The first thing Evelyn registered was the searing pain in her head, followed swiftly by the acrid stench of champagne soaked into silk. A disjointed memory, not her own, flashed behind her eyes: a crystal flute shattering on a marble floor, a woman's gasp, and the face of a man—impossibly handsome—contorted in a mask of cold fury.
My name is Evelyn Reed, she thought, a desperate anchor in a sea of confusion. I'm a senior partner at Sterling & Finch. I was just leaving the office… car accident…
But the body she was in didn't feel like a lawyer's. It felt… weak. Fragile. The hands she shakily raised were adorned with perfectly manicured, blood-red nails, and on her left ring finger sat a diamond so large it looked like a shard of ice. This wasn't her life. This was a scene from the trashy web novel she'd been hate-reading on her commute: "The CEO's Accidental Love."
And she was not the heroine. She was the villainess. The cannon fodder character, also named Evelyn.
A low, dangerous voice cut through her panic, each word dripping with ice. "Are you done with the hysterics?"
Evelyn's head snapped up. There he was, the male lead of the novel, Damien Blackwood. He stood by the penthouse window, the glittering city lights behind him doing nothing to soften his lethal silhouette. He was exactly as the book described him: a ruthless, emotionally unavailable CEO, the kind of man who didn't just run a business empire, but commanded it. He was the beast to be tamed, and she had just committed the ultimate sin of publicly trying to claw him.
Another memory flared: At the Blackwood Corp annual gala, this body's original owner had seen Damien speaking to the story's gentle heroine, and had promptly thrown a drink in his face, accusing him of infidelity in front of hundreds of investors and socialites.
It was the inciting incident. The chapter where the villainess signs her own death warrant. According to the plot, Damien was here to annul their arranged business marriage and systematically destroy her family's company as retribution.
"I asked you a question," Damien said, his voice dangerously soft.
The original Evelyn would have dissolved into tears or screamed more accusations. But the new Evelyn—the lawyer who had negotiated multi-billion-dollar mergers—felt a cold, familiar calm settle over her. She assessed the situation. Her reputation was in tatters. Her family's fate was sealed. Her position was one of absolute weakness.
She met his gaze, her own surprisingly steady. "The hysterics are over," she said, her voice clear and devoid of the shrill panic he expected. "Let's talk business."
Damien's eyebrow arched in faint surprise. He took a step closer, circling her like a predator. "Business? There is no more business, Evelyn. Our engagement is terminated. My legal team will be in touch with your father tomorrow to discuss the terms of his company's dissolution."
This was it. The dialogue she'd read on her phone just yesterday. The beginning of the end.
But the original Evelyn didn't have a law degree from Harvard.
"Termination of the engagement agreement requires just cause," Evelyn stated, her mind racing, instinctively shifting into legal combat mode. "While my… predecessor's actions were certainly embarrassing, a single public outburst does not constitute sufficient grounds for unilateral termination without penalty. The penalty clause, if I recall the society pages correctly, is a twenty percent equity stake in the terminating party's primary holding."
Damien actually stopped moving. The predatory amusement in his eyes was replaced by a flicker of genuine shock, then suspicion. "You've read the contract?"
"I don't need to," Evelyn said, a sliver of her old self returning. A ghost of a smirk touched her lips as she delivered the hook, the one thing this cold, ruthless CEO would never expect. "I helped my father's legal team draft it."
She watched the flicker of shock turn into a storm in his dark eyes. The narrative had just taken a detour. For the first time all night, Damien Blackwood, the man who held this entire world in his palm, looked momentarily off-balance. And in that tiny moment, Evelyn felt a spark of something that wasn't in the original script: a chance.