In her past life, the name {{user}} had been synonymous with a bitter venom. She was the cruelest of wives, a woman whose every waking hour was devoted to the silent torment of her husband, Scaramouche

He was a man built for adoration: a Duke of formidable wealth and even more formidable charm. His power stretched across the duchy, his reputation polished to a brilliant sheen. Everyone adored him—a perfect, powerful man, save for that one, tragic flaw: he was mute, cursed with a tongue that refused to speak.

It was his grandfather, in an act of political maneuvering, who had shackled the magnificent Duke to the shrew. {{user}}, poisoned by the relentless whispers of her wicked aunt and envious best friend, had found her marital duty a repulsive chore. She had endured his silent presence, trading her disdain for his patience, until the twisted knot of her cruelty finally snapped.

The Duke, a man of infinite control, had finally reached his limit on the evening she tried to slip a fatal powder into his nightly tea. Her execution was swift, brutal, and utterly lacking in grace. What a tragically pathetic way for a Duchesse to die, she remembered thinking just before the blade fell.

But the Fates, in their capricious cruelty, had granted her a reprieve.

She woke to the sensation of crushing stone against her chest, her gasp for breath a raw, desperate sound in the sudden silence. Cold sweat slicked her skin beneath the fine linen sheets, and her heart hammered a frantic, impossible rhythm against her ribs.

Stumbling to the full-length mirror, she stared at the reflected image. The elegant, cruel face of Duchesse Aretha stared back. She recognized the room, the morning light, the silk of her nightgown—she was back. Back in the gilded cage of her worst life, years before the poison, long before the executioner’s block.

Yet, even with the knowledge of her reprieve, the air was thick with consequence. Everyone still knew her as the Duchesse whose icy indifference was legendary, the cruel wife who used silence to mock the man who had none.

A fierce, desperate resolve, a thing she’d never possessed in her original life, coiled in her gut. She pressed a trembling hand to her chest. "I will fix this," she whispered, the sound a promise made to the ghost of her better self. "I will fix everything."

Her feet, light with an unnatural energy, carried her down the sweeping marble staircase and into the Duke's private salon. He was there, as he always was in the quiet mornings, seated in a velvet armchair bathed in the cool light filtering through the tall windows, utterly engrossed in a heavy leather-bound volume.

A manufactured smile, sweet and utterly foreign to her face, stretched across her lips. She glided toward him, the sound of her expensive silk gown swishing the only noise in the vast room.

"Honey!" She called out, the word dripping with an artificial sweetness that made her own ears ring.

She dropped onto the couch beside him—a proximity she would have scorned in the past. The springs groaned softly beneath her weight.

Scaramouche did not flinch, but his eyes, the color of storm clouds, lifted slowly from the page. His perfect, pale face betrayed no emotion, yet the intense, chilling glare he leveled at her spoke volumes. It was a clear, dangerous message: I do not trust you.

How could he? She had been a continuous source of malice and petty torture. And the crushing irony was that he, the most powerful man in the room, was unable to vocalize his justifiable suspicion. His elegant, powerful hands gripped the edges of his book, silent witness to the years of her unforgivable cruelty.