Chapter 2
I set the glass goblets beside my bed.
Then I drifted off to sleep, thoroughly satisfied once again.
But tonight’s dream was not a pleasant one.
In it, water weeds seemed to drag me into a lake.
A water snake worked its way upward from below, wandering where it shouldn’t.
I could neither rise nor sink.
All I could do was grumble and make disgruntled little noises.
When I finally struggled out of the dream and opened my eyes,
a strikingly beautiful man emerged from under my brocade quilt.
Dream and reality overlapped. I couldn’t quite tell them apart.
Instinctively, I tried to call for someone.
But the moment I opened my mouth, a hand clamped roughly over it.
“Wen Xiaoxiao, it’s been half a month. Why haven’t you come to see me?”
“Because I pressed you to divorce him?”
“You’re avoiding me? Do you want to die?”
His vicious voice clung to my ear like something ghostly and cold.
I came fully awake and remembered who he was.
Pei Jin.
The crown prince with something wrong in his head, who had practically begged to become my kept lover.
He really was ill.
Three years ago, at a flower-viewing banquet, he saw me for the first time and promptly drugged himself.
His maid led me to a warm chamber. There he was, under the drug’s influence, his clothes disheveled and his eyes unfocused, pleading, “Miss Wen, I’ve been drugged.”
“Please, help me…”
He was handsome.
His black hair hung loose, and his white robe had fallen open to reveal the firm, clean lines of his waist and abdomen.
Nothing like the famously chaste crown prince of rumor.
More like some alluring spirit bent on stealing souls.
But I was a woman of exceptional self-control.
I fled with my virtue intact.
When seduction failed, he had me accused of drugging him, hoping to force me into marrying him that way.
Fortunately, the grand princess believed me and helped me.
In the end, though, he did succeed.
He found my weakness.
On the day Chu Yan ran out on our wedding, he haunted me like a ghost.
A stack of banknotes silenced my refusal.
“Xiaoxiao, I have a great deal of money.”
“Let me be yours, and all my money will be yours too.”
“Don’t you remember? You saved me when we were children. I’ve come to repay you with myself.”
He was always saying that he had slipped out of the palace as a boy, been caught by traffickers, and been rescued by me.
Yet in practice, he often failed to treat me like his savior.
This moment, for instance.
“Xiaoxiao, living is so dull anyway. Why don’t we die together and be lovers in the afterlife?”
Pei Jin ground his teeth, his hand resting loosely around my throat as though he might strangle me at any moment.
I wasn’t afraid.
I was still caught in the lingering sensations of that dream.
“Are you being mean to me?” I asked plaintively.
He faltered, his eyes softening a little.
I took the opportunity to put my arms around his neck.
“Why did you stop?”
“Pei Jin, go on.”