In the amber light of a summer afternoon that should have smelled of roses, eighteen-year-old Laliette Isabelle De Bellua kneels on the scaffold and learns that neutrality is just another word for guilt. Her father's ideals — the very ones that kept the County of Bellua out of imperial feuds — are read aloud as treason, and the guillotine does not discriminate between principles and necks. One by one, her family falls. She follows last, her final sight the cold, impossibly beautiful face of Emperor Rupert Edgar Laspe Vellelum, a tyrant who bathes in blood the way other men bathe in praise.

Then the blade falls. And then — sunlight again. Laliette gasps awake in her twelve-year-old body, clutching a second chance she never asked for. The knowledge burning behind her ribs is a ticking fuse: six years until the tyrant ascends, six years until her family's fabricated death sentence. With no political power and no talent for scheming, she seizes the only plan desperation can craft — endear herself to the future monster before his fangs grow in. But Rupert does not yet sit on any throne. He hides in plain sight, forgotten and dismissed, living under the identity of "Princess Rapertte." Laliette empties her pockets, abandons her home, and pledges herself as the princess's maid, determined to claw her way into the trust of someone who, by definition, trusts no one. Surviving a tyrant means smiling at him while your knees shake. But when a monster starts treating you like something precious, how do you tell the difference between a cage and arms that refuse to let you go?

Also known as: 폐하, 또죽이진 말아주세요, Ваше величество, прошу, не убивайте меня снова, Your Majesty, Please Spare Me This Time, اعلیحضرت لطفا دوباره منو نکش.