THE LATE DUKE’S WILL

The headache pulled me awake before the light did.

A pale golden glow, soft, filtering through heavy velvet curtains, fell across a ceiling carved with clusters of grapes in gilded plaster.

I lay still for a long time, just staring at that ceiling, trying to work out why my twenty-eight-square-meter flat in Shoreditch had turned into something out of a museum.

Then the memories hit — not gradually, but all at once, like a door kicked open: my name was Isabelle von Hartmann.

Twenty-eight years old.

Reigning Duchess of Aldenburg, a small domain nestled between two ranges of vine-covered hills, where the river Ilme wound past grey stone villages that had stood for four hundred years.

And tonight, at seven o’clock sharp, in the hall below, my fiancé — Duke Konrad Ashfeld — would stand before the entire family council and announce the end of an engagement that had lasted ten years.

I sat up, my hands trembling slightly — that tremor belonged to Isabelle, a bodily reflex I had just inherited along with her memories — while the part of me that still remembered being a CFO at an investment fund in London tried to make sense of an entire stranger’s life that had just poured into my head in under a minute.

The door opened softly.

Greta — the maid who had served Isabelle since she was twelve — came in with a tea tray, her walk so familiar that Isabelle’s memory recognized her instantly.

“You’re awake, my lady.” Greta set the tray down, her eyes searching my face.

“You… look different somehow.”

“I’m fine.” I heard my own voice come out, still Isabelle’s voice, but the rhythm of it had changed.

I got up from the bed and let Greta help me dress for the hall below.

Just before I stepped out of the room, a fragment of Isabelle’s memory surfaced more clearly than the rest — nothing dramatic, just an offhand remark at this year’s summer banquet, when a wine merchant from Cologne had raised his glass in a toast: “This year’s Aldenburg harvest is the finest I’ve bought in ten years, my lady.” Isabelle had simply smiled back then and thought nothing more of it.

But the report Uncle Friedrich presented to the council that spring described the harvest as “only average, lower than the year before.” At the time, Isabelle hadn’t paid it any mind — she had never once read a financial report closely in her life.

Now, with the eyes of someone who had once pored over thousands of pages of ledgers in London, those two statements scraped against each other loudly in my head.

“Greta,” I said, my voice already different — no longer curious and probing, but the voice of someone who had just decided not to let this pass unquestioned the way it had every year before.

“Tell me. Where is last year’s harvest ledger being kept?”

Greta paused, the tray tilting slightly in her hands.

“The ledger… it’s in Count Friedrich’s study, my lady. But you’ve never before—”

“I know.” I cut her off, softening my tone when I saw her look startled.

“But this year, I want to see it.”