Josei

My boyfriend was ruthless and vicious, with no end of evil deeds to his name.

And he had a childhood friend who was every bit as wicked.

Two of a kind, they joined forces and left the whole of Haicheng in turmoil.

I was his kindhearted girlfriend, destined to die young.

His wicked childhood friend had a first love too—a reserved, upright man with little time left to live.

After he and I died, the two villains would finally see the error of their ways, mourn us, comfort each other, and spend the rest of their lives fabulously wealthy.

When I became aware of the plot, I was gently trying to reason with my boyfriend.

“They helped you before.

Why do you have to destroy them completely?”

He lazily lifted his eyelids.

“Kindness is the most useless thing in the world.

And so are you, Ruoruo.”

I froze for a moment.

Then I lowered my eyes to the message I had just received.

[Want to set a time to look at burial plots together?]

At twenty-five, I arranged for Bighead Xiao to take his first concubine.

Her dowry was an entire city.

At twenty-six, I arranged the second.

Her dowry was ten li of granaries.

At forty-two, he took his eighteenth.

There were so many women that I could no longer remember their names.

And I had gone from a farmer’s wife to the founding empress of Great Zhao.

There were no domineering male leads here—only sweet boys with softer tempers, bigger pecs, broader shoulders, and a height over 180 centimeters.

An old-fashioned girl like me had somehow become the decent woman everyone was fighting over.

They said any woman who could resist staring at a man’s pecs had to be a good woman.

On my first day in the Duke of Liang’s household, my stepdaughter threw her ceremonial tea onto the floor, and my stepson threatened to have me cast out.

I drenched her with a teapot and took a ruler to his hand.

When their father asked what had happened, I told him I was merely teaching the children our household’s rules.

Everyone says a stepmother’s lot is hard.

But this household would recognize only one mistress: me.

During the palace coup, I saved more than forty members of the Jiang household.

Afterward, the emperor asked what reward I wished for.

I knelt before him.

“This commoner wishes to enter the palace.”

The moment I spoke, the bright fire in the eyes of the Jiang family’s second son, standing beside His Majesty, died to ash.

My betrothed had become entangled in a love affair in Yangzhou.

The woman was a courtesan named Li Pengpeng, the most celebrated beauty in the city’s pleasure quarters.

She bought her freedom and stood alone outside the Xie family’s ancestral residence, waiting in silence for an entire month before she was finally granted an audience with Old Madam Xie.

In the end, a sedan chair carried her into a house on Four Wells Lane.

When I reached the capital, I happened to hear that she and Xie Shijing had held a proper wedding feast.

They went everywhere together, basking in their newfound glory.

Though only his mistress, she enjoyed all the privileges of a lawful wife.

Everyone in Shangjing was watching for my humiliation.

Occasionally someone voiced indignation on my behalf, but other voices soon drowned them out.

Some busybodies even opened a betting pool, wagering that I would swallow the insult.

After all, the Song family of Luochuan had long since fallen from its former standing, while the Xies were a pillar of the imperial court.

On the day the betting began, I went alone to the Xie family’s principal residence, just as Li Pengpeng had done.

I had not come to demand justice.

I had come to end the engagement.

Xie Shijing was unworthy of being my husband.

Seven years after he forced me into marriage, my domineering CEO husband fell in love with someone else.

I wasn’t worried.

His sister, on the other hand, was so anxious she burst into tears.

“If you get divorced, what are Song Yu and I supposed to do?”

Song Yu.

The name sounded so familiar.

He was, if I remembered correctly, the childhood sweetheart I’d been dating before I married Gu Zeyan.

When my mother married Wang the Mute, she was already carrying me.

Everyone in the neighborhood had advice for him.

Some told him to get rid of the bastard with a strong dose of medicine.

Others told him to write a divorce letter and throw my mother out.

Wang only smiled, turned around, and sent for the best midwife for miles.

Then I was born.

My husband found my long-lost cousin in a brothel, dying of a venereal disease.

She took one look at my happy life and decided I had stolen it from her.

I was never an impostor: my mother had given me to my grieving aunt in adoption when I was five.

For nine years, I had been made to soothe a woman who resented my happiness.

Now my husband expected me to sacrifice myself for my cousin too.

I was done paying for everyone else’s guilt.

This time, I would take what they owed me—and leave with my daughter.

The day I decided not to get married, Chen Shuo was at the market buying a bass.

He sent me a photo and asked, “This one’s nine hundred grams.

Too big?

Mum said you liked it steamed.”

I stared at the fish lying in its plastic basket for ten or fifteen seconds, then replied, “Chen Shuo, let’s not register our marriage next week.”

He probably thought I was stressed about the wedding again.

After a while, he replied, “Sure.

We can push it back.

You’ve been busy with your project lately anyway, haven’t you?”

I said, “I don’t mean push it back.”

There was nothing from him for two minutes.

“What do you mean?”

I put my phone facedown on my desk and didn’t answer.

At 4:27 that afternoon, I was sitting in a windowless meeting room with a final account for a construction project worth forty-seven million yuan spread out before me.

The printer kept spitting out paper next door.

The air vent hummed overhead.

My supervisor, Wei, was arguing with the contractor’s people over a hundred and seventy thousand yuan in additional works claims.

Everything was ordinary.

So ordinary it hardly seemed like the afternoon a woman had decided to cancel her wedding.

No one had been caught cheating.

There had been no slap, no other woman, no sudden revelation of anyone’s true colours.

Chen Shuo hadn’t betrayed me.

He was, by most standards, a decent man.

He didn’t smoke, didn’t throw money around, wasn’t violent, and had no interest in going out for what men called “a night with the boys.”

If you drew up a job specification for a suitable husband, he’d score eighty-five out of a hundred.

So everyone asked me, “Then why on earth won’t you marry him?”

That turned out to be the hardest question to answer.

Because when an adult truly wants to leave a relationship, there often isn’t one devastating piece of evidence against the other person.

Just one small bill after another.

And suddenly you realise that, for seven years, every one of those bills has had your name on it.