The Penthouse Player Beneath the Gilded Surface

[Modern-day romance with a twist + a cast of villains + elite school + two of a kind]

The crystal chandeliers at Shengying Academy shine so brightly they hurt the eyes. The rules here are made by those at the top of the pyramid, people like Su Yan.

She is the perfect role model in everyone’s eyes. Whenever she smiles and offers a helping hand, her fingertips conceal the fuse that could ruin her opponent forever.

Lu Chenzhou is the one exception. Sitting in the shadows on the terrace, he watches this farce of hypocrisy and scheming through a pair of binoculars, until the lens settles on Su Yan: the woman who swapped out a donated necklace at a charity gala, then turned around and sweetly apologized to its owner.

“Your acting is more convincing than the drama club’s,” he says the first time he speaks to her. Su Yan is just then presenting her opponent’s secret as a gift.

They are alike, the only people who can see through each other’s disguises. When the Gu family heir arrives with ambitions of their own, and the family-marriage chessboard traps them both at its center, they go from watching coolly on the sidelines to working together in perfect sync, using even sharper methods to clear away anyone in their path. But when trust becomes a bargaining chip and the meaning of “ally” starts to blur, Lu Chenzhou discovers that he is willing to make an exception for her, while Su Yan, for the first time, hesitates to scheme.

The game beneath the crystal chandeliers goes on. But this time, the two people best at walking away unscathed each see a weakness in the other’s eyes

“Are we trying to win, or to have each other?”

And no one knows that in the attic of Shengying Academy, the last page of the notebook recording every conspiracy bears only one line: Her weakness is the one secret I never want to expose.