Beatrice didn't open the book in the library.
Something stopped her — some instinct she couldn't fully explain, the same quiet internal voice that had been guiding her all day through a palace full of things she didn't yet understand. It told her that whatever was inside those pages was not meant to be read in a room where anyone could walk in, where a guard stood at the door and an empress had eyes everywhere.
She tucked the book carefully beneath the fold of her arm, hidden by the drape of her sleeve, and returned to her chair long enough to make the visit look unhurried and ordinary. She spent another twenty minutes at the reading table with Cartwright's Chronicle open in front of her, turning pages at a normal pace, reading none of it.
Then she thanked Hamish pleasantly, returned the Concordance to his desk, and walked back to her guest chamber with the plain brown book pressed against her ribs and her heart beating too fast for the pace of her steps.
The guard outside her door straightened as she approached.
"I'd like to rest now," she said. "Please ensure I'm not disturbed until the carriage is ready."
"Of course, Lady Laporte."
She closed the door behind her.
Turned the key in the lock.
And stood in the middle of the room for one long, steadying breath before she carried the book to the window seat, settled into it with her knees drawn up and her back against the wall, and opened the cover.
The first thing she noticed was the handwriting.
It was small and precise — careful letters formed with a particular kind of deliberate neatness, the handwriting of someone who had been well-taught and who wrote with intention rather than haste. The ink had faded to a warm brown with age, but the words were still entirely legible.
The second thing she noticed made her breath stop.
She knew the handwriting.
Not in the way you recognize a style or a period. Not the abstract recognition of a scholar identifying a historical hand.
She knew it the way you know your own face in a mirror.
Because it was hers.
The loops of the letters. The particular angle of the pen strokes. The way certain letters connected at the baseline — the small, specific habits of a hand that had been forming the same shapes since childhood.
It was her handwriting.
Three hundred years old.
Her handwriting.
Beatrice sat very still and stared at the page.
The pull beneath the floor had gone completely quiet — not absent, but hushed, as though whatever lay below was holding its breath.
Her hands were trembling. She noticed this distantly, the way you notice something happening to a body that feels temporarily separate from your mind. She pressed her palms flat against the open pages and breathed carefully, in through the nose and out through the mouth, until the trembling steadied enough that she could read.
She began at the beginning.
If you are reading this, then you have found your way back. I knew you would. I always knew — even at the end, even when everything was falling apart around us, I knew that something as stubborn as what exists between us would not simply stop because one life ended.
My name is Beatrice. I was born the third daughter of House Valen, a minor noble family of no particular consequence to anyone except ourselves. I was seventeen years old when I started working on the royal family as maid when I first met him. The thirteenth Prince of Deverux bloodline. Prince Lucian von Deverux. The Prince of Darkness.The man with the highest affinity for dark magic.
Beatrice sat back against the window wall and looked at the snow falling outside and let the words settle into her like stones dropping into still water, each one sending ripples outward that she couldn't stop and didn't try to.
My name is Beatrice.
So we shared the same name 'old' me.
She pressed her fingers to her mouth.
The trembling in her hands had not stopped. She didn't think it was going to stop for a while. She pressed them flat against the pages again and made herself breathe and made herself continue reading.
I was born with the special ability. To foresee future and I am writing this because in my vision, the history will be rewritten. What happened will be buried. The records will be altered. The name they curse in the streets today will simply disappear from tomorrow, replaced by silence, which is easier to control than anger.
And You — the one reading this — will have lived an entire life without knowing any of it. Without knowing him. Without knowing yourself. Without knowing why you wake up reaching for someone who isn't there.
So I am writing it down. All of it. Everything they will try to erase.
Starting from the beginning.
Beatrice turned the page.
I should explain what I mean when I say I was born with the ability to foresee the future. It sounds grander than it is. I did not see everything. I did not see clearly. My visions came in fragments — images, emotions, impressions — like trying to read a letter through frosted glass. I could make out shapes and the general meaning, but the fine details were always slightly beyond reach.
What I saw clearly enough, from a young age, was this:
I would love someone deeply.
It would cost me everything.
And it would not end with my death.
I first saw Prince Lucian von Devereux when I was seventeen years old, newly placed in the palace as a junior maid in the west wing household.
He was not what I expected.
I had heard the things they said about him, of course. Everyone had. The thirteenth prince. The dark one. Born with an affinity for dark magic so strong that the palace priests had debated, apparently, whether he should be permitted to live at all. I had heard the words they used — dangerous, cursed, unnatural. I had formed a picture in my mind of something monstrous.
He was twenty-three years old and he was sitting alone in the west courtyard in the rain.
Not brooding. Not performing darkness for an audience.
Just sitting. Getting completely, thoroughly soaked.
Staring at the ground with the expression of someone who has been told the same painful thing so many times that it has stopped hurting the way it used to and simply become the background noise of existence.
I should have kept walking. A junior maid had no business approaching any member of the imperial family, let alone that one.
I stopped.
"You're going to catch cold," I told him. Which was, I acknowledge, a ridiculous thing to say to a prince.
He looked up at me.
I had expected hostility. Dismissal. The sharp command to remove myself from his presence that any sensible member of the royal family would have issued to a maid who had just spoken to them without being addressed first.
He blinked.
And then, slowly, as though he wasn't entirely sure his face remembered how to do it — he almost smiled.
"I'm aware," he said.
"Then why are you still sitting in it?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"Because no one else is," he said at last. "It's quieter out here when it rains. People tend to go inside."
I understood that immediately. The desire for a space where no one was looking at you, measuring you, deciding what you were.
I sat down beside him in the rain.
He stared at me.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Sitting," I said.
"You'll catch cold."
"I'm aware."
Another silence. Then — quietly, barely audible beneath the sound of rain on stone — he laughed.
It was the smallest sound. Almost nothing.
But I felt it in my chest like a bell being struck.
And I knew, with the particular clarity that only my visions ever gave me, that I was in a great deal of trouble.
Beatrice stopped reading.
Her chest was aching.
Not with sadness exactly. It was more complicated than sadness — a layered, textured feeling that she didn't have a single word for, made up of recognition and grief and something that felt dangerously close to longing for a person she had never met and a life she couldn't remember living.
She knew that courtyard.
She had never been in it. She was almost certain she had never been in it, and yet — the image of it that had formed in her mind while reading was too specific, too detailed, to have come from imagination alone. The particular way the stone held water. The shape of the archways surrounding it. The sound of rain echoing off the walls.
She had sat in that courtyard.
Not in this life.
But she had sat there.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and breathed through her nose and gave herself exactly thirty seconds to feel the full weight of that before folding it away and reading on. There would be time for falling apart later. Right now she needed to understand.
Dark magic Lucian possessed is not evil in the way fire is not evil. Fire warms and fire destroys, and which one it does depends entirely on the circumstances surrounding it — on whether it has fuel and air and space, or whether it has been confined and starved and given nothing to do but burn inward.
Dark magic is the same.
It draws on shadow and absence — on the space between things, on silence, on what is hidden rather than what is shown. In a person who is stable and grounded and loved, it is extraordinary. Lucian could do things I had never seen and have never seen since — he could move through shadows the way a fish moves through water, he could see in complete darkness, he could feel the emotional state of anyone in a room the moment he entered it.
And the last one, I think, was both a gift and a curse.
He felt everything. Everything that everyone around him felt — their contempt, their fear, their carefully polished disgust — he absorbed all of it, all the time, with no ability to simply decide not to.
Imagine growing up like that.
But in the future— countless years after my death—the grief and loneliness will turn that power into something dangerous— something to be feared.