[Strong heroine and revenge | The aloof beauty brought down from her pedestal | A long, hard road to winning her back]
“If I have to take the blame for someone else’s misfortune… must I pay with my life?” Shen Zhiwei’s voice trembled in the freezing cell.
Pei Yanzhou’s gaze was icy. “That is your fate.” A marriage contract sealed her into a dead end: serving as his beloved’s human shield against disaster and test subject for her medicine.
After three years of grinding ink and tending incense, her love finally died with his words: “Your eyes are too bright. You’re not as pitifully delicate as she is.” When his beloved fell gravely ill, he personally offered Shen Zhiwei a cup of poisoned wine. “I need some of your heart’s blood.”
Shen Zhiwei smiled as she drank it down. Clad in red like a flame, she leapt from the city tower. “Pei Yanzhou, I’ve returned your fate to you!”
At her funeral, he clutched the divorce papers she had left behind and turned them over. On the back was damning proof of a political enemy’s crimes, enough to overturn the entire court! His cold world came crashing down.
Three years later, at a salt merchants’ banquet in Jiangnan.
Pei Yanzhou, the all-powerful Chief Councillor, clutched the wrist of “Yun Shuyue,” a wealthy salt merchant, his voice hoarse and desperate as a trapped beast. “My lady…”
She withdrew her hand gracefully, her gaze colder than ice. “You have the wrong person, Lord Pei. That pitifully delicate beloved of yours, the one whose heart you needed to cut out of me to save, ” Her red lips parted, each word striking deep. “The grass on her grave is three feet tall.”
Behind a screen, a cherubic little boy poked out his head. “Mother, there’s an uncle at the door who’s been kneeling in the snow all night. He says he wants to be Ah Che’s new father.”
The wind and snow howled. Outside, a figure nearly frozen stiff stubbornly knelt in the bitter cold, just for one glance from her.
The powerful man who once treated her like dirt had become the weakness that tore his heart apart.
