Chapter 1: Welcome To My Wedding Night
Deep red velvet drapes covered the walls from ceiling to floor, while hundreds of candles filled the luxurious chamber with warm golden light.
The bed behind her was enormous, carved from dark wood and draped in white silk sheets. The wooden furniture looked expensive enough to feed an entire village for months. Everything in the chamber screamed of wealth, power, and belonged to a man who could afford anything except mercy.
She stood near the foot of the bed in her expensive wedding dress. She was trembling so badly that the gold bangles on her wrists clinked non stop.
Across the room, a man stood by the window. Duke Eveyr Aldric did not look like a monster, even though he was one. Instead, he looked like some painting in a museum until you looked into his eyes. His eyes were empty with nothing inside them.
"Esme...." Her name left his lips like a death sentence.
She flinched instinctively. Slowly, he turned from the window and looked straight into her eyes.
"Why did you agree to this marriage?" he asked, his voice suddenly softened, making it worse than his shouting.
"I... I..."
Her throat had gone dry. The words were there but they refused to come out.
Eveyr watched her quiet struggle with her words but didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look angry, frustrated, or disappointed. He just observed her.
Seconds passed.
11...12....13...
"Pathetic," he said, annoyed.
Then he moved. One moment he was standing by the window. The next he was right in front of her. She hadn’t even seen him take a step. She gasped and stumbled backward. Adding to her misery, her heel caught on the edge of the rug and she fell hard onto the marble floor.
She looked up and found him staring down at her. Her eyes moved to his hand as he drew a silver knife from inside his sleeve. Her heart stopped.
"Wait..."
He didn’t and drew a single, horizontal line across her throat as if he were signing a document. She touched her neck with her shaking fingers, staining them with blood. Then she collapsed near his boots.
Desperately, she looked at him, searching for even a hint of regret in his eyes. But he had already stepped back and was looking at the blood on his shoe with annoyance.
Then her vision darkened.
Esme slammed the book shut.
"No way!" she yelled, staring at the book in disbelief.
"Chapter ONE?? SERIOUSLY?? She didn’t even make the wedding night!"
She tossed the book onto the cushion beside her and rubbed her eyes. Her head was throbbing from reading too long in bad lighting, and her back ached from hunching over, but she didn’t care about it.
Right now, her whole attention was on "The Duke’s Shadow", a historical fantasy novel she had picked up on a whim last night because the cover looked interesting and the reviews had mentioned a sweeping romance.
But nobody in the reviews had thought to mention that the very first Chapter opened with a bride being murdered by her husband.
What annoyed her even more was the bride’s name—Esme.
She glanced at the book and picked it up again.
Esme had never been the type of person to leave a story unfinished once she had started it. She flipped past the murder scene and continued.
Soon she realized that Duke Eveyr Aldric wasn’t the main character. He was barely even a side character. The real story was about a young and poor woman named Cressida who caught the attention of the crown prince.
Eveyr Aldric only appeared in the extra scenes.
"Huh," Esme murmured, turning another page. "So he is just there to be creepy in the background. Good riddance."
By Chapter fifty, she had completely forgotten about the duke and his dead bride. Hours passed by but she didn’t notice. She kept reading.
Ding
Her phone buzzed but she ignored it.
Ding
Ding
Ding
"What the fuck!!!!" she groaned in annoyance as she put the book on the bed and grabbed her phone.
The first text was from an unknown number:
Esme, please. Can we just talk?
The second message was from a different unknown number:
I know you’re reading this. I just want to explain.
The third was from yet another number:
It wasn’t what it looked like. She means nothing to me.
She gripped the phone so tightly that a little more pressure would have broken it.
It had been a week since she had seen her boyfriend of two years on the bed with another woman. And he still thought he could justify it.
She had already blocked his five numbers but he was shameless. He wouldn’t stop. Esme had no time and energy to waste on him. She blocked all three new numbers again and was about to switch off her phone when another text notification came.
[Design Team]
She didn’t want to open it but she did.
Sarah: CONGRATULATIONS JESSICA!! 🎉🎉 So proud of you for landing the Veren Corp account! You worked so hard for this and you absolutely deserve it!!
Mark: Wow! This is huge!! Drinks on Jessica this Friday?? 😂
Daniel: Really impressed with the research you did.
Research.
Esme smiled bitterly. She had spent a whole month on the Veren Corp pitch. She was the one who had done all the research, prepared presentation slides, and written every report. Feeling satisfied with the final result, she had sent the complete project to her team lead.
But the next morning, the project had been reassigned to Jessica who had contributed absolutely nothing in the project. And now everyone was busy congratulating Jessica, pretending they didn’t know who actually did the work.
Anger simmered inside her. She wanted to type something that would make every single person in the chat embarrassed. But what was the point? They’d just call her dramatic and unprofessional.
So she just muted the group chat and turned off her phone. The moment she tossed it aside, her stomach growled.
"When did I last eat?" she asked herself.
She couldn’t remember. She looked around and spotted an opened pack of riceballs on the table. She had bought it along with the book and had completely forgotten about it.
She picked one up and turned it over in her hands. The rice had become slightly hard.
"Still edible," she muttered, and ate it.
After finishing, she wiped her hands on her shirt, and picked up the novel again. She was reading the consummation scene between the prince and the heroine feeling all giddy when suddenly a grain of rice stuck in her throat.
Her windpipe shut down and her lungs locked. She tried to inhale but couldn’t. The novel slipped down from her hands. She grabbed her throat to let the grain pass but nothing happened.
She tried to stand, but her legs had gone weak. Her vision blurred as she fell down on the bed.
This is it! Looks like...I’m finally dying.
Oddly enough, instead of screaming and panicking, she kind of felt relieved.
Wow!! What a pathetic ending to a pathetic life!
She had spent her entire life being the person who could be left behind, and now she was dying exactly that way.
If there’s a next life...I want to be someone who matters to someone... want to know what it feels like to be loved....to be loved like no one has ever loved anybody else.
Then her eyes drifted shut and the darkness took her.
Esme expected hell. Instead, when she opened her eyes she gasped loudly. Her chest was too tight. She put her hand on her chest and looked at it, she was wearing a corset.
It was so tight she could barely breathe. The white fabric around her body was heavy, full of jewels. She tried to focus and realized she was kneeling on a cold marble floor.
Confused, she glanced around and found herself inside a cathedral. Then a glowing screen suddenly appeared in front of her.
[WELCOME TO THE HUSBAND REDEMPTION PROGRAM!]
Target: Duke Eveyr Aldric
Threat Level: CATASTROPHIC
Current Role: Duchess Esme Aldric
Objective: Survive the wedding night
Time Remaining: 02:59:59
The timer began the countdown immediately.
02:59:58.
02:59:57.
02:59:56.
