When Yun'er was ten, she was dragged from a sea of flames into the Prince Regent's mansion. Thin as a frightened cat, she knelt on the flagstones and heard someone tell her she was now Xie Yan's "little servant." Everyone said the heir was cold-hearted and could kill with a smile, but he didn't make her suffer in the laundry room. Instead, he had her study and learn to write, and even fabricated "instructions from the Old Madam" to send guards to keep her away from his bedroom. She thought he simply couldn't stand the sight of her, never knowing he was shielding her from the open and hidden dangers within the prince's mansion.
One rainy night when she was fifteen, she dropped a tea bowl while serving tea and, in her panic, blurted out that she "could sleep with a man." To her shock, she exposed the disguise he'd kept up for three years. He crouched down and pinched her flushed cheek, tenderness in his eyes unlike anything she'd ever seen. When she secretly investigated her past, he watched from behind a screen as she held an ancient book upside down, then quietly replaced it with an annotated edition. Even when she gripped a military tally and demanded to know, "Why did you save your enemy's daughter?" he finally confessed: he had risked his life to carry her out of the fire all those years ago, and had protected her for five years, not out of guilt, but because he'd fallen for the silly girl back when she chased a butterfly and tumbled into a crack in the rockery.
This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.
