Reincarnated As The Duke`s Fiancée

Rain was the last thing I heard.

It beat against the window with a patience that felt almost cruel, each drop tapping the glass as if it had all the time in the world. English rain never rushed. It lingered, soaked into brick and bone, seeped into everything until there was no clear line between the cold outside and the cold already living in your chest. From three stories below came the hiss of tires slicing through wet asphalt, distant and indifferent.

I lay on a mattress shoved against the wall of my bedsit, staring at a ceiling light that flickered with a tired, uneven hum. It buzzed, dimmed, brightened again, like it might give out before I did. I found myself watching it with mild curiosity, the way one watches a stranger on the train. Detached. Already halfway gone.

The room smelled like the sum total of my existence. Damp laundry that never quite dried. Cheap instant noodles. The faint metallic tang of an electric heater that rattled and groaned while giving off more noise than warmth. Everything in the room had been acquired second-hand or not at all. A wobbly table rescued from a charity shop. A kettle that clicked and shuddered violently when it boiled, as though protesting its continued service. A clock on the wall that ticked too loudly, counting out hours I could never quite afford.

Rooms like this had followed me my entire life, temporary spaces that somehow became permanent by accident. Places meant for passing through, never settling. And yet here I was, settled in the most final way imaginable.

I had started working young. Not because anyone praised ambition or drive, but because hunger is persuasive and landlords are patient only until they are not. By my early teens I understood time in shifts and pay cycles, in how many hours it took to earn a meal. Warehouse jobs under fluorescent lights that leached colour from the world and left my thoughts feeling bleached and thin. Delivery routes that ruined my knees long before they had any right to complain. Night security shifts where the silence pressed so hard against my chest it felt like something might crack inside me.

Zero-hour contracts. Temporary solutions. Always the next shift, the next bill, the next quiet panic waiting just around the corner.

People liked to talk about dignity in labour. About honest work and simple lives. They’d never lived one. There was no poetry in trading hours of your life for the bare minimum needed to keep breathing. No romance in knowing that if you vanished, the only person who might notice would be your landlord, and even then, only when the payment failed to arrive.

There was no one to call. No one waiting on the other end of the line. No hand to hold, no voice to tell me it would be all right.

When the pain came, it was almost a relief.

It didn’t explode through my chest like in the