Everyone in the capital said that Regent Xie Lin was a demon who had crawled back from hell.
He led troops to quell a rebellion at seventeen and held the court in his grasp by twenty. In court, he was the “Prince of Ashes,” a man whose word was law. Countless souls had died beneath his blade, and even three-year-olds stopped crying at the sound of his name.
But only Xie Lin knew that a flower bloomed in his heart: Shen Weiwan, whom he kept in the depths of his manor.
He had taken Shen Weiwan in. She was like a late-blooming cherry blossom, unaware of the world's cruelty. When he worked at his desk, she would secretly slip her cold little hands into his arms to warm them. When he was angry, she would rise on tiptoe, tug at his sleeve, and wheedle, “Xie Lin, don’t frown. It doesn’t suit you.” She would also order him about as if it were the most natural thing in the world: “I don’t know this character. Teach me.”
No one had ever seen the regent, who could make prisoners scream for three days and nights in the torture chamber, crouch beneath the corridor eaves to peel an apple for a young girl, furrowing his brow in frustration when the peel broke. No one knew he could have an entire courtyard planted with alfalfa just because she said, “I want to see fireflies,” so she could watch them to her heart's content on summer nights.
But tenderness makes a weakness impossible to hide.
When his political enemies aimed their arrows at her, when she found the bloodstained old letters he had hidden, when the truth of her family's wrongful case pierced her heart like an icicle
Xie Lin, who had indulged her in everything, instantly became the Prince of Ashes who killed without batting an eye.
“Lay a finger on her, and I’ll slaughter your entire family.”
With her, he was gentle as silk wrapped around a finger. To the outside world, he was as cold as bone. He built a wall with his own ferocity, keeping her in the safest place of all.
Shen Weiwan looked at the man who had coaxed her to drink her medicine one moment and ordered someone killed the next, and suddenly understood: his cruelty was for the world, and his softness had always been reserved for her alone.
