Arranged Marriage

On the second day of the tenth lunar month, the great warlord Lu Zhi took a second concubine: Song Anran, the youngest daughter of the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce.

Lu Zhi had made a name for himself in recent years.

He had won battle after battle, commanded a formidable army, and wielded immense power—but surely not so much that the chairman of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce would deliver his own daughter to him as a concubine.

Oh, but it was.

My father did exactly that.

My elder sister disappeared when she was little, but fortune favored her: the Yong’an Marquis household took her in and raised her with every comfort.

By the time she returned to us, our mother had already arranged one marriage for her, while the marquis household had promised her to someone else.

One man was the adoptive brother who had grown up beside her; the other, her childhood betrothed.

Unable to let either go, she proposed a compromise: she would marry whichever man found the jade hairpin she hid.

The day she hid hers, however, she hid mine as well.

In my last life, Wei Heng found a hairpin first, but the one in his hand belonged to me.

The smile had barely touched his lips when her adoptive brother said coldly, “You cannot even recognize Ah Zhi’s hairpin. I suppose that leaves you no choice but to marry Ranran.”

After we married, every quarrel between my sister and her husband sent her running to Wei Heng in tears.

His heart ached for her, and his old regret never faded.

“If you had married me,” he would murmur, “I would never have made you cry. Not even once.”

I found them together beneath the moon, composing poems, and side by side among the spring blossoms.

Whenever I showed the slightest displeasure, Wei Heng called me jealous and narrow-minded, saying I could never match my sister’s poetry or painting.

Now I had returned to the day Wei Heng picked up my hairpin.

I held out my hand.

“Young Master Wei, Mother is already considering matches for me. Please return my hairpin.”

“Fine. I’ll marry him.” I raised my hand from behind the other princesses.

Father had many daughters, but his favorite was Princess Changning, his eldest and the only daughter born to the Empress.

I was the most inconspicuous of them all; Father had probably forgotten I existed.

My father’s favored concubine trained my younger sister in all the arts of the pleasure quarters, convinced it would help her secure a man’s heart.

When I came of age, she proposed that Yuniang marry alongside me as an accompanying concubine.

There was only one flaw in her plan.

As the Qiao family’s legitimate eldest daughter and future head, I was never marrying out—I would take a husband into my own household.

After Wei Xuan and I had tormented each other for most of our lives, he finally grew tired.

On his deathbed, he refused even to see me.

He had our children deliver his last words instead.

“In my next life, I would rather be your brother for a lifetime than spend half a life as your resentful husband, with both of us losing the ones we truly love.”

Sure enough, the moment he returned to the past, he rushed to free his childhood sweetheart from prison and showered her with tenderness.

Then he forced his mother to take me as a goddaughter.

Smiling, I accepted the jade pendant and bowed with perfect obedience.

“May all be well with you, Elder Brother.”

His hand faltered, then dropped stiffly to his side.

Before long, we were each betrothed to someone else.

He remained in the capital.

I was bound for Lin’an.

Yet on the day my boat departed, he tore off his wedding robes, leaped into the river with no thought for his life, and clung desperately to the gunwale, begging me to stay.

A mistaken phone call makes Si Yun order her distant contract husband, Huo Jingheng, to come home before she locks the door.

He obeys—and after an illness brings them closer, the cold businessman discovers how much he wants her care, her rules, and a real marriage.

But meddling parents, a proposed heiress, and the fragile terms of their agreement force them to decide whether their marriage is still a transaction or the home they have both been missing.

Everyone in Shengjing knows that Young Marquis Shen despises his wife, Meng Suichao.

He spends his days in brothels while she tends to him with unfailing devotion—until a scar destroys the one resemblance that kept her at his side.

When Suichao finally asks for a divorce, an old love believed dead returns through the snow, forcing every buried truth into the light.

Ever since I was little, I had been a little slower than everyone else to speak and act.

People had always laughed at me for it when I was a child.

Gradually, I stopped wanting to speak.

Until the emperor asked me, in front of everyone, whom I wanted to marry.

When he named the gracious Prince Rui, my eyes lit up.

But by the time I nodded, the emperor had already asked, “Surely you don’t mean Prince Yan?”

Across the hall, the prince everyone called cruel and ruthless lurched in his seat and dropped his wine cup.

Before we married, I already knew my husband had a concubine he doted on.

It did not matter.

I was marrying into a great house to become its mistress.

Naturally, I could afford to be generous.

After the wedding, I put the marquis’s household in perfect order, and my reputation as a virtuous wife spread throughout the capital.

Whether that concubine had a brain in her head, I could not say.

She actually let people know that the marquis and I had never consummated our marriage.

She meant to humiliate me, to make me a laughingstock.

What she never imagined was that her little stunt would force my mother-in-law to send the marquis knocking on my door late one night.

Her eldest son was devoted to a two-faced woman he thought was his one true love.

In a fit of rage, my future mother-in-law conceived a second child—and promised me to him instead.

I stared miserably at my still-unborn new fiancé and tactfully suggested that this might, possibly, perhaps be a little inappropriate.

She slapped the golden, glowing egg so hard it rang, and declared with absolute conviction that if her second son let me down too, she would simply have a third.

Me: Excuse me?