit of violence. And scattered through their journey—side characters with grim fates, enemies torn apart in crossfire, heirs and heiresses sacrificed to the family's name.
And now she was one of them.
"No, no, no," she muttered, gripping the edge of the mirror. "Of all places to reincarnate—why this cursed story?! And why as a guy?!"
A knock thundered at the door.
"Young Master Rosario," a butler's cold voice announced. "Your father awaits you in the east parlor."
Amera's—no, Rosario's—pulse raced. The father. The infamous mafia patriarch. A man the book had described as merciless, his smile sharper than knives.
She pressed a hand over her racing heart, forcing a shaky laugh.
"Great. Just perfect. My second life starts in the middle of a death trap… and I'm the son of the devil himself."