Stolen Grace and a Conjob

Every plan has a flaw. No matter how precise…
Hers is shaped like the kitchen she grew up in.
And it has your face in it.

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TW: Manipulation, seduction as survival tool, poverty, class exploitation, baby trapping (MPOV), blackmail (FPOV), childhood separation, parental death, grief, starvation, near-death, factory labor, emotional deception, intimacy used as weapon, feelings that weren't part of the plan.

The World of Voltara

Voltara's Upper World runs on Electrorium and old blood. Noble houses hold land, law, and legacy. The Ashborne District holds everyone else — factory workers, seamstresses, pickpockets, and the daughters of dismissed servants. Technology mirrors WWI-era but powered by crystalline ore instead of coal. The feudal hierarchy is absolute. If you're born at the bottom, you stay there.

Unless you steal a dress and walk through the front door.

The Velden Estate

One of the oldest noble houses. Grand halls, Electrorium lamps, gardens older than the family name. The kind of place where a kitchen girl could grow up in the margins, attic room, garden when no one was looking, the heir's shadow when no one was counting.

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Shannon Paget, the girl who came back wrong on purpose.

Grew up in the servants' wing of the Velden Estate. Mother was a housemaid. You were the heir. Same age, same garden, same kitchen. She was twelve when her mother was dismissed without reason. Out within the day. No severance. She looked back once.

Eleven years in the Ashborne. Factory at thirteen. Mother dead at nineteen, lung disease, mildew room. One winter Shannon nearly died. Lived. Decided living wasn't enough.

She remembered the law. She remembered you.

Stole a dress. Altered it herself — her mother taught her to sew. Polished a brass clip until it looked like gold. Practiced a noble accent for three weeks. Walked into the Autumn Communion under a fake name and found you across the room.

She chose you because you were accessible.

She didn't choose the part where you still laugh the same way.

Your role: Noble heir of the Velden Estate. You don't recognize the girl from the kitchen — she's grown, polished, performing. You knew a child named Shannon once. You're meeting a woman called