PROLOGUE

A perfect weapon has no dreams. It has a purpose.

Her name was Akira Gemstone, and her purpose was to cleanse.

At five, she learned the world was a garden overrun with weeds. At seven, she was told she was the beautiful, sharp tool meant to cut them down. By eighteen, she had earned her designation: G6. The sixth Reaper of the Gemstone line. A rose with thorns sharp enough to kill, chained to a duty she never chose.

For years, she moved through shadows, a ghost in the machine of a secret world. She took out the trash—the corrupt, the cruel, the irredeemable—so others could sleep in peace they’d never know she bought with blood.

Until the night in Cairo.

Until the dusty book in a forgotten shop: The Wonder of a Wonderful World.

It was a silly thing. A fantasy. It ended with a tragic villainess throwing herself from a balcony for a prince named Dio.

G6 bought it as a joke. A trophy to her own superiority. She never believed in fate. She believed in bullets, blades, and the cold math of survival.

She was wrong.

It wasn't a mission that ended her. It wasn't a rival, a betrayal, or a glorious last stand. It was exhaustion, a cheap can of beer, and a small, amber vial on a cluttered counter. In the haze of a rare, self-indulgent stupor, she mistook the morphine inside for her vitamins.

A miscalculation. A slip. A pathetic, boring, unbefitting error.

__________

She did not expect when she wake up, it was a completely different world.

She did not expect silk sheets, or the scent of roses, or the agonizing ache in a body that was both hers and not. She did not expect the face in the mirror—a stranger’s face, breathtakingly beautiful, with eyes the color of a winter sky.

She did not expect the servants who called her Lady Reise.
Or the gilded palace that was her new cage.
Or the fiancé—a cold prince—who looked at her with disdain.
Or the Queen who looked at her with something far more dangerous: interest.

This was not her world. This was the world from the book.

And she was not the hero. She was the villainess meant to die.

But G6 does not know how to die gracefully. She only knows how to fight, how to assess, and how to kill. They have given her a new name, a new face, a new prison of silk and politics.

They have made one fatal mistake.

They have trapped a Reaper in a gilded cage.

And she is about to teach them the cost.