At the Mercer family's winter gala, my brother announced that he would never marry Adrian Vale, the wheelchair-using heir everyone called a monster. Then my father turned to me, the son he had just found, and offered me my brother's place. I knew the scene from a novel I had read before waking in the body of Theodore Mercer. In that story, Adrian became the villain, my brother inherited the family, and I died before the wedding. I could refuse the engagement and walk away. But Adrian was watching me as if he already knew what I was going to say, and I wasn't sure the story had ever told the truth about him.