Chapter 3

Chapter 3

“My Lord, there is an urgent matter at the Document Academy.”

Meng Ye gave me a faint glance.

“Rest early, my wife. I shall return shortly.”

He wouldn’t be coming back. That was the other woman’s way of asserting her dominance over me.

As soon as he left, I turned and summoned Lian Cheng, a guard I had brought from my maiden family.

He was a man trained to scout military intelligence on the battlefield; if he wanted to find something out, nothing could remain hidden.

“Investigate where my husband has been going lately.”

“Keep it quiet. Do not alert him.”

He looked at me with a great deal of surprise.

Meng Ye and I had been married for fifteen years, and we had played together since we were toddlers. By a rough count, we had been together for thirty years.

I would have sooner believed that my powerful father and brother were plotting a rebellion than believe Meng Ye would betray me.

It was precisely because of this that being betrayed by the person I trusted most-being stabbed in the back by my closest confidant-hurt all the more.

“There is a spare carriage waiting for him at the back gate of the Document Academy. Follow it now; it should be easy enough to track.”

Once a person accepts reality and sets aside their emotions, their mind becomes exceptionally clear.

Meng Ye spent every day immersed in the Document Academy. How could he possibly keep a living, breathing woman right under my nose?

He likely used the academy as a front, slipping away through a shell game of coming and going.

My guess was correct. In just a few short days, the information on the girl he was hiding in the western district-including three generations of her ancestry-was laid out on my desk.

She was Wen Yunyang, the concubine-born daughter of my brother’s former lieutenant.

Now in the prime of her youth, she had been riding a horse in the outskirts of the capital when she supposedly fell right into Lord Meng’s arms.

Life as a concubine’s daughter was difficult; she had suffered through the bullying of her legitimate elder sister and the primary wife. Her ride out of the city had been a desperate attempt to find a way to survive.

Meng Ye took pity on her.

He pitied her so much that he took her to his bed and bought her a three-entry courtyard house, complete with more maids and servants than I had.

A young girl’s love is flamboyant and overbearing; she was always eager to prove that she was more important than the aging original wife.

Thus, on my birthday, she developed a high fever.

On the anniversary of my father and brother’s deaths, she fell into a lake.

When I hosted a banquet, her house caught fire.

Time and again, she forced Meng Ye to choose her over me.

She even knew I possessed a southern pearl hairpin bestowed by the Empress, so she pestered Meng Ye for a pair of southern pearl earrings.

Even though it wasn’t the season for pearl diving, and even though southern pearls were reserved for imperial use, the usually self-disciplined and upright Grand Tutor still overstepped his bounds. He spent a fortune to find a pair of massive pearls for her.

It took him three months to personally set them into the earrings as a birthday gift for Wen Yunyang.

Wen Yunyang had once bragged to her legitimate sister that an old woman didn’t deserve such precious things.

Only someone of her flowery age could truly do justice to their elegance.

Time and again, she eclipsed the elegance of the “old woman,” proving over and over that her love held the top spot.

And Meng Ye had indulged her from start to finish, fully aware of what he was doing.

Although I had long expected that the truth behind a changed heart would be cruel and disgusting, I still felt a faint, lingering ache in my chest.

It turned out my childhood affection would one day force me to swallow needles and swords.

But I, Su Jinhua, have never been one to suffer a loss quietly.

If you gift me the point of a needle, I shall return to you the edge of a blade.