Prologue
Prologue — The Night Two Readers Volunteered
At 2:47 in the morning, Su Wanqing finished the worst book she had ever loved.
She read the last line twice, in case her eyes had betrayed her.
They had not.
"That's it?"
Her voice stayed level. It always stayed level. Level was the whole problem with her life, according to exactly one person, whose opinion did not matter, and whose name she was not thinking at three in the morning.
The final chapter of The Heiress in Her Place glowed on her phone, smug and unbothered.
Jiang Zhiyi: dead at twenty-two. Framed for a theft she didn't commit, disowned by the family she'd only just found, gone in a cell of a room while the fake daughter cried prettily at the funeral and inherited everything.
Lu Mingxi: dead at twenty-two. One staged accident, one closed casket, and the other fake daughter weeping on camera all the way to the Lu family fortune.
Four hundred chapters. Two stolen lives. And the author had handed the ending to the thieves like a tip.
Wanqing's thumb hovered over the comment box.
She had never commented on a novel in her life. Comments were for people who lost arguments in public. She had a reputation — first in her year, undefeated in debate, a personal brand built entirely on not caring about things in front of witnesses.
She typed: This ending is a crime scene and you are the prime suspect.
She deleted it.
She typed: Structurally cowardly.
Deleted.
In the end she left one star and no words at all, which, from Su Wanqing, was a declaration of war.
Nobody alive knew she read it. She had found it during a debate tournament in the spring of junior year, in the eleven minutes between rounds, and it had eaten her life in eleven-minute pieces ever since. Somewhere on her laptop there was a document titled Tournament Research that contained no research and no tournaments — only four hundred chapters of heiress plot threads, catalogued, cross-referenced, and annotated in a fury of footnotes.
She had once, in a moment of weakness she still didn't forgive, considered asking a certain person whether she was reading it too.
The evidence: a bookmark, chapter eighty-eight, glimpsed face-up on a desk for two seconds.
She had decided, on balance, that she would rather die.
The author had now made that decision for two other girls instead.
Downstairs, the house was silent in the expensive way. Her mother's shoes stood by the door in a perfect line. On the kitchen counter, a university ranking printout had been left where the fruit bowl used to be, her name at the top, highlighted, like a grade she'd been given for existing.
Nobody had asked her what she was reading. Nobody ever asked her anything that wasn't on a transcript.
She turned off the lamp.
On the other side of the city, Tang Luoluo was having the exact same night at maximum volume.
"SHE DIES??"
The wall thumped. Her father's voice came through it, half asleep and fully done.
"Tang Luoluo, it is three in the morning!"
"Papa, the author killed BOTH of them! Four hundred chapters and the fakes WIN, the fakes get EVERYTHING—"
"Sleep! Or read quieter!"
Her little brother's voice, from the other wall:
"She can't. We checked. It's a medical condition."
Luoluo hurled a pillow at the wall and turned back to her phone, betrayed by literature and family alike.
She had been reading The Heiress in Her Place in secret for a year. Secret, because she had a reputation too — drama club president, life of every party, a person who read menus and vibes, not four-hundred-chapter heiress novels.
And also because she knew, she KNEW, exactly one other person was reading it.
She'd seen the bookmark. Junior year. Su Wanqing's phone, face-up on a desk for exactly two seconds, and the cover of chapter eighty-eight burned into Luoluo's memory like evidence.
Neither of them had ever mentioned it.
It was the most intimate thing about their entire war.
Luoluo's comment, unlike some people's, went live immediately, in all caps, with fourteen exclamation points and a threat to find the author's house.
Moderation removed it in four minutes.
Her reading life was one long exercise in hiding. The only quiet room in the Tang house was the bathroom, so she had read three hundred chapters sitting on the closed toilet lid during family dinners, re-emerging flushed and inspired to a table that had finished eating without her and saved her the bones. She had theories about this book — pages of them, typed into a chat window addressed to exactly one person and never, ever sent.
The person was Su Wanqing.
Because there was nobody else on earth who would understand, and that was the most annoying fact of Tang Luoluo's entire life.
She stared at the dead heiresses' names on the screen. Zhiyi, who'd been too honest to survive her own family. Mingxi, who'd been too loud to be forgiven for it.
She thought about saying all of it out loud at breakfast tomorrow. She thought about her mother saying that's nice, baby, pass the salt, without looking up from her phone. Her father laughing at the TV over her voice. Her brother putting his headphones on.
Loud house. Nobody listening. That was the whole trick of it.
Wanqing lay in the dark and composed, out of pure habit, the ending she would have written. Zhiyi walking into that mansion with her spine straight. Mingxi laughing in the fake's face on live television. The two of them — rivals in the book, worse than rivals, strangers whose families had made them enemies — the two of them comparing notes. Watching each other's backs. Winning.
It would take her one week, she thought. Two, if the fakes were clever.
Luoluo lay in the dark and composed the same ending, louder and with more slapping.
Across the city from each other, in a silent house and a noisy one, two girls who had been enemies since they were twelve years old closed their eyes at the same moment and said the exact same sentence to the dark:
"Worst ending ever. I could fix this book in my sleep."
And the book heard them.
