Pain.

That was the last thing she remembered.

The cold pavement, the scent of blood in the air, the distant murmurs of people who didn’t care enough to help. Her body broken, her vision fading, her mind clinging to the last thought that had haunted her for years—

"Was I ever truly meant to exist?"

Then everything went dark.

She had always been invisible.

Her parents had never wanted her. She was just a shadow in their grand, perfect lives—a child born not out of love but duty, raised in a house too large, too cold, too empty. She grew up in silence, in loneliness, in the quiet knowledge that nothing she did would ever make them look at her with warmth.

She had once believed that love could fill that emptiness.

And so, she had loved.

She had watched over him, the man who had unknowingly become her entire world. He had been brilliant, untouchable, the kind of person everyone admired but no one truly understood.

She had understood.

She had seen him at his lowest, stood in the shadows when he needed someone, protected him from afar without expecting anything in return. She had believed—foolishly, desperately—that if she loved him enough, he would notice her one day.

But he never did.

And she had died watching him love someone else.

---

When she opened her eyes again, she was somewhere familiar yet distant.

A grand chandelier hung above her, its golden light casting long shadows on the elegant walls. The heavy scent of jasmine filled the air, and in the polished mirror across the room, a girl stared back at her.

A girl she knew all too well.

The same long, dark hair, the same tired brown eyes, the same delicate features that had never been enough to make anyone stay.

She had been reborn.

Not in another world.

Not as someone new.

But back in the same life she had once lost.

The same life that had been nothing but suffering.

Her breath caught in her throat as memories crashed into her like a tidal wave.

Her cold, distant family. The love she had given so freely yet never received. The man she had spent her life protecting from the sidelines, only to be cast aside like she was invisible.

But now, she knew the truth.

This world was just a novel.

Her pain, her suffering, her miserable fate—they were nothing more than ink on a page, written to highlight the brilliance of the real heroine and male lead.

She clenched her fists.

Not this time.

This time, she wouldn’t beg for love. She wouldn’t play her role as the tragic background character. If the world wanted her to be the villainess, then she would embrace it.

Because broken ink no longer followed the writer’s hand.

It shattered fate itself.

---

And yet…

A bitter laugh slipped past her lips as she sat up in bed, her fingers trembling against the silk sheets.

There was one thing the writer had never told her.

One thing she had only realized after her death.

The man she had loved. The one she had watched over, protected from the shadows. The one who had never once looked at her, never once acknowledged her existence—

He was the real male lead.

Not the man who had proposed to someone else that night.

Not the man she had wasted her life waiting for.

But the one who had stood in the distance, watching her without ever stepping forward.

The one whose eyes had been empty when they lowered her coffin into the ground.

The one who had finally spoken her name—too late, when she was already gone.

Her chest tightened.

If this world was truly a novel, then she had played her role perfectly.

She had been a fool who loved blindly.

She had been a pawn, written to be abandoned, to suffer, to die forgotten.

But now that she knew the truth…

She would burn the entire story to the ground.