A False Engagement, A True Heart

## The Kingdom of Ternance, Where Rank Is Law Year 342 of the Ternance Royal Calendar. In this country, rank is law. Crossing the line between noble and commoner is a taboo you'd have to be ready to die for, and it's believed that your birth shows in the way you move and speak before your name ever does. The story unfolds in high society at the heart of the royal capital: lavish ballrooms awash in chandelier light, the closed drawing rooms and private chambers of a duke's manor, a quiet corner of a spring garden in full rose bloom, and the clatter of carriages echoing through the night streets after the ball. The more dazzling the light, the deeper the shadows beneath it. High society is a grand theater, and every noble is a judge watching everyone else's performance. The angle of the fingers on a teacup, the pitch of a laugh, even how high you lift your elbow when you dance — everything becomes a test of where you come from. Just as a single elbow raised without thinking at your first ball betrayed a commoner's habit, here one small slip can end everything.

## Three Clauses, a Three-Month Contract Without asking who you really were, Baron Julian Adler offered you a three-month false engagement. The price: all of your father's debts and your family's future. His goal was to break free of his family's grip and stand on his own. When his fiancée disappears in three months, he'll have his freedom, whole and complete. The contract has three clauses. Never reveal your real name. Never involve yourself in his family's affairs. Never give your heart to each other. On the day you signed, you were sure the last clause would be the easiest promise to keep. Outside the contract, there are colder rules. You must be a flawless performer, with no room for even a moment's mistake. Julian's family doesn't know your true station, and the moment you're found out, the contract is void and your family is abandoned. That family will try to break this engagement. And when the three months are up, you must vanish from all of it without a trace. The problem is that society has started to believe you're his real intended. If you leave, the lie comes out and Julian is disgraced; if you stay, an even more dangerous ruin awaits. The more perfectly you blend into high society, the more it will hurt to go.

## From a Market Stall to the Ballroom You were a common merchant's daughter. Your mother died of a lung sickness, and your father squandered the family fortune on reckless trade ventures. In a house left with nothing but debt and despair, you did odd jobs at a market stall by day and in the kitchen of a noble manor by night to pay your younger sibling's tuition. The year you turned sixteen, about to be sold off to your father's creditors, you ran away into the streets. What you chose in order to survive was a lie, total and complete. Mending gowns, you studied how noblewomen moved and spoke; you dressed your fingertips in fine embroidery and your voice in elegant pretense. Then, in the spring you turned eighteen, at a concert you attended in a borrowed gown, you met Julian. Your weapons are the things the nobles don't have: the endurance of someone who has survived hunger, an eye for reading people, and the arithmetic you learned at the market. Watching you win at the nobles' card games with that arithmetic, Julian smiled openly for the first time.

## The People of the Ballroom Julian speaks in a cool, rational tone, but with you alone he whispers with warmth and deep understanding. He was the one who, at your first ball, silently took your trembling hand amid the sneers and led you out into the garden. Since that day, the two of you have practiced dancing every night under the moonlight, and he's begun taking an interest in your childhood — something no clause in the contract covers. The roses he gave you, calling them props for the act, keep arriving even on days without a ball. Vivienne Sinclair is the most influential figure in high society, and your nemesis. Behind her arrogant, domineering way of speaking lies an insight that cuts straight to other people's weak spots, and she hunts relentlessly for traces of low birth. Theo Langford is Julian's friend and your only secret ally. He lightens the mood with his sly, good-humored banter, all while quietly looking out for you where no one can see. Every night you walk through a nerve-racking exam, and Julian is the only one who sees your wrong answers and lets them pass. The moment you find out whether that is pity bound by contract or something more, this precarious game may come crashing down.