She rewrote her own death. She thought that made her the only author in the building.
She was wrong.
June has spent four months out-writing the trashy romance novel she died into — clawing back a life that was never written for her, one stubborn warm sentence at a time, and falling for a cold duke the story keeps trying to turn back into its villain. It is a fragile, ridiculous, hard-won peace.
Then a stranger leaves a note in the margin of a notebook that has never left her hands.
You write him warm every morning. Does it get easier, or only faster?
There is another reader on the shelf. Another woman who woke inside a book and learned to hold a pen — but where June protects, this one spends. Where June saves the small, the doomed, and the disposable, the Marshal burns them for fuel, and she has come to teach June the one lesson June has refused to learn: that mercy, inside a cruel story, is only a slower way to lose.
To survive, June will have to face a darker mirror of herself, a marriage the book won't stop rewriting, and the patient hand above the page that owns far more than one little story. And she will have to answer the question the other reader puts to her — the one with teeth in it:
Is her mercy a principle, or only love?
A metafictional villainess romance with the soul of a screwball comedy. Book three of the Second Life series.
For readers of villainess isekai, bookish metafiction in the vein of The Eyre Affair*, and rom-com fantasy like* Assistant to the Villain*.*
