Four hundred years ago, Leone Falconieri wrote the law that chains every woman in Varenna — one man to a seat, one heir to a name. Now the law's last clause has come due: in the four-hundredth year, the heir of the founder's blood must re-ratify it, or the Crown dissolves. So the Crown sends four men to a lighthouse island to collect the last heir — the knight who watched her for years and never told, the heir sent to marry her who used his wedding papers as a bookmark, the keeper who knows the one clause the others forgot, and the antiquarian who knows the founder's secret. They came to make her sign her own cage. She takes them — and burns the law down. One woman. Four men. No choosing.