I know exactly how this ends.
The sword enters my chest from behind — swift, practiced, almost gentle. Like he has done it before. Like he will do it again.
I don't scream.
I stopped screaming in my fourth life.
The cold stone floor of the palace corridor rushes up to meet me, and as my cheek presses against it, I stare at the flickering torchlight and think: this is the ninth time. The ninth time I have died in this world. The ninth time I have opened my eyes in a life that isn't mine and loved a man who doesn't remember me.
The ninth time I have failed.
The blood pools slowly beneath me, warm against the freezing stone, and I feel it — that familiar pull. The unraveling. The world going soft at its edges, going quiet.
He is standing over me. I know without looking.
"Forgive me," he says.
He always says that. Every single time.
I want to tell him: you won't remember saying it. You never do.
But my lips won't move anymore. My lungs have forgotten their purpose.
And for a moment — just a moment — I let myself feel it. Nine lifetimes of loving him. Nine lifetimes of believing, each time, that this one would be different. That I would be enough. That he would choose me over whatever darkness they had built inside him.
Nine times. And I was wrong every single time.
The grief is old and familiar and immense, and I let it move through me like a tide. Then I let it go.
No more forgiveness.
No more waiting.
No more dying quietly so he can live.
In the next life — if there is a next life — I will be the one who chooses.
The darkness takes me.
I wake up gasping.
The first thing I notice is the ceiling — low wooden beams, draped with dried herbs that smell of lavender and something sharper, medicinal. Morning light cuts through a narrow window to my left, pale gold and young, the kind of light that means it's barely past dawn.
The second thing I notice is that I am not dead.
The third thing I notice is that I am ten years old.
I sit up slowly, my small hands gripping sheets that are too coarse, too rough — peasant linen, not palace silk. My heart is hammering. My mind is already moving, sorting through the flood of memories that come with every new life: who I am here, what year it is, what disaster is already creeping toward us on silent feet.
Seo Areum.
Merchant's daughter. Mother dead, father grieving and drinking too much. An older brother, Sohan, who works at the capital docks and sends money home every third month without fail. A life small and simple and far, far from any prince.
Good.
I press my small hands together and breathe.
Nine lifetimes. Seven different starting points — noble lady, palace handmaiden, war general's daughter, foreign princess, commoner. Different entrances, different paths, always the same destination: standing beside Prince Kaien, loving him, and then dying for it.
Not this time.
This time I am ten years old and I have seventeen years before the Great Collapse — the catastrophic war that reshapes this kingdom, the war that no one in this timeline can see coming. Seventeen years before the world burns.
Seventeen years to prepare.
Seventeen years before I meet him again.
I swing my small legs over the edge of the bed, bare feet hitting the cold earthen floor, and stand up straight in a body that barely reaches the windowsill.
Fine.
I've worked with worse.
By the time the sun has fully risen, I have made a list.
Not on paper — paper is expensive, and my father, good man that he is, does not earn enough to waste it on his strange, too-serious daughter who woke up this morning with the eyes of someone much older.
The list is in my head. It has always lived there.
Things I know:
One. The Great Collapse begins in seventeen years, triggered by a famine in the eastern provinces that the crown ignores until it becomes a revolution.
Two. The revolution is funded in secret by the merchant guilds in the capital — the same guilds my father does business with.
Three. Prince Kaien will be twenty-eight years old when it begins. He will be standing in the throne room when the first arrows fly through the palace windows. He will survive. Barely.
Four. Someone in his inner circle is a traitor. I have suspected this since my sixth life. I have never been able to prove it. I have never been alive long enough.
Five. In every life where I died, it was always the same wound. The same angle. A blade between the left shoulder and spine, precise as surgery.
Someone has been following me across lifetimes.
And they know exactly where my heart is.
I press my lips together, staring out the small window at the village square below — a handful of merchants setting up their stalls, children chasing a dog through the mud, ordinary life moving at its ordinary pace — and feel something settle cold and clear in my chest.
Not grief. Not fear.
Purpose.
"Areum."
My father appears in the doorway, a bowl of cold rice in his hands and dark circles carved beneath his eyes. He looks at me the way he has looked at me every morning of my remembered childhood — with love, and confusion, and a faint worry he can't quite name.
"You're up early."
"I couldn't sleep," I say.
My voice is a child's voice. Small. High. It will take some getting used to.
He crosses the room and hands me the rice. I take it carefully in both hands, the way I learned in my second life — that receiving things properly was a small form of respect that cost nothing and meant everything.
He notices. He always notices the things I do that don't quite fit.
"Strange dream?" he asks.
I look up at him — this father, this life's father, kind and tired and loving me more than he knows how to say. Somewhere across the capital, Sohan is probably loading cargo at the docks right now, already working before most of the city has opened its eyes. In nine lifetimes I have had nine different families. These two I intend to keep.
"Something like that," I tell him.
I eat my rice.
And I begin.