He claimed to be a useless scholar, too weak to even truss a chicken. Yet while she examined her half-sister's corpse, he used a hairpin to fish half a grain of poison from her throat.
She claimed to be a gentle seamstress who could only embroider intertwined lotus flowers. Yet when he was falsely accused of stealing a golden Buddha, she pointed at the window lattice and said, "This scratch was made by the jade pendant at your waist when you climbed in last night."
The water in the marquis's residence well had been deep for twenty years. Those who fell into it included a legal wife, an elder sister, and... the blades each of them had hidden in their sleeves.
When the beggar child's old scars matched the seamstress's fresh wounds, and the ink of the record of cleared injustices mingled with the softness of embroidery thread, they would settle this twenty-year-old score once and for all...
