Last thing Ren remembered was a truck. Not even a cool one. A delivery truck, running a red light while he crossed the street with a bag of instant noodles in one hand and his phone in the other, reading the latest Chapter of Empire of Thorns because of course he was, because he’d been binge-reading that stupid novel for three days straight like an idiot. Then pain. Then nothing. Then a ceiling.
A very expensive ceiling, holographic star charts drifting lazily across the surface like it was decoration instead of a live feed of the empire’s outer sectors.
Ren sat up slow, waiting for the hospital smell, the beeping, some nurse yelling at him for moving too fast. None of that came. Just a bed the size of his whole studio apartment, a climate unit humming somewhere in the wall keeping the air at a temperature that didn’t exist naturally anywhere, and a room that looked like it belonged to royalty. ’Okay,’ he thought, ’this is either a really good dream or I’m about to have a really bad time.’
Then he caught his reflection in the mirrored panel across the room and every drop of blood in his body went cold. Long red hair, dark as old wine, falling well past his shoulders. Sharp violet eyes. A face so pretty than most women, it looked like a airbrushed in real life. He knew that face. He’d spent three days hating that face.
"No," he said out loud, and his own voice came out wrong, higher and smoother than it should. "No. No no no no."
He was looking at Rafayal Miller, the villain of Empire of Thorns, the spoiled heir who’d been engaged to the male lead since they were kids and obsessed with him in the worst, most suffocating way there was, the one who sabotaged his own fiancé’s career out of jealousy and humiliated anyone who so much as looked at him too long, the one who eventually got so unhinged he backed a whole rebellion just to keep the guy from outgrowing him. Ending? Execution, cold and quick, barely two pages. Ren remembered reading that scene on the train and feeling nothing but satisfaction, thinking good riddance, thinking what an absolute menace, thinking he deserved every second of it. Now he was the menace.
The door chimed and a servant stepped in through the sliding panel, bowing so low her forehead nearly touched the floor. "Young Master Miller, Grand Marshal Yegard has arrived early for the evening meeting and he’s asking to see you directly, so I need to know whether I should tell him you’re still resting or whether you’re well enough to receive him now."
Ren’s brain short-circuited somewhere around Grand Marshal. That was the male lead’s title in this book, the terrifyingly efficient commander half the empire worshipped and the other half feared outright, and apparently Ren — no, apparently Rafayal — was engaged to him, which meant Ren himself was now engaged to a man who existed to hunt down and execute people exactly like him. ’Absolutely not,’ he thought. ’I did not survive getting hit by a truck just to die again in some stranger’s murder-fiancé arc, I refuse, this is not happening.’
"Tell him I’ll see him now," Ren said, because hiding in this bed wasn’t going to fix a single thing and he needed information a lot more than he needed a moment alone to panic properly.
The Grand Marshal was already waiting in the receiving hall when Ren walked in, standing in front of a wall-sized display scrolling deployment reports from three different star systems at once, and the first thought that hit Ren was that no illustration in any story could have prepared him for this in person.
The man was tall in a way that made the whole room feel smaller than it was, dressed in a black-and-silver uniform weighed down with more medals than Ren could count in one glance, a neural comm unit glowing faint blue at his temple, and his face was so still it barely registered as an expression at all. Cold didn’t begin to cover it. This was a man who looked like he’d stopped feeling things around the same time he learned to walk, and Ren had exactly three seconds to decide how he wanted to play this before those violet eyes landed on him and pinned him in place.
"You wanted to see me," Yegard said, and it wasn’t a question so much as a statement daring Ren to waste his time, every word clipped short like he budgeted his voice the way other people budgeted money.
Ren studied him for two full seconds and made up his mind. If this was the male lead, and if this was the exact reason the last version of Rafayal ended up kneeling in front of an execution squad, then there was only one move here that made any sense at all.
"I want to break off the engagement," Ren said, and he watched the words land, watched something flicker across that carved-still face like disbelief had briefly forgotten how to stay hidden. "I’ve thought about it and I don’t want to marry you, I don’t want any of this, so I’m asking you to release me from it right now, tonight, before either of us has to sit through another one of these meetings pretending we don’t already know how badly this ends."
For a long moment Yegard just looked at him, violet eyes scanning his face like he was checking for a trick buried somewhere under the words. Ren braced himself for an argument, for fury, maybe even a threat, because God only knew Rafayal probably had one coming after years of tantrums and sabotage and ruined careers. Instead the man’s jaw loosened, just slightly, like a knot finally coming undone after being pulled too tight for too long.
"Fine," Yegard said. "I’ll have the papers drawn up by morning and sent to your terminal for signature, and then this will be over, and neither of us will ever have to pretend again."
It should have felt like winning. Instead it stung, and Ren hated that it stung, hated that some stupid leftover instinct in this borrowed body wanted to argue with a man who’d just agreed to exactly what he asked for. ’Guess he really did hate the old me,’ he thought, shoving the feeling down hard. ’Good. That just makes this easier.’
"I’m also stepping down from my position," Ren said, pushing past the strange twist in his chest before it could turn into something worse. "And I’m taking whatever personal assets are legally mine when I go, all of it, because I have no intention of staying in this Capital one more week than I have to."
"You’re leaving the Capital entirely, then," Yegard said, and something in his tone shifted just slightly, like the words weighed more than they should have.
"That’s the plan, yes."
"Why." Yegard said back.
Because I read the book you’re a character in, Ren thought, and I already know exactly how this ends for me if I stay anywhere near you. Out loud he just said, "Because I’m tired of being everyone’s problem, and I figure disappearing quietly is the fastest way to make sure I never become one again. Isn’t that exactly what you wanted from the day we were first engaged?"
Yegard didn’t answer that directly. He just kept watching Ren with an expression colder than anger and somehow heavier than indifference, long enough that Ren started to wonder if he’d badly misjudged how much this man actually hated him. Then the moment passed, and Yegard turned toward the door without another word.
"Do whatever you want," he said, already walking away, not even bothering to look back. "I won’t stop you, and I won’t come looking for you either, so don’t waste time worrying about that."
Ren stood alone in that absurdly large receiving hall, watching the doors seal shut behind the single most terrifying man he’d ever met in this life or the last one, and let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. ’Okay. Step one, done. Broke it off clean, no drama, no fight, exactly like I planned.’ He should have felt nothing but relief. Mostly he did. Mostly.
By the end of the week he’d liquidated every credit he could legally liquidate, packed what actually mattered, and boarded a long-range transport headed as far from the Imperial Capital as his money could carry him, running through the same three-line plan over and over in his head like a survival checklist. Stay alive. Stay rich. Stay away from Yegard. Simple. Clean. Nothing about it could possibly go wrong.
He was still telling himself that when the transport’s hull shuddered hard enough to rattle his teeth, alarms tore through the cabin, and the pilot’s voice crackled over the comm announcing an unscheduled emergency stop at the very edge of monster territory. ’You have got to be kidding me,’ Ren thought.