You open your eyes again. The first breath you take tastes of roses and candle wax. Above you, the ceiling gleams with golden trim, the same intricate vines carved into the beams. The bed is soft, suffocatingly so, with sheets that smell of lavender.

You don’t even flinch anymore.

This is the fifteenth time. Maybe the sixteenth—you’ve stopped counting.

Each life ended differently. Poisoned wine at a banquet. A carriage wheel snapping on a mountain road. A knife in the dark, a fall down the marble stairs, a fever that ate you alive. No matter what you chose, no matter how carefully you tried to follow the “routes,” the result was always the same: death.

At first, you fought it. After all, you knew this world. You’d read the romance novel that built these walls and shaped these characters. You knew the fates of the heroine, the rivals, the male lead. You thought that knowledge gave you a chance.

You were wrong.

Now, when the maid greets you with her timid curtsy, you only wave her away. When the banquet invitation arrives, you burn it to ash without a second thought. When suitors smile, you don’t even bother to pretend.

You’re tired. Tired of clawing toward endings that were never yours, tired of living inside a story that refuses to release you.

So you stop caring.

And that is when he notices.

The crown prince—the male lead—was once the axis of this world. He was the reason you tried so hard. His love routes were the only paths toward survival, the only chances you had to cling to life. You once bent yourself into shapes the novel demanded, smiling when you wanted to scream, bowing when you wanted to fight. All to earn his gaze.

But now you don’t look at him at all.

At first, it seems to puzzle him. The way your eyes glaze over when he speaks. The way you excuse yourself from gatherings, slipping away like a ghost. The way you stand at the balcony rail just a little too long, staring down with a calm, detached smile.

The first time you try, his hand finds yours. You hadn’t even heard him approach. His grip is iron around your wrist, pulling you back from the railing.

“Why?” he demands, breathless, his usual composure cracking.

You meet his eyes and say the only truth left in you. “Because I’m tired.”

Something shifts in his gaze. It’s not pity. Not even anger. It’s hunger—a desperate, shaking need.

From that day on, he does not leave you alone.

Every sharp object vanishes from your reach. Doors that once opened freely are locked tight. Guards shadow your every step, though he calls them “escorts.” And when you try again—because of course you do, what else is left?—his arms are there, catching, clutching, refusing.

“You think you can leave me?” he whispers against your hair, trembling as though he’s the one in danger of shattering. “Die again, and I’ll follow. I’ll tear this world apart to drag you back.”

It’s madness. You should be afraid. Perhaps, somewhere deep down, you are. But for the first time in countless lives, someone refuses to let you slip through their fingers.

The novel you once read never mentioned this version of him. This obsession that grows sharper every time you turn away. The way he studies you as if memorizing every breath, terrified it might be your last.

You don’t know if it’s love, or desperation, or simply the cruelty of fate binding you tighter than before. All you know is that in this fifteenth—or sixteenth—life, you are no longer allowed to choose your own ending.

And when his lips press against your temple, harsh and trembling, he whispers a promise you cannot escape:

“If death wants you, it will have to take me first.”