The Villainess Lives Twice

Artezia Rosan was never meant to be a heroine. Born with a mind sharp as a blade and a conscience dulled by necessity, she waded through blood and treachery to place her brother on the imperial throne—every scheme, every whisper, every ruined life justified as duty. Yet her reward for that devotion came not in gratitude, but in a dagger aimed at her back. Left to die at the hands of the very family she had elevated, she found salvation in the least likely of saviors: Cedric, the Grand Duke of the North, her sworn political enemy and the empire's last bastion of moral conviction. When he pleads for her cunning to salvage a kingdom already fracturing at its seams, Artezia knows no mortal strategy can mend what is broken. So she turns to the forbidden—ancient magic that demands not gold or gems, but flesh and soul. With her own body as the sacrifice, she rewinds the hands of time, hurtling back into the skin of her eighteen-year-old self. This second life carries no illusions of redemption; she has no desire to be good. Instead, she resolves to be the villainess once more, but this time with a new master. She kneels before Cedric and offers him a pact as ruthless as it is intimate: marry her, and she will forge him into an emperor. This time, her machinations will serve not ambition, but atonement—and she will let nothing, not even her own heart, stand in the way.