The rain was not letting up.
If anything it was getting worse.
Thessine stood outside her father's manor gates, soaking wet, hair plastered to her face, dress completely ruined.
A trunk sat beside her containing everything she owned.
Yep. That's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up here.
The answer is not a short one.
Three months ago she was He Shu.
Lawyer.
Productive member of society.
Dedicated owner of a very spoiled cat named Shushu who she sincerely hoped someone was feeding right now.
She had been reading a novel.
A webnovel actually — about a foolish noble girl named Thessine Margot Beaumont who spent every chapter embarrassing herself over a man who found her mildly irritating at best.
I remember falling asleep halfway through chapter twelve thinking — poor girl.
Then I woke up as the poor girl
No warning.
No explanation.
No mysterious voice welcoming her to another world.
No truck kun! At least.
Just He Shu closing her eyes in her apartment and opening them in a very unfamiliar bedroom.
My Shushu was gone. My apartment was gone. My entire carefully built life was gone.
In their place she had inherited Thessine's ruined reputation, Thessine's disaster of a life, and apparently Thessine's extraordinary talent for making everything worse.
Which brings us to today.
What did I do to get kicked out, you ask? I would rather not say.
...Fine.
The original Thessine in her infinite wisdom had apparently shown up to a public dinner hosted by the most influential nobles in the kingdom and caused a scene so catastrophically embarrassing that even the servants couldn't look her in the eye afterward.
Something involving a very loud declaration, a knocked over table, and the Duchess of somewhere very important.
I wasn't even there when it happened. That was before I arrived in this body. But I inherited every single consequence in full.
Her Father had given her three days after that incident.
I genuinely thought I was managing well enough.
Apparently not.
Just thinking about it made something cringe violently in my stomach.
She stood outside the gates now, rain hammering down without mercy, and considered her options.
Thessine didn't have friends.
Not real ones.
The girls who used to hover around her had vanished the moment the Beaumont name started carrying shame instead of status.
They would open their doors just to laugh in my face.
There was only one person she could think of.
Rynael would be annoyed.
That was a certainty. But he wouldn't turn me away. We had known each other too long for that, unfortunately for him.
She turned back to the gates and found the guard very pointedly pretending not to see her.
"I'm leaving my trunk here." she said flatly. "Make sure no one touches it or I'm having your head."
He blinked.
She didn't wait for a response.
The walk to the Montserrat estate was not short. The wind did its absolute best to send her sideways and by the time the gates came into view she looked less like a noble and more like something the storm had personally victimized.
She knocked, her teeth chattering so bad she thought they were going to fall off.
The gate opened almost immediately.
Oh.
She stared at the guard for a moment.
He hasn't banned me yet. Surprising.
Given everything that had happened Rynael had every reason to have her name struck from the visitor list. The fact that he hadn't was either an oversight or a sign that somewhere beneath all that cold indifference he still considered them something.
Don't read too much into it, He Shu. He probably just forgot.
She stepped inside.
A servant spotted her the moment she crossed into the main courtyard. The poor boy looked genuinely alarmed, eyes darting between her soaking figure and the door behind him like he was calculating whether he could pretend he hadn't seen her.
He could not.
"Is the Duke in?" she asked.
"Y-yes my lady but—"
"Good."
She walked past him.
The inside of the Montserrat manor was exactly as she remembered. Grand, immaculately kept, and completely unwelcoming.
Everything about it screamed that the man who lived here did not particularly enjoy visitors.
She had always found that funny considering how often the original Thessine had shown up uninvited.
A different servant intercepted her at the drawing room entrance, this one older and significantly better at hiding his alarm.
"My lady Beaumont. The Duke is not expecting company this evening."
"I know." She looked down at herself — dripping water onto the expensive floors, dress beyond saving, hair a complete disaster. "Tell him Thessine is here. He'll want to know."
The servant hesitated.
"Tell him." she said simply.
He did as he was told.
She stood in the corridor and waited, leaving a small puddle where she stood and feeling absolutely no guilt about it.
This was Rynael's fault for not having better weather on his side of the city.
The servant returned faster than expected.
"The Duke will see you."
Surprising.
She followed him through the corridor and stopped at the study doors.
They opened from the inside.
Rynael stood by the window, hands clasped behind his back, not looking at her.
The firelight caught the sharp lines of his face. He looked exactly like what he was — a man who had not been having a pleasant evening and was now having a significantly less pleasant one.
He turned.
His eyes swept over her once.
The dripping hair.
The ruined dress.
The trunk that was notably absent.
"You look terrible," he said.
"Thank you." she replied. "I need somewhere to stay for a few days."
Silence.
Rynael looked at her for a long moment. The kind of look that could strip paint off walls.
She looked back at him.
She was too wet and too tired to be intimidated.
"A few days," he repeated.
"A few days." she confirmed.
He turned back to the window.
She could see the tension in his shoulders, the slight tightening of his jaw. He was annoyed. That was expected. What was not expected was that he hadn't immediately pointed at the door.
"Your father kicked you out?"