Read Chapter 1: A Most Unpleasant Awakening

The first thing Eleanor registered was the smell. Lavender, something sharp beneath it—rosemary, maybe—and the unmistakable must of old fabric. Not the antiseptic tang of her apartment's cleaning spray, not the faint exhaust note of Manhattan traffic drifting through double-paned glass. This was wrong. All of it was wrong, starting with the canopy of heavy green velvet swaying gently above her face.

She sat up too fast. The world tilted, and a cascade of dark hair—hair that was far too long, far too thick, far too *not her pixie cut*—spilled over her shoulders and across the high neck of a linen shift that felt like sandpaper against her skin.

"What the hell," she whispered. Her voice came out wrong too. Higher. Softer. A voice that had never argued a motion in front of a judge, that had never raised itself over a conference table full of hostile opposing counsel.

The bedchamber swam into focus. A massive four-poster bed draped in heavy damask. A vanity cluttered with silver brushes and glass bottles. A fireplace, cold and dark, with a portrait above it of a man in a powdered wig staring down his nose at her. The wallpaper was a pattern of climbing roses so insistent it almost moved. Everything was too much—too ornate, too gold-trimmed, too *old*.

This wasn't her bedroom. This wasn't her apartment. This wasn't even her century.

A memory surfaced, sharp as a paper cut: the firm's holiday party, the rented ballroom with its gaudy chandeliers, and then—what? She'd had a drink. One drink, maybe two. She'd been arguing with Marcus about the Langford merger, about his willingness to bury the due diligence report that would have exposed the fraud. She'd told him exactly what she thought of his ethics, his haircut, and his likelihood of surviving the SEC's investigation. And then...

Nothing. A blank.

"Her" hands—slimmer, paler, with longer fingers than she remembered—gripped the coverlet. She held them up. No. No calluses from the gym. No faint scar on her right thumb from that knife accident in law school. And the nails, perfectly shaped pink ovals, looked like they'd never typed a single email.

Her heart started to pound in a way that had nothing to do with a hangover.

The door opened without a knock. A young woman in a plain gray dress and white cap bustled in carrying a tray, her face pinched with worry. "Oh, my lady, you're awake. Thank heavens. Cook said the draught would see you through the night, but I told her you were in a terrible state—"

"Who are you?" Eleanor's voice came out sharper than she meant, and the maid flinched, nearly sloshing tea from a delicate porcelain cup.

"I—I'm Mary, my lady. Your lady's maid. Please, you mustn't upset yourself. The doctor said—"

"Doctor." Eleanor latched onto the word. "Good. I need a doctor. I think I'm having a stroke. Or a psychotic break. Or—" She swung her legs over the side of the bed and immediately regretted it as the floor rushed up to meet her, cold and hard through the thin soles of what appeared to be silk slippers.

Mary rushed forward, steadying her with both hands. "My lady, please! You took a dreadful fever. The physician bled you twice, and the apothecary said—"

"I'm going to need you to stop talking about bloodletting." Eleanor pressed her fingers to her temples, trying to think through the pounding in her skull. It couldn't be a stroke. Strokes didn't do this. Psychosis didn't do this, not with this kind of coherence. She felt present. She felt *real*. And yet—

"Let me see a mirror."

"My lady—"

"Now."

Mary's lips pressed into a thin line, but she scurried to the vanity and returned with a small hand mirror framed in ornately carved silver. Eleanor snatched it, lifted it to her face, and felt her stomach drop through the floor.

The woman staring back at her was not Ava Chen. This was a face she'd never seen before—young, perhaps twenty, with porcelain skin and wide, dark-lashed eyes the color of sherry. A delicate nose. A mouth that looked like it had never smiled with genuine amusement. And hair, that ridiculous cascade of near-black waves, tumbling over shoulders that were far too thin, collarbones far too sharp.

"Oh, no," she said. "No, no, no."

"My lady?"

Eleanor—Ava, *whoever she was*—let the mirror fall onto the bedspread. This wasn't happening. This was a dream, a fever delusion, some kind of elaborate—

"The date," she said, trying to keep her voice level. "What's the date?"

Mary's brow creased. "The fourteenth of April, my lady. 1816."

1816. She'd been born in 1994. She'd been practicing law in 2025. The math didn't work. It didn't work at all. Eleanor closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the room was still there. The rose wallpaper. The disapproving portrait. The maid with her worried, candlelit face.

"1816," she repeated. "In England?"

"Where else would we be, my lady?" Mary's confusion was deepening into concern. "Are you certain you ought not to rest? The physician said the fever might have—"

"Taken my wits?" Eleanor laughed, a short, hollow sound that didn't belong in this mouth. "Yes, I suspect it might have."

She forced herself to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Panic wasn't going to help. Neither was denial. She was a lawyer. She assessed situations. She made arguments. She found the fastest path through a broken system.

"All right," she said, more calmly than she felt. "Mary. Tell me who I am."

Mary blinked. "You're Lady Eleanor Ashworth, my lady. Of Ashworth Hall."

"Ashworth." The name sparked something—not a memory, but an instinct. A warning. "And my family?"

"Your uncle, Lord Ashworth, is your guardian." Mary's voice dropped, as if she might be overheard by the portraits. "Since your parents passed in the carriage accident three years past. You've been in his care ever since."

Guardian. Uncle. That was how it usually worked, wasn't it? In every historical romance Ava had ever skimmed while waiting for hearings, the orphaned heiress always had a guardian, and the guardian always had plans. Eleanor felt a knot of cold certainty settle in her stomach.

"And what exactly does my uncle plan for me?"

The door behind Mary opened before the maid could answer. A man stood in the threshold—tall, broad through the shoulders, with a face that might have been handsome before disapproval settled into it permanently. His waistcoat was a deep burgundy, his cravat crisp, his graying hair styled precisely. He looked like a man who had never once been told no.

"The plan, my dear niece, is that you recover quickly enough to meet your betrothed."

Eleanor met his gaze. Something in her—Ava's litigator's instinct—recognized the calculation behind his eyes. The way he assessed her like a balance sheet.

"Betrothed." She rolled the word around in her mouth. "I don't recall agreeing to any betrothal."

"You've had a fever, Eleanor." Lord Ashworth stepped into the room, his presence seeming to dim the candlelight. "You agreed to it readily enough before your collapse. Viscount Vane is an excellent match. The contract was signed a fortnight ago."

Contract. The word snapped her attention back to him like a rubber band. "I signed a contract?"

"Your guardian signed," he corrected mildly. "You are not yet of age, my dear. You have no legal standing."

Legal standing. He was talking about her legal standing as if she were a piece of property, and the absurdity of it almost made her laugh. She'd spent years arguing about contracts, about consent, about the rights of parties to determine their own obligations. And here she was, in 1816, where a woman's signature meant nothing and her guardian's meant everything.

"I see," she said slowly. "And this Viscount Vane is...?"

"A man of considerable fortune and impeccable lineage." Lord Ashworth's tone brooked no argument. "You will wed him on the first of June, and you will do so with a grateful heart. Your parents left you nothing but debts, Eleanor. It is only through my benevolence—and Vane's—that you have any future at all."

Nothing but debts. Benevolence. Future. Eleanor's mind was already racing, cataloging each word, each inflection, each piece of leverage she might find. She was a lawyer. She could work with a bad contract. She'd spent her career working with bad contracts, finding the loopholes, the ambiguities, the quiet clauses that could blow the whole thing open.

But first, she needed more information.

"You've said my parents left debts," she said carefully. "What of my dowry? The Ashworth estate? My mother's holdings?"

Lord Ashworth's eyes narrowed, just a fraction. "Your mother's holdings were entailed to the male line. Your father's debts consumed the rest. There is nothing, Eleanor. Nothing but Vane's goodwill."

He was lying. She could feel it in the way his weight shifted, in the way his gaze skittered away from hers. He was lying, and if she was going to survive this—*this*—she needed to find out what he was hiding.

"Very well," she said, and let her shoulders slump, let her voice go soft and girlish. "You're right, Uncle. I've been unwell. I don't remember the discussions, but I trust you made the best arrangement."

Lord Ashworth's expression relaxed into something approaching satisfaction. "There you are. Mary, see that she dresses and takes some broth. We'll discuss the wedding preparations once you're presentable."

He left without another word, the door closing behind him with a final click. Mary lingered, wringing her hands.

"My lady, you don't seem quite yourself—"

"I'm not," Eleanor said, and then forced a smile into this unfamiliar face. "But I'm feeling better already. Tell me, Mary—this Viscount Vane. What have you heard about him?"

Mary's cheeks flushed. She glanced toward the door, then leaned in conspiratorially. "They say he's cold, my lady. Cruel, even. His first wife—" She stopped, biting her lip.

"His first wife?"

"Died under mysterious circumstances, my lady. The gossips in the kitchen say she fell from a window, but no one believes it was an accident."

A shiver ran down Eleanor's spine, settling into her bones. She had been planning to fight this marriage with logic, with law, with the sharp edge of her tongue. But now she understood the stakes were higher than she'd imagined. This wasn't just a bad arrangement with a difficult man. This was a possibly fatal one.

She needed a plan. She needed allies. She needed to understand the rules of this world so completely that she could bend them to her will.

And she needed to find out what her uncle was hiding.

She stood, steadying herself on the bedpost, and faced the mirror again. The stranger's face stared back at her—young, beautiful, and utterly trapped.

"All right," she told her reflection. "Let's see what we're working with."