Chapter 2

Barely two months after my marriage, Lihua returned to the capital with her husband. I could hardly avoid giving a banquet for them.

The moment Wei Zhao saw her, his gaze went blank.

I knew that look all too well.

Every man bewitched by Lihua’s beauty wore that same useless expression, like a dog seeing a bone, almost drooling.

Lihua recognized it too and couldn’t help covering her lips with a little laugh.

“Brother-in-law, if you look at me like that, my sister will get jealous.”

She made no attempt to hide herself. As she talked and laughed, she was charming and radiant, bright as summer flowers.

The fan in Wei Zhao’s hand fell to the floor with a clatter.

Lihua shook with laughter, then flashed me a mocking smile of triumph.

At the table, she openly exchanged flirtatious looks with him, treating me as though I didn’t exist.

After the banquet, Yan Changxi came to fetch her.

He had once been my childhood sweetheart and fiancé, the man I’d thought I could depend on for the rest of my life.

But everything had changed. He’d become my brother-in-law, and I’d married someone else.

When he arrived, Lihua was still laughing and chatting with Wei Zhao. The two seemed to get on wonderfully.

Seeing this, Yan Changxi’s first instinct was to blame me.

“Lishu, how could you abandon me?”

I was astonished. “I abandoned you?”

He said sorrowfully, “I thought you would wait for me. You were promised to me before we were born. Even after marrying Lihua, I never intended to give you up. Yet you were the one who left me first.”

I laughed.

“And how exactly did you intend not to give me up?”

“By taking you as an honored concubine, of course,” he said confidently.

Seeing my surprise, he added, “A concubine, yes, but you would rank only below Lihua. What more could you want?”

He made it sound so grand. It was ridiculous.

Like Wei Zhao, he came from an earl’s household, but his family was more powerful, full of high officials.

He himself was accomplished at a young age and handsome to boot. Countless women in the capital longed to marry him.

So he thought that if I learned he wanted me as an honored concubine, I’d weep with gratitude and regret marrying another man.

I only found it absurd.

“Yan Changxi, I am the Wen family’s legitimate daughter. The Wens are a scholarly family with a century of standing. What makes you think I would agree to be your concubine?”

He said, “Because your position in the Wen household is precarious, and I’m your only protection.”

How had I never known what a conceited man Yan Changxi was?

He was right about one thing, though. Life in the Wen household had indeed been difficult.

My mother was a merchant’s daughter. To the nobility, that meant coarse manners, greed for money, and no place in refined society.

Had the Wens not suffered a sudden disaster and needed a great sum urgently, my father would never have married her.

She brought a magnificent dowry into the Wen household, yet my father still disliked her.

He preferred Concubine Liu, Lihua’s mother, whose peerless beauty was famed throughout the land.

To him, Liu was graceful, tender, and loving—a hundred times better than my mother, who spent her days over ledgers and abacuses and reeked of money.

So barely three days after my mother died of illness, he ignored every objection and hastened to make Liu his principal wife.

From then on, Lihua too became a legitimate daughter and took precedence over me in everything.

Without my mother’s protection, and with my father’s dislike, my position in the household grew more awkward still.

Yan Changxi saw it all, yet said fortunes turned.

“You used your position as the legitimate daughter to bully Lihua for being a concubine’s child.”

“Now it’s come back to you. It’s time you learned how it feels.”

But I’d never bullied Lihua. What retribution was there to speak of?

I’d explained. Yan Changxi didn’t believe me.

Perhaps Lihua was simply too beautiful. She needed no facts. A few delicate tears in front of him, and he believed anything.

When she said I’d stolen her clothes, he turned cold toward me and bought her the finest, loveliest gowns.

When she said I’d insulted her, he complained to my father, and I was made to kneel in the ancestral hall for a day and a night.

Rewarded, she grew bolder. She claimed I’d bullied her, beaten her, drugged her, and urged my mother to marry her off to an old man as a concubine, and on and on.

There was nothing but her word. No matter how I explained, Yan Changxi would not believe me.

He called me a vicious woman and held her in righteous fury.

“Wen Lishu, we grew up together. I never imagined you could be so venomous.”

“Lihua may be a concubine’s daughter, but she’s still your own younger sister. However jealous you are, you shouldn’t humiliate her like this.”

“Besides, your mother was only a vulgar merchant’s daughter. She merely entered the household before Concubine Liu. What right does she have to look down on her?”

Wen Lihua cried in Yan Changxi’s arms while giving me a victor’s smile.

I was young then, and I loved him.

With such a terrible injustice done to me, all I could do was throw myself into my mother’s arms and sob.