Chapter 3 Shadows in the Halls
Love had betrayed her once.
In this world, it would not have the chance to do so again.
Aria sat on the edge of her bed as the night breathed through the curtains. Her fingers traced the faint scars along her wrist, faint memories that didn’t belong to her, yet lived in her skin now. This body had loved. This body had trusted. And for that, it had been poisoned.
Not this time.
She had learned her lesson most cruelly: love was a dagger that always found its way to the heart of the one who believed in it.
She closed her eyes. No love. No trust. No weakness.
She would live, not for romance, not for forgiveness, but to win and to survive.
Because survival was its own kind of vengeance.
---
The first days after her awakening had been chaos in silence. She had studied the world she had fallen into the world she had once read about, and it is now frighteningly different.
The Draemyr Estate.
The Alpha’s house is very vast, ancient, and quietly rotting from the inside.
The book said the Alpha’s daughter had been pitied, loved, and mourned when she died of a mysterious illness that left her bedridden.
But now Aria knew the truth.
It wasn’t an illness.
It was clearly murder, stretched out drop by drop in her tea. And she's determined to find out who they are.
If this world wanted to follow the script she had read, it would have to fight her for it.
She spent her mornings pretending weakness and her nights awake, mapping every inch of her surroundings. And tonight, she had chosen the library as her battlefield. Knowledge would be her sword.
---
The halls of the Draemyr estate were quiet and made of stone. Torches hissed as if they too feared what the night carried. Flames pulled long, trembling tongues of light that danced across tapestries and the carved faces of shields from centuries past.
Every step Aria took was careful, soft, deliberate, like the steady tick of a clock counting down to something inevitable.
Her limbs still shook from the toxin’s ghost, but her mind burned bright, colder and clearer than ever.
Betrayal was stitched into her bones when she woke up. The memory of his mouth on Lysandra’s, the betrayal that ended her first life, flashed in cruelly in time with her heartbeat. The pain hadn’t left her; it had transformed into purpose.
She had tasted the poison.
Now she would find out where it came from.
---
The library door sighedwhen she touched it, letting forth the breath of old secrets.
The smell of dust, ink, and time was like an old friend to her. The moonlight made the shelves look silver, and the dust motes floated around like falling snow.
Aria moved quietly, her eyes scanning spines as if one title may speak the truth she sought. Her fingers tips halted on the thick herbal compendium, the same she had read the night before.
She set it down and opened to the section titled Gradual Debilitation.
The words tasted like iron in her mouth.
“Venoms that look like tonics.”
“Sickness pretending to be mercy.”
“Sweetness concealing death.”
Each statement was like a mirror reflecting her condition.
Her heart raced as fear and anger mixed together. Whoever designed this poison had done it with a mind both brilliant and cruel.
---
A noise pierced the silence.
Soft. Purposeful. Wrong.
Not the hurried scurry of servants, but footsteps meant for command.
Her breath caught. The wolf inside her stirred, not yet whole, but awake enough to whisper, Danger.
She slipped into the shadow between two towering shelves.
The figure that entered the light was tall, broad-shouldered, and too confident. A face made of charm and sharpness.
Dorian. Gamma’s successor.
In the book, he’d been a footnote, loyal, forgettable. But this version of him smiled like he knew where her blood was thinnest.
“Princess Aria,” he said smoothly, the title gliding off his tongue like mockery. “You should be sleeping.”
Her throat tightened, but she let the fragile-girl mask fall over her features. “Sleep won’t come,” she whispered. “Books keep the mind busy.”
Dorian’s grin deepened. “Books,” he echoed, stepping closer. “And perhaps… cures? For people who are ill?”
The light from the torch cut across his cheekbones, making his smirk almost beautiful, if not for the malice behind it.
Aria’s rage coiled low and neat inside her chest. Her lips curved faintly. “Books are sometimes the best medicine.”
He chuckled. “If only medicine fixed everything.” He tapped his temple lightly. “Some things are infectious.”
His tone was playful, but the message cut deep.
Her fingers tightened around her sleeve, nails pressing crescents into her palm.
Let him believe she was dying. Let him think her powerless.
Predators always relaxed before they fed, and that’s when they were easiest to kill.
When Dorian finally left, the silence that followed was sharp enough to bleed.
---
She bent over the compendium again. The descriptions of poisons and their antidotes swam before her eyes, but she forced herself to memorize them.
Metallic tang. Bitter root. Sweetness that numbed the tongue.
Her handwriting filled the margins, swift, secret, and sure. The same motions her past self had once used to sew sutures and measure medicine.
Patience. The hardest lesson of them all.
She would wear weakness like a crown until it choked them.
---
A breeze stirred her hair.
Aria looked up sharply.
The window, the one she had closed, now gaped open. Moonlight spilled through, slicing the floor in silver lines.
And there, on the small table near her bed, lay a single flower.
Dark red petals, edges blackened as if burned.
Wolfsbane.
Her pulse slowed. Then quickened.
The message was clear: We see you.
She approached slowly, lifting the bloom between her fingers. The scent was sharp, metallic, dangerous.
Her wolf stirred again, low and approving. Finally, it seemed to purr. A worthy hunt.
Aria crushed the petal between her fingertips, the juice staining her skin violet.
“Let them watch,” she whispered. “Let them think I’m fading.”
Her reflection in the glass window smiled back, not the fragile girl they pitied, but something reborn from venom and fire.
---
Back in her chamber, the moonlight became her accomplice.
Tiny vials gleamed across her desk, her arsenal in miniature. She measured antidotes in drops, tasting the edge of each mixture, her mind running hot despite her trembling hands.
Outside, the clock chimed softly, the hour of secrets.
Aria slipped on her patient’s gown, the costume of her role, and began to write. Notes in invisible ink. Questions she’d plant in whispers. A false complaint to the healer.
By morning, she would appear weak again.
By morning, the game would be hers.
She wasn’t the doomed heroine from the book anymore.
She was the rewrite.
And when the first thread of their web moved, she would be waiting, knife in hand, smiling.
---
A shadow stopped at her door outside her room, but she couldn’t see it. The sound of a vial being put down made a gentle metallic click.
There was a faint pulse inside it.
And by the time Aria looked up from her notes, the slightest tendril of smoke was already coming in through the door. It smelt delicious, flowery and lethal.
