Sarahjnolin
Mia Sun always finished a bad manuscript with a red pen and a list of notes. She never expected to wake up inside one.
One minute she's an overworked Chicago editor falling asleep mid-chapter of a mediocre web novel; the next, she's Elodie Vasari - the disposable ex-fiancée of Duke Cassian Ashgrave, four days out from the humiliating public breakup that's supposed to send her spiraling into a quiet, tragic death by chapter twenty. Mia has read this book. She gave it two stars. And she has absolutely no intention of dying to make someone else's love story more poignant.
Armed with an editor's eye for plot holes, thirteen years of a life nobody bothered to notice, and zero patience for melodrama, Mia starts pulling apart the story stitch by stitch - auditing her own dowry, interrogating her fiancé like a difficult author, and discovering that the "true love" subplot she's been written out of was never as inevitable as the narrative wanted her to believe. Someone built this romance on purpose. Someone's been paying for the ending.
As Mia digs into the conspiracy behind Cassian's engagement, she finds herself doing the one thing the book never planned for: actually getting to know the cold, dutiful duke underneath his carefully managed reputation - banter first, feelings a stubborn, reluctant second. Funny, sharp, and quietly tender, The Duke's Second Draft is a slow-burn romance about refusing to be a footnote in your own story, and rewriting the ending until it finally, properly, belongs to you.