(A/N: I wrote the following three  four chapters in advance so I will go in this week and do a bit more revising this weekend. Enjoy!)

Her place in the world. 

Noémie du Cœur has never truly found a place for herself in the world.

Even when she found herself in another.

Being adopted into a noble family, she was thrust into the life of aristocrats, where no one looked like her, including her adoptive family, who prided themselves on having manners and beauty that she could never achieve. Not that she thought of 

The day she recalled memories of another time, another life. She was only twelve years old, perched up in her bed, being looked after by a maid after she had a fever that refused to break.

It was not until that persistent fever that she realized she had died once already. Miserably, alone at twenty-nine years old, already withered from corporate rot. Her name was something else…something ordinary, something grey. The building smelled of ink and stress—no one had even noticed when she collapsed, let alone that she died, until two hours later.

That first death came with a mundane, lolling ending.

But her second life was anything but mundane. Louder, fearful, met with the strange men rushing off on ships wearing powdered wigs. 

Noémie was very young when her village fell—maybe five or six. The only daughter of an herbalist of a large tribe and a father who traveled often across the island to the larger continent as a doctor. The night it happened was an ordinary one. The aggression was so sudden—her mother’s screams pierced through the night as fires bloomed like spider lilies on the tops of their palm-thatched roofs. There had been no warning, no mercy.

Everything was so hot, unbearable. It couldn’t have been punishment, for they had not done anything to receive this kind of torment.

The men who stormed the village wore coats with brass buttons and spoke in a language she didn’t yet understand. They took everything and burned down what they could not take on the ships they came on. The women. The children. The men, including her father, were left to bleed in the dirt.

Noémie remembered the ship the most, the grueling passage. When she came to, she was alone, bound by rope, looking at the faces of other terrified children; some she recognized, some she did not. The sound of the wood creaking and groaning under their combined weight. The smell of sweat, seawater, feces, and grief. How her chains bit into her wrist like the bit of a dog. And more than those things, there was her mother’s voice fading into the night as they were torn apart. Muttering a name, she cannot bring herself to be called. 

Telling her they’d meet again.

She often thought of it but gave up the possibility that they’d find one another again in such a large, despicable empire. 

The journey was long and arduous. Many of them died on the way to the place where they were to be held captive. There were many nights Noémie wept until her throat was raw. 

Then she learned that crying only brought more pain.

With the arrival at a French port came Geneviève du Cœur, the woman who bought her. Slender and tall, with a white face, she was dressed in mourning silks. A flutter of her veil, like moth wings, revealed her face. Pale, rosy cheeks streaked with drying tears, blue eyes framed by lashes that looked almost white against sunlight. She spoke French like a limerick, and when she touched Noémie’s cheek through the iron bars of her entrapment, her hand trembled.

“Is she as you wished?”

“She’s perfect,” Geneviève whispered. “A daughter for my penance.”

That day, she was renamed Noémie after delight and pleasantry. 

When she arrived at the residence, a governess was appointed to ‘educate’ her. She knew not a word of how to be noble, the language, speech, and posture, and mannerisms of one either; oh, but did she learn it. No, it was beaten into her until she’d mimic what the governess did at a mind-numbing pace, perfectly, in tears. 

The Marquise told her, gently in a way that almost blamed her for her tears, to “forget the past.”

But Noémie never could. 

It felt as if her second life stopped the day she was separated from her parents.

“Your skin is turning to prunes, mademoiselle,” Aimée giggles as she pours water down Noémie’s back.

Noémie blinks—the memories receded like a tide. Never gone, just waiting beneath the surface to appear again. 

“I’m getting out, I’m getting out,” she says softly, rising from the bath in a rush of water. Aimée was ready on her toes with a towel to wrap in and an ivory comb for her hair. Her hands are carefully detangling Noémie’s curls, sectioning them painstakingly. 

Noémie sat before her vanity, gazing into her reflection. Her dusky skin glowed from the bath, her body swaddled in her chemise and stay. Her dark, reddish-brown eyes at times looked russet. Her full, plump lips were the color of ripe plums. 

She sighs, resting her head on the table of her vanity.

“I don’t want to go.”

“Mademoiselle, please act like an adult.”

She got up with a huff but turned quickly to tickle the little girl, “Such a serious little girl I raised!”

Aimée’s giggles as they tumbled back the bed in the end did little to quell her mind.

Noémie despised social events and talked to the nobility.

She was thrust into society at a young age and jaded by everything. Balls, events, hunting competitions—she tried avoiding them all when she could, feeling ill, hiding, and even conveniently using the excuse of studying.

Noémie disliked being amongst those who were so...obsessed with keeping appearances. In a community where gatherings were held nearly every week, people sauntered off to charity balls to show off their wealth under the guise of helping the less fortunate.

She was made into an example of how to turn a wild wolf into a neutered pup, while your adoptive parents were applauded for taking such an unfortunate ‘thing’ in. Nothing but a woman in a society where status was everything, and eventually, she thought she’d be married off—or so she thought. Once Noémie became an adult, she hoped at least to be away from her dearest Father and older brother. However, now at her age, of thirty, she was well beyond spinster age, now a thornback collecting dust—her family hadn’t even bothered to set her up with someone of similar social standing or even with an old man with money and running borrowed time.

Once Noémie became an adult, she hoped at least to be away from her dearest Father and older brother. However, now at her age, of twenty-nine, she was well beyond spinster age, now a thornback collecting dust—her family hadn’t even bothered to set her up with someone of similar social standing. 

Her second sister, Annelise, had already been married off to an older earl as his second wife. Yet, she remembered her thirteen-year-old sister, Maximilienne, who had received an abundance of suitors lately. 

She had the face of an angel, small and flushed. Eyes like clear skies—hair like pale, hand-spun silk, just like their mother. A girl that even Aphrodite would envy. 

Her sisters were one of the few good parts of the despicable country she found herself in. 

Her baby sister’s suitors came from far and wide. However, their father had one man in mind for her, and that was the rumored beastly duke. A man she’s going to marry in a year. If she could strangle the emperor for this decision, she would—but they behead nobles who go against the crown, and she wasn’t planning on dying quite that soon.

 However, knowing the story, she finds it bittersweet that her dear sister died of cholera. At this point in the story, Noémie herself resigned to her fate. Their father fled with their older brother, but not before leaving their house penniless. Devastated and driven to pawn off precious items and borrow money from their older sister. 

Noémie in the novel could not survive alone, ending her time in an unmarked grave at the end of her life. and only a cabin where she spent her final days, either ostracized or abandoned by her family. Her father and brother were somewhere living it up, her oldest sister had been distancing herself after she could not help Noémie more than she already did.

Maximilienne died before she could marry the duke, and from what Noémie remembers, their family’s downfall was a brief mention in the overall story.

A setup for a romance, a story written to be a means to an end.

Since she became aware of her fate wrapped within a novel that barely mentions and only mentions her sister as the build-up to a romance that doesn’t exist without her death. 

She resigned to that fate ages ago—there wasn’t much she could do without some sort of backing. So, one could say she’s only living to await her future in a ruined family.