Chapter 1

“Your Highness, what sort of wildcat clawed you up like that?” someone teased.

Xing Ye touched the livid red mark on his neck. A dimple appeared beside his lips as he looked toward me in the darkest corner of the hall.

“Aunt did.”

The banquet went dead silent.

Someone dropped a crystal cup in fright.

I looked at Xing Ye. He smiled back at me.

So he wanted to play.

Very well. Let us play.

I licked the last trace of wine from my lip, raised my cup, and asked in the same low voice I had used at his ear the night before, “Does it still hurt, Your Highness?”

He had appeared beside the spring like a ghost, half a month earlier than expected.

“Why are you here, Your Highness?”

He waded toward me, his dark eyes unfathomable.

“I was afraid Aunt might lose patience and find someone else.” His voice was rough.

I had been born in a brothel and afflicted with a passion curse that flared on the summer solstice. I had planned to seek out Censor Zhang. Then Xing Ye returned without warning.

Whether his timing was fortunate or unfortunate, I could not say.

He hooked an arm around my waist. His hard armor scraped painfully against my skin, carrying the mingled scents of sand and blood.

“You have not returned to the palace?” I asked.

“No.” His voice had gone hoarse. “I came to find you. Nothing else mattered.”

His body bore many new, uneven scars.

The glory of this imperial prince had been forged between sword and flame.

“Surely Your Highness has not fallen in love with me?”

He laughed softly, his handsome face turning rakish. “I have.”

My heart gave a treacherous flutter.

I could not believe him. It was an obvious lie.

Yet when I lifted my head, his expression was unusually solemn, and the dimple beside his lips looked almost tender.

As if possessed, I dragged my nails down his neck and left a long, bloody scratch.

“Does it hurt?”

He did not seem to mind. His eyes shone like dark water.

“As long as Yaoyao is pleased.”

Now, at the banquet, his clear voice rang out again.

“If Aunt truly wants to know whether it hurts, why not inspect it yourself?”

He spoke as casually as if discussing the weather. To everyone else, the words landed like a thunderbolt.

My father clenched his silver chopsticks until the veins rose on his hand. Poison gathered in my mother’s eyes. My elder brother’s face turned livid, and my sister-in-law glared at me with naked hatred.

A widow of a noble house seducing the man promised to her own niece.

How filthy. How shameless. How absurd.

Delight flared inside me.

I winked at Xing Ye. “That would hardly be proper. Men and women should keep their distance.”

The faces around us grew darker still. Their fury poured oil over the fire in my heart until it blazed merrily.

Once, I had overheard my mother and sister-in-law chatting in the garden.

“The little whore is just like that northern courtesan who birthed her. Seduction is in her bones.”

My elder brother had smashed my birth mother’s urn.

“A brothel whore thinks she deserves a place in the Wen family?”

I had begged my father to give my mother a memorial tablet.

He answered with a slap.

“Remember this. You are Wen Lanyu, and your mother is alive and well.”

But I was not Wen Lanyu.

The more splendid a noble house appeared, the more filth it concealed.

My father had visited a prostitute during the national mourning period, when he was already past sixty, and sired an illegitimate daughter named Lian Yao.

My father happened to be a highly respected Senior Grand Secretary who had served three reigns.

To his political enemies, I would have been the greatest stain on his illustrious life. He had no intention of letting his reputation rot in old age, so he could never acknowledge that Lian Yao existed.

How, then, had I become Wen Lanyu?

The real Wen Lanyu had eloped.

I escaped the brothel and came to glittering Jindu in search of my father, foolishly thinking I had found a home.

Instead, they shoved me into a bridal sedan and made me impersonate Wen Lanyu, a woman five years older than I was, so I could marry the heir of the Chen family.

On our wedding night, he died on top of me before he managed to do much of anything.

Thus “Wen Lanyu” became a widow.

A fortune-teller claimed the single crease across my palm marked me as a woman with a fate too hard for those around her. The Chen family sent me back to the Wen residence that very night. The Wens then tried to send me to Qingning Temple.

They no longer needed Wen Lanyu, and they would never admit Lian Yao was alive.

That was all right.

Even under Wen Lanyu’s name, Lian Yao could still raise a magnificent storm.