Prologue - The Sixth Judgment
Prologue
The Sixth Judgment
The sound of armored boots echoed from the far end of the corridor.
Once.
Twice.
Heavy, measured footsteps, steady and never hurried—as though the man approaching already knew exactly where he was going, regardless of whether the person waiting behind the iron door wished to see him or not.
Evelyn lifted her gaze from the stone wall in front of her.
The fingers resting in her lap were so cold they had nearly gone numb, though the holding cell was no colder than it had been the night before. The thin chain around her wrist shifted as her hand tensed, the links brushing softly against one another.
The footsteps drew closer.
She knew them.
Not because she had heard them throughout the days she had spent imprisoned here, but because they had come for her again and again—in different corridors, before different doors, beneath skies that were never quite the same.
Sometimes it had been across the marble floors of the Velmont estate.
Sometimes through the damp, frigid passageways of a military fortress.
Sometimes across a prison yard while rain hammered against the roof overhead.
But every time, the man who came to stand before her was the same.
Cassian Blackwell.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
Without realizing it, Evelyn tightened her grip on her skirt. The coarse fabric dug painfully into her palm, but that small sting reminded her that she was still here, still sitting on the narrow wooden bench inside this cell.
And the door had not opened yet.
At least, not yet.
Metal scraped outside, followed by the sound of an officer drawing back the bolt.
Evelyn did not need to look up to know who would enter.
She already knew what she would see.
A black cloak over a knight’s uniform. The Blackwell crest at his shoulder. Dark leather gloves. And a rolled document tied with the crimson ribbon of the Imperial Court.
In her five previous lives, some details had been different.
Once, dust had stained the hem of his cloak.
Another time, dried blood had marked his right glove—not the blood of anyone in her family, though no one had ever told her whose it was.
But one thing had never changed.
The dark red imperial seal stamped upon the document in his hand.
The iron door opened.
For a moment, Evelyn forgot to breathe.
Cassian stepped inside alone. The two officers remained outside, and the door closed behind him without being bolted again.
He was as impeccably dressed as ever. His black cloak fell smoothly from his shoulders without so much as a crease. His dark hair was arranged simply, and his sharply defined face was so composed that there was no way to tell where he had come from or what kind of conversation he might have endured before arriving here.
His deep golden eyes swept briefly over the room before settling on her.
Evelyn looked instead at the document in his hand.
A red ribbon.
The Emperor’s seal.
There was nothing left to ask.
And yet Cassian did not unroll it immediately.
He stood several paces away—far enough that a prisoner would not feel threatened by his presence, but not so far that it seemed as though he were distancing himself from his duty.
Had he done the same in her other lives?
Evelyn could no longer remember.
Six lifetimes of memories did not sit neatly in her mind like books arranged on library shelves. Some moments were so vivid she could still recall every scratch on a wall. Others had blurred together until she could no longer tell whether they had happened before one death or after another.
But she did remember one thing.
This time, he was late.
Two days later than the judgment had arrived in any of her previous lives.
Two days she had spent waiting, unsure whether the delay meant hope—
or merely postponed the same ending.
Evelyn spoke first.
“Has the judgment arrived?”
Her voice was calmer than she expected, as though she were asking about an invitation that had been delivered later than scheduled.
Cassian held her gaze for a moment before answering.
“Yes.”
That single word quietly extinguished the shameful scrap of hope still hidden somewhere deep inside her chest.
Evelyn loosened her grip on her skirt. Crescent marks from her nails remained on her palm.
“Everyone?”
The question was far too vague.
He understood anyway.
“The rulings are not the same for every member of your family.”
Her heart gave a sharp jolt.
Cassian unrolled the document. The soft rustle of parchment seemed unnaturally loud in a room quiet enough for Evelyn to hear her own breathing.
“Albert Velmont has been found guilty of aiding conspirators, concealing information from the Imperial Court, and permitting assets belonging to House Velmont to be used in acts deemed harmful to the Empire.”
Evelyn lowered her eyes.
She already knew her father was not innocent.
She knew it from fragments of testimony that had reached the holding cells. From documents she had discovered in secret. And from his silence on the day he was taken away.
Even so, hearing his name read aloud in a formal judgment made something ache deep in the center of her chest.
“The sentence is death,” Cassian continued.
No embellishment.
No unnecessary words of comfort.
Next came Adrian’s name.
Her brother had not been judged one of the masterminds, but there was still insufficient evidence to prove that he had been unaware of everything he transported. The Imperial Court had therefore imposed a severe sentence upon him as well.
Then came her mother.
The words no direct evidence appeared in the judgment.
They were followed by member of the offender’s household and reasonable grounds to believe she may have had knowledge.
Polite, official phrases.
Perfectly sufficient to destroy a person’s life without ever proving that she had actually done anything.
Evelyn listened without interrupting.
When Cassian reached her name, he paused.
Only for a fraction of a second.
So slight that she might not have noticed if she had not been watching him.
“Evelyn Velmont has been found to have possessed knowledge concerning the conspiracy prior to the arrests and failed to report it to the authorities. During questioning, she also concealed the source of that information.”
Every word was only partly true.
She had known certain things.
She had hidden certain things.
And there was no way for her to explain how a young woman who had never involved herself in her family’s affairs could know the names of people who had not yet been exposed, the location of a warehouse that had already been moved, or the exact corner where a seal should appear on a document she had never seen in this lifetime.
Every answer she gave sounded like a lie.
Or worse—
like a confession from someone still protecting her accomplices.
Cassian lowered the document slightly.
“The sentence is death.”
Evelyn stared at the dark red imperial seal.
She had thought she would feel more.
Perhaps she should have cried. Begged. Or at the very least felt as though the ground had collapsed beneath her feet, as it had the first time.
But there was nothing left to collapse.
Her first death had been filled with shock.
During the second, there had still been anger and disbelief.
In her third life, she had screamed for her mother until her voice gave out.
In the fourth, she had cursed everyone who refused to believe the evidence she brought them.
In the fifth, she had thought that if she took the entire blame upon herself, perhaps the rest of them could survive.
And this time—
Evelyn simply sat and listened as the same man delivered her death sentence for the sixth time.
“Has the date been decided?”
“The morning after tomorrow.”
Two days.
The Imperial Court was still merciful enough to grant her two more days to wait for death.
Evelyn nodded slowly.
Cassian rolled the document closed again.
But he did not turn toward the door.
Normally, his duty should have ended there.
He had delivered the judgment. The condemned prisoner had acknowledged it. From that point onward, the guards would handle the remaining procedures.
Yet Cassian remained where he was.
For the first time, Evelyn raised her head and looked at him fully.
In her memories, he had never grown older.
Never looked more tired.
Never remembered her from one lifetime to the next.
To him, this was the first time he had met a young woman of House Velmont inside a prison cell.
The first time he had read her death sentence aloud.
And in two days, he would probably forget the expression on her face along with the dozens of other cases that had passed through his hands.
But today, there was something in those deep golden eyes that she had never noticed quite so clearly before.
It was not pity.
Cassian Blackwell did not strike her as a man who would pity someone simply because they were about to die.
It was closer to restrained displeasure—the expression of a man who had discovered an error in a report, only to realize it too late to dismantle the entire process and begin again.
“Is there something else, Your Grace?”
Cassian was silent for a moment.
“The information you gave us about the western warehouse was accurate.”
Evelyn blinked.
She had not expected him to mention it again.
During her interrogation, nearly every officer had cared only about how she knew the location. No one had shown much interest in her insistence that the evidence hidden there would lead to someone far above her father.
“But the warehouse was cleared before my men arrived,” he said. “One set of ledgers was burned, and the overseer disappeared before we obtained a search warrant.”
Evelyn looked down at her hands.
She understood what he was telling her.
Her information had been correct.
But truth discovered too late carried little weight.
“We traced part of the money trail exactly as you described,” Cassian continued. “But the evidence breaks off before reaching whoever gave the orders. Two witness statements contradict one another, and one of the witnesses died before he could be brought in for questioning.”
Nothing he said declared her innocent.
Nothing promised that the judgment would be overturned.
He was simply telling her what his investigation had found, as though returning an answer to the person who had once handed him the lead.
Strangely, that honesty hurt more than comfort would have.
Because it meant she had not been wrong about everything this time.
She had only been too late.
Again.
“If that evidence had been found sooner,” Evelyn asked, “would the judgment have been different?”
She did not know what answer she expected.
Cassian did not respond at once.
He studied her as though choosing words that would not offer more hope than he could justify.
“I cannot speak for His Majesty or guarantee what judgment he would have reached.”
Of course.
Cassian was not the Emperor.
He was not the judge.
He was not the one who decided who deserved to keep living.
He was merely the man who carried that document to her every time.
“But if there had been enough time to investigate where your information came from, trace the documents separately, and question those involved before they realized they were under suspicion...” He paused. “At the very least, we might have established who knew what before everyone’s names were placed together in the same report.”
Something tightened painfully in Evelyn’s throat.
Across six lives, she had always tried to save House Velmont.
She had tried to stop everything at once.
To make them all flee.
To expose the mastermind.
To take the blame for the entire family herself.
But the man standing before her had just spoken of something she had never once managed to accomplish.
Separating each person’s actions from the surname they shared.
Cassian turned toward the door, then stopped with his hand on the knob.
“If you had come to me sooner...”
The sentence ended there.
He did not say that he would have saved her.
He did not say that everyone would have survived.
And he did not say that her father’s crimes would somehow disappear.
The door opened.
The officers outside stepped aside to let him pass.
Evelyn watched his black-clad back disappear from the room before the iron door closed between them once more.
The bolt slid into place.
Cassian’s footsteps gradually faded down the corridor.
Once.
Twice.
Until only silence remained.
Evelyn lowered her gaze to the red marks on her palm.
If she had gone to him sooner.
How much sooner?
Before the banquet?
Before her father began hiding evidence?
Before Adrian’s name appeared on the documents?
Or before someone decided that an entire family could be condemned together simply because they shared the same surname?
The questions were useless now.
In two days, she would die.
After that, perhaps there would be nothing.
Or perhaps she would open her eyes once again in the same bed, beneath cream-colored curtains washed almost white by morning sunlight.
Evelyn had thanked God when she received her second life.
In her third, she had still tried to believe it was divine mercy.
After that, she was no longer certain whether He was helping her, punishing her, or simply allowing one human being to struggle endlessly inside a cycle no one cared enough to end.
This time, she did not pray for everyone to survive.
She did not pray for the judgment to change.
She simply remained in the holding cell until the light from the narrow window faded away, committing Cassian’s unfinished sentence to memory.
────⋆⋅☆⋅⋆────
Two mornings later, the sky was perfectly clear.
Evelyn climbed the stone steps on her own.
No one had to drag her.
The clink of chains, the scrape of armor, and the restless murmur of the crowd beyond blended into a distant haze. She did not turn to search for her family. She did not look for the official carrying the judgment. And she made no attempt to determine whether the black-clad figure standing far away was Cassian.
The morning wind blew strands of chestnut-brown hair across her eyes.
An officer asked whether she had any final words.
Evelyn lifted her face toward the sky.
“If you’re going to make me start over again,” she murmured, too softly for almost anyone to hear, “then at least send me back far enough this time.”
A mechanism clicked above her head.
The entire world went dark.
Then birdsong drifted in through a window.
Evelyn dragged in a sharp breath.
Her eyes flew open.
An ivory ceiling stretched above her.
No stone walls.
No chains.
No imperial seal.
Sunlight streamed through cream-colored curtains and spilled across the blankets. The vase beside the window still held the white flowers a maid had replaced only yesterday.
Or what should have been months ago.
Evelyn pushed herself upright. Her hands trembled as she snatched the small calendar from the bedside table.
For a moment, the numbers blurred before her eyes.
She blinked hard and read them again.
Four months remained before the banquet at the Velmont estate.
More time than she had ever been given before.
Evelyn clenched the page tightly in her fist. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, but amid the shock, one sentence rang clearer than anything else.
If you had come to me sooner...
Six times, she had waited for him to bring her judgment.
In her seventh life—
she would go to him first.
Before the judgment was ever written.
