“If you touch that beauty mark again, sister, Lan Yin won’t care about the rules between master and servant anymore.” Xie Lanyin catches Fu Qique’s mischievous hand, yet gently brushes the red mole beneath her collar. This mark hidden under her clothes is the secret he has kept in his heart for three years.
The inner household’s power struggles never cease. Fu Qique foils the second branch’s drugging plot and intercepts the third branch’s accounts of embezzlement, stirring up a storm throughout the manor. Yet she falls for the guard a year younger than herself. When he shields her from a poisoned hidden weapon, his black robes are stained with blood, and the beauty mark at the corner of his eye turns a faint pink. She deliberately teases him, saying, “A guard should obey his master,” yet when he murmurs “sister,” her ears turn red. The forbidden romance between a legitimate daughter and her guard becomes the most enticing whisper of the night.
An investigation in Luozhou takes a sudden turn. Xie Lanyin is poisoned with the lethal “Bone-Eroding Green,” and Fu Qique searches everywhere for herbs, staying up all night to prepare an antidote. As she keeps watch by his bed, her collar slips, revealing her red mole, which meets his gaze just as he wakes. In a desperate cave, he grips her hand and says, “I’ll die with you,” and at last their feelings can no longer be hidden. But just as the antidote stabilizes his condition, Yun Shu, a Jiangnan orphan holding evidence about the Xie family’s old case, is surrounded. An unknown force has a blade at her throat, and the feelings hidden in their sleeves become their only bargaining chip for breaking the deadlock.
Meanwhile, the bold Shen Zhiyi mistakes Wen Yan for an assassin and pins him against a tree, then turns around and chases after him for “secrets of political strategy.” Who would have guessed that this gentle scholar was hiding secrets about the old Jiangnan case? At a banquet of the great families, he dismantles every trap with a few moves, then leans close to her ear and laughs. “Want to win? You have to give me your heart first.”
The two couples trample the “divide in status” beneath their feet amid the schemes of household rivalry and deadly traps, using stolen kisses to escape their predicaments,
