The courtyard before the Royal Palace was teeming with gilded carriages and thoroughbred horses. The air was saturated with the scent of Parisian perfumes and social hypocrisy. When the Everberg family carriage arrived, a sudden silence fell over the crowd.
Lilian stepped down. She wasn't wearing black this time. She had chosen a bolder color, more bloody. A dress of crimson velvet, the color of wine and blood, with a design that accentuated her curves in a manner both elegant and scandalous. The diamond necklace adorning her neck was a gift that had arrived that morning from an "anonymous" sender, but everyone knew who sent it; in its center sat a red ruby the size of a wolf's eye.
Her father and brothers walked behind her as if walking in their own funeral procession. Their faces were pale, their eyes vacant, their pride shattered beneath the feet of their daughter who walked with terrifying confidence.
At the gate of the Grand Hall, the Royal Chamberlain struck the floor with his staff to announce their arrival.
"Duke Leonard de Everberg... and his family."
They entered, and all eyes turned toward Lilian. Whispers began to rise like the buzzing of hornets.
"Did you hear?" "They say she lost her mind." "Look at the Duke's face; he looks like he swallowed hot coals."
In the center of the hall, Crown Prince Eric stood surrounded by his entourage of sycophants, laughing loudly and artificially. When he saw Lilian, his laughter vanished. He strode toward her, his eyes gleaming with a mix of disdain and curiosity.
"Lilian!" he called out loudly, intending to embarrass her. "What a surprise. I heard funny rumors today. They say you accepted an offer from the Duke of the North? Are you trying to provoke my jealousy to this extent? You poor thing... have you run out of tricks to the point of threatening to marry a barbarian?"
The entourage around him laughed, but their laughter was tense.
Lilian stood before him and did not bow. She looked into the blue eyes that the old Lilian had always adored, and saw nothing but emptiness and arrogance.
"Your Highness..." she began calmly. "It seems your information, as usual, is superficial. I am not trying to provoke your jealousy. Jealousy is an emotion that requires the existence of love, and I... quite honestly... no longer see anything in you worth loving."
A collective gasp echoed through the hall. Eric's face turned red with anger: "How dare you... I am the Crown Prince! And you are just..."
"Just what?" Lilian interrupted him sharply. "Just a Duke's daughter? No, Your Highness. Correct your information."
At that moment, the main doors of the hall opened again, but this time they were thrown open violently.
A draft of cold air entered, making the candles flicker. Absolute silence prevailed.
Alistair Cloud entered.
He wore a military uniform entirely of black, embroidered with silver threads, and on his shoulders rested a cloak of black wolf fur. He looked massive, terrifying, like a piece of the night that had stormed a daytime party. His gray eyes swept the hall in a single glance that made men lower their heads and women shiver with a mix of attraction and terror.
Alistair walked with steady steps, the sound of his military boots echoing clearly, heading straight for the circle where Lilian and Eric stood. He didn't look at the Prince, nor at Duke Leonard, nor at anyone else. His eyes were fixed only on Lilian.
He reached her and stood beside her, so close that his broad shoulder touched hers.
With a clear, shocking gesture of possession, he reached out, wrapped his strong arm around her waist, and pulled her against his solid body in front of everyone.
"Is this child bothering you, my love?" Alistair asked in a deep, calm voice that was clearly audible in the deadly silence.
"Child?!" Eric shouted. "I am the Crown Prince of this Kingdom! How dare you, Alistair!"
Alistair turned slowly toward Eric, looking at him as one looks at an annoying fly.
"Crown Prince..." he said with veiled mockery. "Watch your words. You are speaking to my fiancée. From this moment on, any word directed at her, I consider directed at me. And you know... I do not respond with words."
Alistair placed his other hand on Lilian's chin and tilted her face up to him, ignoring the stunned Prince and the silent audience.
"You look breathtaking in red," he whispered to her, his eyes gleaming with the memory of their night. "The color of blood suits you... and the color of passion."
Then, before the eyes of the Royal Court, before her shattered father and angry brother, and before the humiliated Crown Prince, Alistair leaned down and kissed her.
It wasn't a shy kiss on the hand. It was a kiss on the lips. A deep, brazen, possessive kiss. A kiss that announced to the whole world that this woman no longer belonged to herself, nor to her family, but had become the private property of the Duke of the North.
When he pulled away, Lilian was panting slightly, her cheeks flushed. He whispered to her in a voice only she could hear:
"The contract is sealed before witnesses. Now... there is no way back. Welcome to my hell, my wife."
Lilian looked at her father and saw tears sliding silently down his wrinkled cheeks. She looked at Eric, who was trembling with humiliation. Then she looked at the man standing beside her, the iceberg to whom she had tied her fate.
She smiled, and her smile resembled the blade of a knife: "The way back was closed from the beginning, Alistair. Let us see which of us burns in the other's hell first."
The party ended, and the crowds began to disperse, but Lilian did not leave the hall immediately. She turned her head slightly back to take one last look at her family, who looked as if their souls had been ripped from them in that moment.
She saw her father, the Iron Duke, standing still as a rock eroded by weathering, his eyes fixed on her with a look of brokenness she had never known in him, his hands hanging limp at his sides, as if he had lost the ability even to wave goodbye.
She saw Cayden, the brother who had always called her a disgrace, standing frozen, his red eyes staring at her in silent shock, as if he were watching her funeral procession, not her wedding.
And she saw Cillian standing pale as a corpse, staring into the void she had left behind, his eyes reflecting a frightening emptiness, as if his mastermind brain had stopped working entirely.
In that moment, a wave of dizziness swept over Lilian, and a stark contradiction stormed her mind.
"This makes no sense..." she whispered to herself internally, while Alistair's hand guided her toward the exit.
She remembered the details of the original novel with painful clarity. In that ending, Lilian did not die on the guillotine. She had been so terrified of the idea of having her neck severed before the cheers of the rabble that she had begged the original heroine—the only girl whose heart took pity on her—to bring her a fast-acting poison.
Lilian had died in her cold cell, alone, having swallowed the poison by her own hand to escape the shame.
And in those final days, her father and brothers had stood silent. They hadn't visited her cell, hadn't objected to the sentence, and hadn't tried to save her. They had left her to face her fate and swallow her poison in absolute silence, as if they had disowned her completely.
"Why now?" she asked herself, confusion squeezing her heart. "Why do they look so shattered just because of my marriage? In the novel, they let me die by poison without batting an eyelid... so why do I see now in my father's eyes the look of a man saying goodbye to his most precious possession? And why do my brothers look like they've lost their reason for living?"
Did her incarnation into Lilian's body change their feelings so quickly? Or was the original novel hiding another face of the truth? Was their silence in the novel cruelty... or a helplessness the author never mentioned?
She found no answer. The picture seemed blurred and incomprehensible. But Alistair's strong grip on her waist pulled her from the vortex of her thoughts to return her to her new reality.
She boarded the carriage, leaving behind a family that appeared dead while still alive, and a puzzle that would not be solved until later, when she would discover that this family had never hated her, and that this incarnation was not a passing coincidence, but a delicate thread woven by someone with tears and blood.
But Lilian, in that moment, did not understand at all.