Cold iron kisses the back of her neck, and the last thing Aideen sees before the blade falls is the banner of Perdi snapping in a wind that does not mourn her. She was the empire's sharpest blade, the daughter of Duke Glandya, the commander of the Owl assassination squad — and Emperor Raymond repaid a lifetime of loyalty with a staged trial and a guillotine. "I will take revenge on you. I will never forgive you even in death," she snarls into the dark . Then the dark spits her back out. She opens her eyes. She is seventeen again, five years before the scaffold, her neck still intact and her red gaze already burning with the blueprint of destruction. Perdi will fall. Raymond will beg. This she swears.

But a regression does not erase the hunters already circling. The enemy kingdom of Jeldion demands a hostage, and Aideen is dispatched across the border — a fox walking willingly into a den that once cheered for her head. Prince Diceon waits at court with the execution order still warm on his conscience and an unsettling glint in his stare. "You are beautiful, Milady. Especially those red eyes of yours" . He is the man who signed her death in another life, and now he refuses to leave her path, slipping into her schemes with a persistence that feels less like interference and more like a second blade she never saw coming. How does an assassin destroy a homeland when the enemy prince insists on standing so close she cannot tell whether he is the target or the shield?

Also known as: 아이딘, Aidin, Les Ailes de la Chouette, 오울.