The last thing Cael Ward heard was the foreman's shout, sharp, desperate and too late.

Then came the crack of splitting metal, the groan of structural failure he'd spent his entire career learning to prevent. His engineering brain registered it all in the split second before the scaffolding gave way: load-bearing capacity exceeded, safety protocols ignored, inevitable catastrophe.

He didn't feel the impact. Just a flash of white, a sensation of falling that never seemed to end, and then...

Nothing.

Cael woke to the smell of mildew and old parchment.

His eyes snapped open to unfamiliar darkness. Not the clean darkness of a hospital room or the mechanical hum of medical equipment. This was the thick, oppressive darkness of a room sealed against the night, broken only by dying embers in a fireplace he could barely make out across the room.

His heart hammered against his ribs. Where am I?

The ceiling above him was wrong—wooden beams instead of acoustic tiles, rough-hewn and ancient-looking. The bed beneath him was wrong—a mattress that felt like it was stuffed with straw, scratchy linens that smelled of lavender and dust. Even the air was wrong, cold and damp in a way that suggested stone walls and poor insulation rather than climate control.

Cael sat up, and his body protested in unfamiliar ways. His muscles felt different—weaker, less conditioned. He'd been in decent shape for a thirty-year-old who spent too much time at a desk, but this body felt softer, less used. Younger, maybe?

Panic crept up his throat. What happened? Where's the construction site? The hospital?

He threw off the covers and stumbled toward what he hoped was a window, his legs shaky and uncertain. His hands—he looked down at them in the ember-light—were pale and unmarked. No calluses from years of site work. No scar on his left palm from that incident with the utility knife in college.

These weren't his hands.

Cael 's breath came faster. He found the window and yanked aside heavy velvet curtains that released a cloud of dust into the cold air. Moonlight spilled in, and with it, a view that made his stomach drop.

This wasn't Seoul. This wasn't anywhere in Korea, or Asia, or anywhere he'd ever been. Outside stretched a landscape from a medieval painting, rolling hills dotted with what looked like thatched cottages, a forest dark against the horizon, and in the distance, the silhouette of a town with buildings that couldn't have been constructed later than the Renaissance.

"What the hell?"

His voice came out wrong. Higher than he remembered, with an accent he didn't recognize—not quite British, not quite anything he could place. He pressed a hand to his throat, feeling the unfamiliar contours of a different neck, a different face.

A mirror. He needed a mirror.

Cael spun around, searching the room more carefully now that his eyes had adjusted. The space was large—too large for a hospital room, too elaborate for a budget hotel. High ceilings, that massive four-poster bed, a writing desk cluttered with papers, a wardrobe that looked like it belonged in a museum, and there, mounted on the wall near the wardrobe, a tarnished silver mirror.

He approached it slowly, afraid of what he'd see.

The face that stared back at him was not Cael Ward's face.

It was younger, mid-twenties, maybe, with wavy chestnut brown hair that fell past his shoulders, bright hazel eyes currently wide with shock, and fair skin that suggested a life lived indoors. Handsome, in a aristocratic sort of way, though currently pale and gaunt as if from too much stress or too little food. The jawline was different, the nose was different, everything was wrong in ways that made his brain short-circuit trying to process it.

This was not his body.

This was someone else's body, and somehow, impossibly, he was inside it.