[Deadly Rebirth + Mutual Imprisonment + A Psychotic Love Triangle]
Shen Nian'an died wearing the wedding ring set with a blue diamond.
As the scalpel opened her abdomen, Gu Ting was slipping an heirloom jade bangle onto the wrist of his beloved Lin Xue'er. Only when blood stained the morgue's fluorescent lights did she finally understand the note hidden inside the gold-trimmed fountain pen Huo Jiuxiao had given her: “A corpse is more honest than the living. Cut it open and look for the truth.”
Reborn into a new life, she drove a poison-tipped rose thorn into Gu Ting's throat. “I hear you've been keeping a stand-in in your basement?”
She slapped the bloodstained amber pendant against Lin Xue'er's face. “Did you enjoy playing the fake?”
Everyone was waiting to see the canary Huo had kept in a gilded cage fall and shatter.
Instead, Huo Jiuxiao, the most violent living devil in Shanghai, tore open his shirt in front of a hundred guests. A black datura tattoo over his heart bore the elegant script: “Property of Nian'an.”
“Had your fun?” He pressed the muzzle of a gun against her heaving chest. “Now it's time to settle accounts for the thirty-seven bullet casings you stole from me.”
Later, aboard an exploding cruise ship, Gu Ting screamed, “She only got close to you to destroy the Huo family!”
Huo Jiuxiao smiled and pulled the trigger. The bullet-pierced financial statements fluttered down into the flames. Gripping Shen Nian'an by the waist, he pinned her in front of the surveillance screens and watched the Gu empire collapse in a torrent of data. “Guess, darling, when I started waiting for you to use me?”
Late at night, at the rooftop pool, Shen Nian'an bit his bloodied collarbone and gasped, “Ninth Master, you knew all along that I was reborn...”
“Shh.” Huo Jiuxiao dipped the DNA report into blood-red wine. “From the moment your wound bled...”
