The S class Guide belongs to the Duke

~Chapter 1~

Elewisa had always believed she would repay the man who served her. She never imagined she would die trying to do it.

Pain came first — a dull, pounding throb at the back of her skull, keeping time with her heartbeat, and then came the dark.

Elewisa's eyes snapped open to nothing. Cloth pressed against her face, coarse and suffocating, stinking of dust and old grain. Her wrists burned where rope bit into skin, crossed behind her back, and when she tried to cry out, only a muffled whimper escaped past the gag cutting into the corners of her mouth. Her feet were bound too, ankles lashed so tight she couldn't feel her toes. The world rocked beneath her — she was being carried, slung over someone's shoulder like a sack of grain, jostled with every step.

The tea. That was the last clear thing she remembered — steam curling off Master Caius's evening cup, the corridor outside his study, the sound of footsteps behind her a heartbeat before something struck the back of her head and the world went black.

She tried to twist, to get some sense of where she was, and the movement betrayed her. A hand shoved against the sack hard enough to knock the air from her lungs.

"She's awake." The voice was hushed, but Elewisa knew it instantly — knew the particular, cruel lilt of it the way she knew her own name. Petra. Years of scrubbed floors and stolen meals and bruises explained away as clumsiness had taught her every one of Petra's voices, and this one, low and delighted, was the worst of them.

"Keep her quiet," Petra hissed, and beside her, another voice — softer, more hesitant — murmured something Elewisa couldn't catch. Sable, maybe. There was always a Sable. Someone willing to help and too afraid to stop.

Elewisa's whole body strained against the ropes, an animal panic clawing up her throat. Someone help me. Someone see this. But the only ones close enough to see were the ones who'd done this to her, and they had spent six years teaching her exactly how little that meant.

She thought of Caius — the warmth of his study in the evenings, the rare, unguarded way he sometimes looked at her when he thought she wasn't watching. She had promised herself long ago that she would never abandon that debt, never abandon him, not while she still drew breath. Whatever this was, whatever Petra intended, Elewisa refused to believe it would end here, in the dark, in a sack that smelled of old grain and cruelty.

The rope at her ankles was looser than the one at her wrists. If she could just —

"She's moving," Petra snapped, and everything went still. Elewisa froze mid-motion, breath caught behind the gag, heart slamming so hard she was certain they could hear it. "Careful," Petra murmured, quieter now, almost gentle, which was somehow worse than her cruelty ever was. "We don't want her waking the whole estate before we're done."

Done with what? Elewisa didn't have time to finish the thought.

The world tilted violently. Hands seized the sack — she felt herself lifted, swung once, twice, weightless for one horrible, suspended second —

Then she was falling.

The impact of the water hit her like a wall of stone, cold enough to steal the scream still trapped behind her gag. It closed over her in an instant, dragging her down, and understanding arrived with brutal clarity: the river. They had thrown her into the river. bound, gagged, blind — and they had meant for her not to come back up.

Survival instinct did what fear could not. Her fingers, numb and clumsy, found the knot at her wrists and clawed at it with a desperation that bordered on madness. The rope bit deeper before it finally gave, and she tore the gag from her mouth, swallowing a mouthful of river water for her trouble. No time to cough it out. No time for anything but her feet, still bound, her lungs already screaming.

The knot at her ankles fought her longer than the first had. Her vision blurred at the edges, dark spots blooming, and still she worked at it, nails splitting, lungs burning, until it finally slipped loose. She kicked free of the sack's mouth, clawing toward a surface she could no longer see, no longer sure which direction was up —

And then the rope around her leg pulled taut, yanking her back down like a hand closing around her ankle.

She twisted, panicked, and found it in the murky dark — a length of rope still tangled around her calf, tethered to the stone they'd used to sink her, tethered to the sack she'd only just escaped. Her fingers tore at the knot uselessly. It wouldn't give. Her lungs had nothing left to bargain with.

Something glinted, catching what little light bled down through the water — small, smooth, impossibly bright against the black. She grabbed for it without thinking, some animal part of her recognizing an edge, a chance, and found the stone had one sharp face, almost like it had been shaped for exactly this. She sawed at the rope with the last of her strength, one strand, two, the world narrowing to a single point of white-hot need.

Almost. Almost —

Her body betrayed her first. The last of her air left in a silent, involuntary gasp, water rushing in to take its place, and the burning in her chest dissolved into something worse — a terrible, floating calm.

Is this it?

Her parents' faces rose out of the dark behind her eyes, soft and unclear the way old grief always was, the Gate that had swallowed their lives into fire and screaming light. And then, brighter, closer — the man who had pulled her from that same kind of ruin all those years ago, and the boy beside him who had held her hand until she stopped shaking. Caius. Her master. Her light.

Not yet. The thought rose up fierce and furious even as her body stopped fighting. I haven't paid you back. Not yet. It isn't my time.

Please, she begged whatever goddess might be listening, the words forming without sound, without breath, without hope. Let me go back to him. Let me repay the boy who held my hand.

The stone in her palm pulsed once, warm against her failing grip.

Then there was nothing at all.

The river 's surface broke violently as a figure cut through the water toward the place she'd gone under, moving with the ruthless speed of someone who had already decided failure wasn't an option. Strong arms found her in the dark, hauled her up and out, and within moments they broke the surface together, her body limp and unresponsive against his.

He laid her on the bank without gentleness — there wasn't time for gentleness — pressing his ear to her lips, her chest, searching for any sign of breath and finding none. His hands moved fast, practiced, driving down against her sternum in the rhythm every soldier learned and prayed never to use.

Nothing.

He bent and breathed air into her lungs, once, twice, pulling back to press against her chest again, water sheeting off them both onto the grass. Her skin had gone the pale, waxen white of something already gone, her lips a bloodless blue, her body as cold under his hands as the river itself.

"Come on," he muttered, low and furious, more to himself than to her. He tried again — compressions, breath, compressions — his own chest heaving now, adrenaline burning through exhaustion. Still nothing. No cough, no gasp, no flutter of movement beneath her closed lids.

He sat back on his heels at last, breath ragged, dragging a hand through his soaked hair in a gesture that was equal parts grief and disbelief. Whatever composure he'd carried into the water had drowned somewhere beneath the surface with her.

He didn't notice the faint glow beginning to bloom from her open palm.

Once.

Twice.

Then a third time—so faint it could have been nothing more than reflected moonlight.

But the light didn't disappear.

It flickered again.

As though something inside her had just opened its eyes.