Mature

While recovering from an illness in Jiangnan, I had a brief, passionate affair with a scholar.

When it was time for me to return to the capital, I left him a hundred ounces of gold and a letter.

“My mother doesn’t approve of our marriage. It’s better if we part ways.” Two years later, he earned honors in the imperial examinations.

When we met again, his face was clouded with a dark, brooding intensity.

“Was the ‘mother’ you spoke of actually your mother-in-law?”

My mother was the finest embroiderer in the capital.

Even the emperor praised the wedding gown she made for the Princess Royal.

The princess rewarded her lavishly.

That very night, she severed Mother’s hands with golden scissors.

“One gown like this in the world, for me alone, is quite enough.”

Mother’s blood covered the floor.

The princess found it filthy, so she burned our entire residence to the ground, saying the blaze was festive enough to suit her.

On her wedding day, the princess became the most beautiful bride in the capital.

That same year, she became pregnant.

I entered her residence carrying the golden scissors that had killed my mother.

“Your servant has come to offer Your Highness the most beautiful garment of all.”

The year I turned fifteen, I buried my foster mother and entered the imperial palace.

I became a princess.

They said the late empress had cut me from her womb before setting herself on fire.

That I looked exactly like her.

How could I not?

Fifteen years of going hungry at every meal and swallowing medicine every day had seen to that.

At least all that effort had paid off.

I had finally wormed my way into the palace!

After my childhood friend and I registered our marriage, his kept woman sneered at me.

“He doesn’t love you.

This is just an arranged marriage!”

I was speechless.

“It’s a business alliance.

Could you sound any more provincial?”

In this day and age, who worried about love in a marriage like ours?

The only use I had for her sugar daddy was to give me an heir carrying both families’ blood as soon as possible.

As for the man himself, I doubted even our housekeeper, Mrs.

Wu, wanted him home.

I worked on a pleasure boat, making my living at the bottom of society.

One day I found a woman’s body.

While searching her for valuables, I discovered a letter tucked out of sight.

Only then did I realize who this battered, broken girl had been.

I laid a hand over her staring eyes, her body crisscrossed with bruises.

“Don’t worry.

I won’t take your name for nothing.

I’ll avenge you.”

My father was an imperial censor, and nothing mattered to him more than his reputation.

He had fathered me on a prostitute.

Mother and I were the greatest stains on his life, and he would have liked nothing better than to be rid of us.

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.

I was a coward by nature, timid as a quail.

Mother taught me the secret to making a living when you were poor— Do whatever people ask.

I never forgot.

At fourteen, my sister-in-law sold me to a brothel.

As she was leaving, she wiped away her tears.

“Xiaoqiao, I truly can’t bear to part with you.”

So I begged the madam to take her in too.

At seventeen, one of the girls stole my money to run away with a man.

When I caught her, she sobbed, “Xiaoqiao, cut off my hand!”

That night, blood covered the floor.

At twenty, I had saved enough to buy my freedom.

I gave every last coin to Lü Buyu.

We had been lovers for six months, and he had promised to take me away.

Instead, he used the money to redeem Qingyue, who had only just arrived.

He knelt before me.

“Xiaoqiao, she’s so pitiful.

I can’t watch her sink into this mire.”

“Or you could just kill me.”

Chapter 0

I am the most low-maintenance Canary in the Shanghai Circle’s elite social scene.

On the surface, I have no interest in causing trouble; in reality, I am single-mindedly focused on making money.

Everything the Big Boss gives me, I liquidate.

Stocks, bonds, and physical investments-I let the money breed more money, compounding the interest.

I secretly invested in his rival’s company and even took the opportunity to acquire shares in the Big Boss’s own firm.

On the day the truth finally came out, the Big Boss looked at my thick stack of asset reports and let out a cold laugh.

“Other Canaries want to climb the social ladder and take a seat at the table,” he said. “You, on the other hand, want to usurp the throne.”

I was a very bad merman.

I used my song to lure in a blind human.

He was an honest sort.

I wasn’t.

Once I tired of him, I threw him away.

I was about to lure in someone else when a wave knocked me senseless.

An enormous tail coiled around me, and someone laughed darkly.

“Darling, of all places, why did you have to run into the sea?”

“Didn’t I tell you it would be dangerous?”

He pressed a hand to my hot belly.

“If it weren’t for our jiaoren baby, I’d never have found you.”

Wait.

Our what baby?