The smell hit her first.
Not the antiseptic hospital smell she expected after a truck accident, but lavender and something sweeter, like honey mixed with vanilla. Rachel's head throbbed as she cracked her eyes open to find herself staring at an ornate ceiling painted with cherubs and roses. Gold leaf traced elaborate patterns across white plaster.
This was definitely not Mount Sinai Hospital.
She sat up too fast and immediately regretted it. The room spun, then resolved into the kind of bedroom you'd see in a period drama. Four-poster bed with silk curtains. A vanity covered in crystal bottles. Furniture that probably cost more than her law degree.
Her hands flew to her face, then her body. Everything felt wrong. Smaller. Softer. Her fingers were delicate and unmarred by the paper cuts that came with processing mountains of legal documents.
A mirror hung across from the bed, and the woman staring back at her was not Rachel Kim, thirty-four-year-old divorce attorney with premature gray hairs and permanent eye bags.
She was maybe twenty-five, with the kind of ethereal beauty that made you think of words like "luminous" and "delicate." Pale skin, enormous violet eyes, and silver-blonde hair that cascaded down her back in waves. She looked like she'd never worked a day in her life, never stayed up until three AM reviewing custody agreements, never stress-ate cold pizza while crying over another client who couldn't afford to leave.
"No," Rachel whispered. "No, no, no."
The face in the mirror mouthed the words with her.
This couldn't be happening. This was shock. Brain damage. A coma dream. She'd read about this happening to people after accidents. Vivid hallucinations. The brain's last desperate attempt to make sense of dying.
Except she knew this face.
She'd seen it exactly once, in a novel she'd hate-read during a particularly soul-crushing case two years ago. Her client had been a woman named Jennifer whose husband had cleaned out their accounts and left her with three kids and no job experience. While waiting for the bastard's lawyer to show up to mediation, Rachel had downloaded some free romance novel to distract herself from the rage.
The Duke's Eternal Obsession had been trash. The worst kind of trash. The kind where the male lead's possessive behavior was treated as romantic, where the heroine's lack of backbone was framed as feminine grace, where every problematic dynamic was justified by "fate" and "destiny."
She'd finished it out of spite, getting angrier with each chapter.
And this face belonged to Seraphina Ashworth. The heroine's best friend. The one who appeared in exactly three scenes to be vapid and giggly, then got written out of the story when she made the unforgivable mistake of suggesting that maybe the Duke's habit of locking the heroine in his mansion was concerning.
The door burst open without warning.
A maid rushed in, all fluttering hands and anxious energy. "Lady Seraphina! Thank the gods you're awake. We were so worried when you fainted at the garden party."
Rachel's mind stumbled over the name even as her mouth formed words in a voice that wasn't hers—breathy and light, nothing like her own sharp tone. "What happened?"
"You took one look at Lady Celestia and the Duke together and simply collapsed! The physician said it was the heat, but between you and me..." The maid leaned in conspiratorially. "I think it was heartbreak. Everyone knows you've harbored feelings for His Grace since you were children."
Oh, perfect. Not only was she trapped in a trash novel, she was trapped in a body with an unrequited crush on the problematic male lead.
Rachel took a breath and tried to think like a lawyer. First, gather information. Second, assess the situation. Third, identify your objectives.
"What day is it?"
The maid blinked. "Monday, my lady. The fifteenth of Rosemoon."
Rosemoon. Right. This world had stupid fantasy calendar names. Rachel searched through the memories surfacing in her mind—Seraphina's memories, she supposed, though they felt distant and hazy like dreams half-forgotten. They were incomplete, but enough to piece together a timeline.
If this was the fifteenth, then the garden party she'd supposedly fainted at was the one where the Duke and Celestia had their first public appearance as an engaged couple. Which meant she was at the very beginning of the novel, right when everything started going downhill.
In the original story, Seraphina faded into the background after this. She was mentioned once more at the wedding, smiling bravely through her heartbreak, and then never appeared again.
The Duke proceeded to spend three hundred pages being controlling and possessive while the narrative insisted this was peak romance. Celestia's personality dissolved into "whatever the Duke wants." There was a kidnapping arc that was really just an excuse for forced proximity. A dramatic reconciliation after he locked her in a tower "for her own safety." An epilogue where they had six children and she never expressed a single independent thought.
Rachel had thrown her phone across the room when she finished it.
"My lady?" The maid looked concerned. "Should I fetch the physician again?"
"No." Rachel swung her legs out of bed, testing them. They held. "I'm fine. Actually, I need you to bring me something."
"Of course! Anything."
"Paper, pen, and every legal document in this household. Marriage contracts, property deeds, anything with terms and signatures."
The maid's face went blank with confusion. "Legal documents, my lady?"
"Yes. You know, contracts. Agreements. Binding arrangements." Rachel could see she was losing her. "The papers that say who owns what and who's married to whom."
"I... suppose I could ask the steward?"
"Do that. Also, I need to know if there are any courts in the capital. Places where disputes are settled."
"The Royal Judiciary handles criminal matters, and the Temple of Divine Order handles marriage blessings, but..." The maid trailed off, clearly wondering if her mistress had hit her head harder than the physician thought.
Of course. This was a world where marriages were "blessed by fate" and noble unions were considered sacred and eternal. The idea of dissolving one probably seemed as absurd as suggesting the sky wasn't blue.
Rachel smiled, and it felt sharp. Predatory.
Because she'd spent twelve years of her life learning exactly how to dissolve the supposedly indissoluble. How to find loopholes in ironclad prenups. How to protect clients from contracts designed to trap them. How to argue against the idea that any commitment, no matter how toxic, was worth preserving.
If she was stuck in this world, she wasn't going to fade into the background like Seraphina was supposed to.
She was going to burn the whole narrative down.
"Actually," Rachel said, "scratch that. Just bring me everything you can find about marriage law in the Celestian Empire. And a very strong cup of coffee."
"We don't have coffee, my lady. Would tea suffice?"
Rachel sighed. "Tea is fine."
As the maid scurried off, Rachel walked to the window and looked out over manicured gardens and a city sprawling in the distance. Somewhere out there, Celestia was probably sighing dreamily over her new fiancé, thinking she'd found her happy ending.
She had no idea what was coming.
In about three months, according to the novel's timeline, the Duke's true nature would start showing. The possessiveness would escalate. The control would tighten. And Celestia, swept up in "destiny" and "fate," would convince herself that this was what love looked like.
Not on Rachel's watch.
She might be trapped in a romance novel, but she was still a divorce attorney at heart. And she'd never met a bad marriage she couldn't find an exit clause for.
Even if she had to write the law herself.