chapter 2
My coming-of-age ceremony ended in haste after my refusal.
Before Shen Yanchu left, he watched me in silence for a long while. Then he forced the jade pendant into my palm.
“I’ll wait until you say yes.”
Without giving me a chance to refuse, he turned and strode away.
Had I not known there was someone else in his heart, I might have mistaken him for a man hopelessly in love with me.
Just then, someone pushed open the door and barged in, her first words aggressive. “Jingyao, what exactly are you trying to do?”
The voice was both familiar and strangely distant.
It was my elder sister, He Rong.
The woman Shen Yanchu loved.
She wore a green-collared red dress and a golden hairpin. With her dazzling beauty and regal grace, no one could look away from her.
For a moment, I stared in a daze.
She frowned and asked again, “Haven’t you always loved Yanchu? What sort of tantrum are you throwing now?”
She had said the same thing in my previous life.
After discovering that Shen Yanchu’s heart belonged entirely to my sister, I had lost all hope and asked him for a divorce.
He refused.
Because my sister would not allow it.
By then, Shen Yanchu stood at the pinnacle of the court. She did not want to lose the bond that allowed her to control him, even if preserving that bond left me in endless misery.
From her seat high above me, she had looked down with cold eyes.
“Don’t you love Shen Yanchu? What sort of tantrum are you throwing now?”
As I looked at the sister before me, her figure gradually merged with the frigid empress from my memories.
I suddenly said, “But the person he loves is you.”
He Rong paused, yet she showed no surprise.
“So what? Can his love put me on the throne as empress?”
I felt as though I had plunged into an icy abyss.
She had known all along.
She knew Shen Yanchu loved her, yet she had still pushed the two of us into marriage. She wanted the Shen family bound to ours so that, when the time came, she could put Shen Yanchu to use.
For the sake of her dream of becoming empress, I was no longer her sister. I was merely a pawn.
And she had never cared whether her pawn lived well or suffered.
My heart turned completely cold, and my voice hardened. “If you want to climb to the highest position, that is your choice. I will not sacrifice myself to make it happen.”
That night, I had a dream.
I was back at the moment I first discovered those letters.
I had been horrified and sickened. I could not believe that the husband I cherished was deeply in love with my own sister.
Clutching the letters, I confronted him. I denounced his depraved, forbidden feelings and reduced him to less than nothing with every insult I could summon.
Yet from beginning to end, he merely watched me without expression.
He watched as I raged and broke apart, until all strength left me and I collapsed to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably.
I hated his icy composure. Blind with fury, I screamed whatever came to mind. “I tore them all apart! It’s disgusting! He Rong is my sister, and you are my husband. The two of you carried on behind my back—this is immoral, incestuous, and utterly shameless!”
“Shen Yanchu, you are a bastard with no regard for human decency. You disgust me—”
Before I could finish, he seized my chin. A savage malice surfaced in his eyes.
“I disgust you?”
“Then what does that make you, the woman who loves a bastard like me? Aren’t you even more disgusting?”
Lightning split the darkness, and he looked like a demon.
I woke with a violent start, gasping for breath.
It took a long time for me to regain my senses.
Early the next morning, I saw a figure standing outside my courtyard and immediately turned to leave.
But the man blocked my path.
Shen Yanchu’s eyes were bloodshot. Something seemed tightly suppressed beneath his stare. He raised a hand as if to touch me, but I stepped back in revulsion.
His face went deathly pale, and his body swayed.
I could not understand how a single night had reduced him to this.
Before I could make sense of it, his low, hoarse voice trembled as he enunciated each word.
“Yaoniang.”
“Why won’t you marry me?”