One

MY NAME USED TO BE ANNA LE BEAUMONT, back when I was a normal female human being living in York, England. By how I began this sentence, you can tell that something changed drastically, right? Well, it did, indeed. Back there, I lived quite a troublesome life.

I was the tenth daughter out of a family of ten kids, all raised by a couple of two women. Rebecca Le Beaumont and Mary Saint Le Beaumont married each other at the age of 24 and founded a tech company that made them billionaires. And so, when they were both 31, they began adopting me and my siblings, two per year, always a couple. 5 girls and 5 boys.

When it was my turn, I was 2 years old, and they adopted me together with my fraternal older twin brother, Austin, who hated my existence because our biological mother died when she gave birth to us, so, he blames me because I was the last one to come out, 14 minutes after him. And that bastard made my life miserable. Being easygoing as he was, he easily became our two moms' favorite, as well as the favorite sibling of our other eight siblings.

All of that, so he could make them turn their back on me. It was very fucked up. Especially when he made all of them constantly beat me up, for all the mistakes he committed and blamed on me.

What a fucking hell that was. Even in elementary school, middle school, and high school, he became the most popular boy around and made all of them bully the shit out of me. But it wasn't like I was unable to fight, because I had attended martial arts classes weekly since I was a little child. After all, my siblings liked to beat me up "fairly". However, if I ever fought back, be it in school or at the mansion, my punishment would be worse.

Because of that, I always spent my free time reading in the farthest room from any of them, since our mansion was beyond huge. Until I turned 21, when I became legally an adult, that was my only escape from all of that. But then I did what anyone would have done in my position, and in the first opportunity I found, I ran away from York.

Not just from York, but from England. After I found out who my biological father was, since I had no memories of him whatsoever, and I was never able to ask Austin about it, I learned how to hack and I did my research until I found him. And to my surprise, he was from Switzerland, and so I moved there, which wasn't a problem since I knew how to speak German.

But, he wasn't a good person. When two months passed, he stopped acting friendly and began to beat me up just as much as my adopted family and Austin did. It was hell all over again. However, this time I fought back since there was nothing to make me stop.

Then I ran away once again, on the night of my 22nd birthday. Nonetheless, this time I went to Sydney, Australia, since I still had a lot of money in my private bank account from my secret time investing in stocks. Again, it wasn't a good choice, because the night I arrived at the airport, there was a terrorist attempt happening, and I died with a bullet in my forehead, without ever knowing what peace or love was like.

22 years of misery ended just like that.

And when I finally thought my soul would get some rest, God played with me and made me reincarnate in another damn world, into a toxic family again. I still had mean siblings and parents who hated me, but the family was of noble status and rich.

To my advantage or not, while I had no idea of what the future held for me in my past life as Anna, this time I was reborn into the world of a typical historical fantasy story. And to my happiness, I was neither the female lead of the novel nor the villainess. The second I was reborn as Hope Ariella Bissonnette, daughter of Count Stefan Bissonnette with his first wife, Late-Countess Yolande Bissonnette, I became a random side character who has no lines in the novel, only a brief mention.

Have I mentioned that this body has a ridiculous amount of mana? Which is what they call magic here. But I kept it a secret from all the members of this absurd family, or they would try to use me for their schemes, and there's no way in hell I'm letting that happen.

Also, I don't have any idea from who I inherited such an IQ, but this body has an IQ that can't be marked as less than 190 or something. And I'm not talking about myself, but about the latent potential of the body, I was reborn in. Which is quite funny since those people have the intelligence of a bunch of donkeys.

Maybe it was from my mother who died. It seems like my soul is destined to always lose my mother while she gave birth to me. At least in this life, I don't have any twin sibling or full-blooded sibling who blames me for it, since I'm the only daughter the Count had with my mother. My three half-siblings are all his offsprings with his mistress, Lorena Bissonnette, who married him right three years after my mom died.

Just to make it clear that I'm the youngest child, which means, when all of my siblings were born, they were all bastards. And so, the title of Countess should rightfully pass down to me. However, my stepmother Lorena always tries her best to make me look bad, so my father will make Kaio, his first son with the bitch, the heir.

Kaio Bissonnette is 4 years older than me, while the twins, Leopold and Cecilia Bissonnette are both three months older than me. And they all loathe me to the core. Especially because I'm the best at literally everything. Be it in martial arts (thanks to my training in my past life as Anna), swordsmanship, dancing, sewing, etiquette, studying, cooking, drawing, playing musical instruments, foreign languages, and physical visuals as well.

So much that Lorena, that scheming fox, hates the fact that I'm the only one who's the spitting image of dad with my mom's body. Possessing wavy black-pitch hair, snowy flawless skin, bright amethyst-ish purple eyes, a small and thin nose, a mole right under my left eye, deep dimples in both cheeks, wide shoulders, a thin waist, curvy hip, long and curvy bow legs, and heart-shaped lips with the bottom being fuller than the top.

Not to mention that I'm taller in a charming way, and when I entered puberty I also evolved my mother's big and wide chest, which was a surprise to me, since in my first life I was short like a dwarf and had micro-boobies and always dreamed of having big ones and being at least 5'7. Both dreams came true. Seriously, I was born with gold genes.

The only problem is the fact that my family in this life is also trash.

My siblings constantly bullied me, but it didn't really hurt, it was just incredibly annoying. The real problem was that my father's magic was ridiculously powerful, and he also has super strength, so when he tortured me, it was hard to avoid. And he constantly did that.

And opposite to the 21st Century on earth, here, on the continent of D'Amboise, and the Kingdom of Desormeaux, we don't have such a freedom of being able to do whatever we want with our lives after we reach adulthood. Especially if we are women. So, I had to plan something else to be able to get away from them, but in a way that I wouldn't end up at the hands of someone worse.

So, I decided to do something I never thought I would do… The only choice I realized I had was to get away from them and still live a good life without having to move out of the Kingdom since I was already familiar with it and had some fame… and that was to get married to a wealthy and bearable man.