Paloma sat neatly in the place set for her opposite Artan.

Her “brother”—Lord Artan Lis.

His hair was a vibrant red, wavy and wild. Unlike Duke Lis and Irina’s cyan colored eyes, his were green. They were narrow and serious, lined with thick, dark lashes. His regal face — impressive to behold, with high cheekbones and a beauty mark on his left cheek — seemed thoughtful.

“Please explain,” Paloma told him, her voice small. She refused to meet his eyes, choosing instead to play with the edges of her embroidered cloth napkin.

Paloma felt tiny here. Insignificant. The high-backed chair she sat in dwarfed her. The vaulted ceilings, the grandiose windows — they all felt like they were looming and watching and waiting. Inside of her skirts, she pulled her knees tighter together and hooked one ankle around the other.

“It’s unusual to see you so timid,” Duke Lis said, cutting Artan’s answer off with a frown. His lips twitched beneath his mustache.

“Unusual?” Paloma asked warily. The goosebumps on her arms prickled. She tucked her napkin into the front of her dress, mimicking Artan’s careful manners.

The Duke rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Perhaps not now. I had known to expect a change, of course, but it’s still eerie.”

He seemed gentle, this Duke Lis. Irina clearly took after their father in appearance. Same hair. Same eyes. Same delicate features. There wasn’t a malicious line on his face, which was weathered with the soft wrinkles of a permanent smile.

Paloma held out a gloved hand to him now, tentatively placing it over his.

She had loved her real father with her entire heart. It ached, knowing Irina’s father was losing who was clearly a beloved daughter. How that would have devastated hers after her fall from that window. At least, it would have, when he’d been alive to care. “I’m sorry, father. I wish I could remember.”

I wish I was her for you.

The Duke waved the servants away as they deposited their breakfast. When they were alone, he hummed, cutting into what looked like an omelet and pushing it about his plate.

The Duke finally spoke. “Your mother’s family is susceptible to a very particular kind of curse.”

A curse? Irina certainly looked fine. No smudges of darkness or wounds on her pearly skin.

A curse…

Paloma could scarcely tether herself to the moment.

“Irina?”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. She was struggling to ground herself in this foreign place, with people play-acting as her family, talking about “curses” like that meant something to her. “You were saying?”

The Duke held her gaze. “No, you’re right. Of course this is overwhelming. My dear, you need not pretend.”

Paloma froze. Had she already revealed her ignorance this quickly? She didn’t think she could keep up the charade for long, but certainly longer than breakfast. “Pretend?” Paloma knew her voice was tentative.

The Duke squeezed her hand where it was resting on his. “I know you are not Irina Lis. But this new you, this you that we have been expecting — you are still going to be a part of this family.”

Paloma’s world toppled sideways. Her breath caught. “Excuse me?”

Artan nodded, face sad but unwavering. “We have had our time to make peace with this. Irina did as well. When your body was born, we knew what could happen and we prepared for your arrival. Irina left us weeks ago, and we have been waiting for you.”

“Now tell us, daughter,” the Duke said, with a gentle smile. “What is your real name?”

___

They had been expecting Paloma?

When she left breakfast, she sequestered herself in her chambers, refusing with a gentle wave of her hand the frantic offers of a number of servants for a walk in the garden, or a new pot of tea, or a game of chess with her former nanny. Her stomach was full of stones and her mind was mind reeling.

According to the Duke, Irina — this body, her predecessor — had known she was going to die.

It was a curse on the matriarchal line of Irina’s family. In each daughter’s early twenties, she would suddenly “change.”

First, her eyes would deaden. She would go through the motions, but she was almost soulless in her demeanor. She would not speak, or cry, or express herself in any way. Weeks later, she would liven up once more — but she would be different. Almost like a new person entirely.

The rest of the Kingdom — because it was a Kingdom, she had learned that much — considered it a mental breakdown. A slip out of reality. Those Novak girls and their fragile dispositions.

The Lis and Rinne families, both Dukedoms here, were the only families outside of the Novak line who knew the truth.

Not even the servants knew.

In reality, in each generation, the first daughters of Irina’s mother’s family, the Novaks, were replaced. Physically identical, but full of knowledge of other worlds. New souls, slotted into the husks that were waiting for them.

Paloma was the latest interloper.

Her new “brother” Artan, the Duke, her “mother” — somewhere far away now, even in this lifetime — they thought of her as a sister and daughter already. Without her knowledge they had blazed ahead, folding her neatly into a new family they had decades to make peace with constructing.

Paloma was…

Terrified.

She did not know where she was, not in any way that counted. The furniture, the food, the accents, the smells, even the size of the sun, it was all foreign to her. She was not a true lady, and she could not act like one, even if she were forgiven for her ill manners after she had her “mental departure” by the public writ large. Adora had always been the debutante. Paloma was the wallflower.

And what was this damn ring on her finger?

She hadn’t had it in her to ask. There was no answer that made her want to slow her breathing, and she didn’t want to hyperventilate on her first night.

There was a gentle knock on the door after an indeterminate amount of time.

Molly.

Something must have read on Paloma’s face, because Molly treated her with the kind of sweetness one might expect from an older sister. At Paloma’s feet were untouched trays of snacks — finger sandwiches and pastries and glasses of something that smelled tart. She did not remember the servants bringing them, though they obviously had done so more than once.

“My lady, it is dusk,” Molly told her softly, and she was right, Paloma could see the light growing paler and darker outside those rattling windows. “You have been sitting alone in this chair for many, many hours. May I help you bathe and get ready for bed?”

Paloma wanted to say no. To say “don’t touch me. I don’t know you. Where I am from, we do these things alone. I want to be alone. Leave me alone.”

But Molly did not know the truth.

And Paloma didn’t want to explain it, either. She didn't feel like she should.

“Okay,” she told Molly instead. And to her credit, Molly was slow and methodical and careful. Irina’s body, hers, now, was much more delicate than Paloma’s frame back on Earth.

Molly made her a warm bath in a clawfoot tub, rich with pleasantly-scented soaps and oils. She scrubbed from the roots to the ends of her hair, and wiped the day from her skin.

Once Paloma was cleansed and coiffed and powdered, and she was offered a new, clean silken nightgown, Molly bid her a warm evening. She whisked away the trays of untouched meals, and promised an attendant would be in at dawn with more wood for her fire as the door shut behind her.

Once again, Paloma was alone.

Paloma liked being alone. Silence was healing, when noise meant cruelty and neglect. In the silence, you could hear who was waiting. Who was lurking. People fear the quiet, the dark, but Paloma liked it. It gave away the people trying to hurt you, unburdened by the movement of others.

Because being noticed had meant bad things for her, before. Punishment.

She already knew she would not miss her mother — not her cruel tongue and her crueler hands. Her mother had never spared her a kind word or a tender embrace. At one time, Paloma had thought that was normal for children as they grew older. Then she’d welcomed her little sister, and she’d seen what sustained love looked like in her mother’s eyes.

Sweet Adora.

Her little sister.

She would miss Dora forever.

The ache seeped from Paloma’s heart into the back of her throat, and she swallowed as the quiet tears pitter-pattered on her pillowcase.

Paloma had felt alone on Earth, but she hadn’t been. Her father’s old study, her little sister, the barista at her favorite coffee shop — they kept her company. She had the little things. The comforts and familiarity of a home, no matter what shape it took. There were scary things that lurked there, but there were sweet things, too.

Now, too late, she was realizing what it felt like to be truly, utterly alone. The thing she always dreamed of. Hoped for.

It was…

She sucked in a shuddering breath, pulling the duvet covers tighter to her body in the cold air of her stone room. The wind howled outside, bracing and unforgiving, even in here.

Awful.