"Lu Jin, your love cuts deeper than shattered porcelain."
On the night Jiang Wu smashed the Lu family's ancestral jade, her husband slapped her in front of everyone.
As blood splattered across the auctioneer's gavel, she finally understood:
This marriage had always been a corporate hunt, with her womb as the bargaining chip.
Three years ago, on the operating table after her miscarriage, he had personally signed an agreement to "prioritize saving the embryo";
three years later, he clamped a hand around her throat and pinned her against the safe, while 108 frozen embryos slept inside a crystal coffin.
"Jiang Wu, your genes are the perfect collateral." Lu Jin's kiss carried the taste of blood. "The Lu family needs three hundred heirs."
She stood on the shards of glass and drove an ovulation shot into her vein.
"I'll use your business empire as an offering to my unborn rose."
From jewelry appraiser to queen of private equity, every step Jiang Wu took was soaked in blood:
At an auction, her high heels crushed a fake diamond, its fragments concealing evidence of Lu Jin's smuggling;
On the giant screens in Times Square, a 365-day apology video played, concealing short-selling codes in its scrolling text;
Only when the cry of a test-tube baby echoed from Wall Street did she realize that the heartbeat in her womb belonged to an embryo frozen twenty years ago.
Kneeling in the ashes of their burning marriage certificate, Lu Jin set a diamond made from ashes into her ankle shackle.
"Every piece of porcelain you smashed was engraved with our children's epitaphs."
When a late-stage cervical cancer diagnosis became her final marriage certificate,
she tore open the scar stitched with the character "Lu" in the court of final appeal.
Buried in her flesh and blood was a secret file on umbilical cord blood, one capable of bringing a century-old dynasty crashing down in an instant.
