My Step-Daughters Are The Villainesses

Ulrich watched Camellia walk away.

Her guards kept their distance around her as she returned toward the waiting nobles, and the people nearest the dance floor immediately shifted to receive her.

Camellia answered them as she had been taught.

She inclined her head at the correct moments, received their congratulation, and listened with the patient attention expected of Kaliantha’s daughter. From across the ballroom, nothing in her behavior appeared changed.

Yet Ulrich had seen the hesitation in her eyes before she left.

He wondered whether he had involved himself where no involvement was needed.

The thought came with more irritation than regret. He had not planned to say those things. Camellia had merely stopped in front of him, and the words had left his mouth before he could decide whether they served any useful purpose.

For those few minutes, he had not felt like Ulrich Van Rubenhart.

Silas’s memories had always been there: the novel’s Chapters, the future events, the knowledge of people who had not yet become what the story made of them. Usually, Ulrich treated those memories as tools. They gave him an advantage. They revealed dangers before they arrived, exposed weaknesses that others could not see, and allowed him to prepare for events that should have caught him unaware.

But Camellia had made that distance collapse.

He had remembered her as Silas remembered her.

Not as the young princess standing with guards at her back and living warmth in her face, but as the girl whose life had unfolded across hundreds of Chapters. He remembered the colder Camellia who emerged afterward.

Silas had read some of her thoughts.

He had known how often she had looked at portraits of her mother and wondered whether she could ever become someone worthy of Kaliantha’s name. He had known the exhaustion beneath the discipline, the fear of disappointing a dead woman whom the entire kingdom had turned into an ideal.

Now that same girl had stood before Ulrich, younger by years, still untouched by a loss.

Of course he had spoken.

If he knew where the road ended, doing nothing at its beginning would have been stupidity.

The novel’s true story would not begin for another three years. That left him time, if he was clever enough to use it, to interfere with the events that had ruined people long before the protagonist ever met them.

He had already changed Ceres’s fate.

Camellia was another matter. She stood far closer to the center of the coming story. She was THE female lead, the woman who would eventually walk beside the protagonist through the kingdom’s conflicts, betrayals, and wars. Touching her path might alter far more than one person’s future.

It might alter everything.

Ulrich saw no reason to treat that as a warning.

Kaliantha’s assassination had never needed to happen. Camellia had never needed to endure years of grief merely to become strong enough for the plot assigned to her. If Ulrich could save Kaliantha and make Camellia question the burden being placed upon her before it hardened into a cage, then he would have done something worthwhile.

The story would change for the good.

A future written through suffering deserved to be changed.

That did not mean he intended to interfere in every life he recognized. He had neither the time nor the patience to shepherd every character away from every hardship. Some people would reject help. Some would grow through pain in ways he could not predict. Others would become worse no matter what he did.

Still, he had seen too clearly what the world’s cruelty had done to those least suited to carry it.

Camellia was one of them.

In the novel, her mother’s death had taught her to close herself off. She had become colder, more cautious, and harder to reach. There had been strength in that transformation. Ulrich understood the appeal of walls better than most. His own were higher, older, and built for reasons he had no interest in explaining to anyone.

But Camellia was not him.

She was too open-hearted by nature. She cared too easily. She looked at people and saw their troubles before she saw their usefulness. If she forced herself into Kaliantha’s image and buried every wish that did not fit a princess’s duty, the person beneath that image would slowly disappear.

Her kindness would survive, perhaps.

It would simply become guarded, exhausted, and reluctant to show itself.

Ulrich thought of Esther.

There was a similarity. Esther’s gentleness had already been tested by people who considered her a witch before they considered her a child. In the novel, the world had continued that work until the soft-hearted girl became someone capable of looking at suffering without mercy, even when it belonged to children.

Ulrich had no desire to watch the same process repeat itself with Camellia.

People were not born into darkness as if it were a bloodline. They were pushed there, piece by piece, until bitterness became easier to carry than grief. Some discovered they preferred it. Others only lost themselves inside it.

Camellia did not belong there.

She deserved the chance to remain kind without being made weak by it.

Across the hall, she offered a courteous response to an older noblewoman, but her attention faltered for the briefest instant. Her emerald eyes moved past the woman’s shoulder and found Ulrich standing near the pillars.

The glance lasted only a second. Her attention had drifted from the noblewoman speaking before her, and the smile she wore for the court had faded enough for Ulrich to see that her thoughts remained elsewhere.

On him and his words.

The instant their eyes met, Camellia turned away.

She recovered quickly. Her expression settled back into the gentle, faultless courtesy expected of a princess, and she returned her attention to the older woman with a soft apology. Whatever had occupied her mind vanished behind the graceful smile she had learned to give without effort.

Ulrich watched her only long enough to confirm that she had regained her composure.

Then he turned away.

He had wasted enough time.

The assassin was still somewhere in the hall. Every exchange, every dance, every moment spent staring at Camellia or thinking about the future Silas had read was another moment in which the demons could arrange their move.

Ulrich began to scan the nearest groups of guests again.

"Addressing the Princess so informally is punishable."

The voice came from directly behind him.

Ulrich turned.

At first, he saw no one before he lowered his gaze.

Astrid Van Gravenberg stood before him, staring up at him.

His expression twisted before he could stop it.

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