Reborn as the Villainess's Bodyguard, I Refused to Stop at Bodyguard novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Oath
Haruka wakes as the guard captain who will hold the axe, kneels in the villainess's cell and swears to guard her instead, and Seraphine asks for fourteen mornings.
Haruka Mori had been reading the last chapter of The Lily Saint of Carrow when her legs gave out under a barbell rack.
That was the final thing she remembered from Tokyo.
The next thing was stone under her knees, so cold it hurt, and a sword across her two open hands.
She looked up.
A woman sat on a narrow cot across the cell, in a grey prison shift, with iron cuffs on both wrists.
Her hair was long, wavy and copper red, and it fell around a pale, freckled face that had not slept in a very long time.
Her green eyes were fixed on Haruka with perfect, tired contempt.
"You're early, Captain," the woman said. "The axe isn't until the fourteenth."
Haruka knew that voice.
She had read it in print four hundred times, always in italics, always cruel.
Lady Seraphine Ardwyn, twenty-three, the villainess of the novel, who would be beheaded in fourteen days for poisoning the Saint at the Harvest Banquet.
And the sword in Haruka's hands belonged to Captain Eleonora Delamere, who in the novel had exactly one line.
She was the guard who stood on the scaffold and swung the axe.
"Oh no," Haruka said, in a deep voice that was not hers. "Oh no, no, no."
Her hands were big and callused, and her forearms were thick with muscle.
She felt the weight of a steel breastplate on her chest, and she liked the fit of it, which scared her more than anything.
Seraphine tilted her head. "Is that a prayer? I've had three priests this week. You're the first to sound this sincere."
Haruka did not think.
She had spotted a hundred people under a bar, and the rule was always the same.
When someone is going down, you get your hands under them first.
"I'm not here to kill you," Haruka said.
"You are, though. It's your job. Fourteen days from now, in Lantern Square, in front of the whole city."
"Then I quit."
Seraphine laughed, one short, dry breath.
"Guards do not quit, Captain. They get replaced."
"Only the Captain can hold the axe. It's the law." Haruka had read that too, in a footnote about the coronation oaths. "So there's nobody to replace me."
The laugh stopped.
Seraphine looked at her differently.
Haruka set the sword flat on the floor in front of her.
Then she put her right fist over her heart and bowed her head to the stone.
She did not know what a guard's oath was supposed to sound like.
But the words came up out of her throat all by themselves, long and old and slow.
"I, Eleonora Delamere, Captain of the Queen's Guard, bind my sword and my breath to Seraphine Ardwyn.
"I will stand between her and every blade until my last day.
"I will keep her from the dark, and when the dark comes, I will carry her out of it."
The last line came out clearer than the others.
Haruka did not understand why her voice shook on it.
She only knew that she meant every word, for her own reasons, and that they were not the reasons the old words were made for.
The cell was very quiet.
Water dripped somewhere beyond the window bars.
When Haruka looked up, Seraphine had gone white to the lips.
"Who told you to say that?" she whispered.
"Nobody. I'm saying it because I want to."
"Those are an executioner's words."
"They are not," Haruka said. "They're a bodyguard's."
Seraphine stared at her.
Then her face did something complicated and angry.
"Do not mock me," she said. "I'm going to die, and I know it, and I've made my peace with it as much as I will. I will not be your little joke."
"It isn't a joke."
"Then what is it?"
Haruka thought of the last chapter, of the single paragraph about the red-haired woman kneeling at the block.
She thought of the footnote, and the page count, and how little ink the author had spent on a woman who had a whole body to be loved in.
"A mistake," Haruka said. "I'm correcting it."
Seraphine slowly stood.
The chain between her cuffs clinked.
She crossed the cell, stopped in front of Haruka, and held out both bound hands.
"Then get up, Captain. If you mean to guard me, you can start by looking me in the face."
Haruka stood.
She was a head taller than Seraphine and she felt every inch of it.
Seraphine's eyes moved over her face.
"Fourteen mornings," she said. "I had resigned myself to spending them looking at a wall."
She lifted her chained hands and laid them, light as birds, on Haruka's breastplate, right over the heart she had just sworn to.
"Take me to the window," Seraphine said. "Carry me, if you're so strong. I haven't seen the sky in eight weeks, and I want to see it now."
Haruka picked her up.
It took no effort.
Seraphine weighed less than a barbell plate, and she smelled of cold stone and old soap.
One thin arm went around Haruka's neck, and the chains rested against her collarbone.
At the window, the sky was the pale grey of a coming snow, and Seraphine looked at it as though someone had handed her a jewel.
"Spend one of the fourteen on me," Seraphine murmured. "Spend all of them, if you mean it."
Haruka did not put her down.
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