I Became the Final Boss's Nameless Fiancée and I Have One Season to Stop Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Girl Who Sat Up
Rina wakes at midnight in the dead bride's body with the final boss kneeling at her bed, knocks the court physician's poisoned tonic out of his hand, and when the demon prince asks why she isn't afraid, the king's envoy rides in to collect her body.
Rina opened her eyes to a ceiling of black stone and a man's huge hand around her wrist.
The clock somewhere in the room was striking midnight.
She followed the strokes without meaning to, the way she had counted change at the register for six years.
Twelve.
The hand was warm, almost hot, and the fingers ended in short dark claws that were careful not to touch her skin.
She turned her head on the pillow.
A man was kneeling beside the bed, so tall that even on his knees his face was level with hers.
He had long silver-white hair tied low at his neck, two short bronze horns curling back from his temples, and amber eyes ringed with red from no sleep.
The collar of his black coat was torn open.
On his bare chest, over the breastbone, sat a ring of small black marks.
Rina knew that face.
She had stared at it for four hundred hours on a phone screen, between customers, under the humming lights of a convenience store at three in the morning.
Prince Kaldrith Ashmoor, Lord of the Cinder March, the final boss of Rosethorn Requiem.
The man who burns the capital at the first snow and dies on the cathedral steps.
"Your Highness," she said.
It came out as a croak.
His hand opened.
"You were dead," he said.
His voice was low and rough, and it shook on the last word.
"The physician said you would not last the hour. Your heart stopped. I felt it stop."
"I'm sorry," Rina said. "I'm thirsty."
She tried to sit up, and he caught her by the shoulders and set her against the pillows.
Her body felt light and strange and small.
Her hands, when she lifted them, were smaller than her hands.
Pale, narrow fingers. A thin silver ring on the left one.
She remembered the line from the game.
The bride is a nameless girl in a white dress who dies on the second screen. The Prince's Grief. The first dead woman of the route.
She was the nameless girl.
She was the dead bride.
A cough came from the foot of the bed.
A thin man in a grey court robe stood there with a silver cup in both hands, as pale as the bed linen.
"My lady," he said. "You must drink your restorative, quickly. It is the king's own prescription."
He crossed the floor with the cup held out.
Rina looked at the cup.
She knew this scene too.
In the game the physician stands exactly there. The player never sees what is in the cup. A line of text says only, She drank, and she did not wake.
Kaldrith's fingers were already closing around the cup to take it from the man's hands and hold it to her mouth.
"Don't," Rina said.
She struck the cup out of the physician's hand.
Silver rang on the stone, and a brown liquid ran across the floor.
The physician made a sound.
"My lady, that was your medicine."
"That was your poison."
She said it plainly, in a voice that surprised her with how steady it was.
Nobody in the room moved.
The steward by the door, a tall grey woman in a black apron, drew a slow breath.
"Prince," Rina said. "The fever started the day I arrived. Every night it was worse after the tonic. Ask him to drink it."
The physician backed away.
"This is slander. I serve the crown."
"Then pour another cup," said Kaldrith.
He had not raised his voice.
He had stood, and he was very tall, and the lamps threw his shadow across the ceiling with the horns on it.
The physician looked at the horns and ran.
His slippers slapped away down the corridor, and the steward went after him without being told.
The door shut.
It was suddenly very quiet in the room.
Kaldrith turned back to the bed.
He looked at her.
"You are not afraid of me," he said.
"No."
"The girl who was sent here hid in the closet for three days."
"I'm sure she had reasons."
"Everyone who looks at me is afraid." He said it flatly, a fact. "I burned a city once. You looked at the horns and asked for water."
Rina laughed, and it hurt her chest.
"You looked like you needed to hear something nice."
His mouth moved, a very small twist.
"Why aren't you afraid?"
She could not say, Because I have loved you for four years in a dark room on my phone.
She could not say, Because I know how your story ends, and I think it's wrong.
She reached up instead.
She laid two fingers on the base of his left horn, where the bronze met his hair, the way the player does in the best scene of the game.
He went completely still.
His breath stopped.
An ember glow ran under the skin of his throat and down into his collar.
"Because," Rina said, "you've been holding my wrist for an hour, and you were so careful with your claws."
Something in his face broke open and shut again.
"There was something you said," he said slowly. "Before you woke. At the very end."
"What did I say?"
"It doesn't matter."
He did not look at her when he said it.
He looked at the black ring on his chest instead.
A horn sounded outside, long and clear, from the gate.
The steward came back through the door with her apron crooked.
"Highness. A rider in the king's colors. The king's envoy has come a day early."
"Why?"
"To collect the body, he says. The king's own words."
Kaldrith's hand closed on the bedpost, and the wood creaked.
Rina understood at once.
The treaty said a bride who died in the keep broke the peace.
The king had sent her to die here, and he had sent a man to witness it.
"He wants a corpse," she said. "Or a reason."
"He'll find neither."
"He'll find neither if he sees me alive tomorrow and sees that I'm yours."
Kaldrith turned his head very slowly.
"Mine," he said, as if testing the word.
She held out her hand.
"Look as if you can't keep your hands off me."
He took it, and his claws closed around her fingers with the same careful grip.
"They will watch the window," he said. "He will have a man in the garden before dawn."
"Then we'd better give him something to see."
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