Fifth Prince Xiao Ruojun realizes he has fallen in love with his cousin, Xiao Anning, the Princess of Yan. She has been showered with affection all her life, yet beneath her luxurious existence lies a bloody secret that could upend everything she knows. She is the orphaned daughter of Wang Ke, the former Chief Councilor. Her family was framed by villains, and more than three hundred of them perished in a sea of flames. Only she was secretly protected, her identity switched so she could survive in hiding for fourteen years.
Xiao Anning and the fifth prince, Xiao Ruojun, grew up together and fell deeply in love. They thought their match was fated, but beneath the palace’s selection of consorts, currents of intrigue run deep. The empress schemes at every turn to marry Anning off to someone else. When the truth of her origins is suddenly revealed, she falls in an instant from a favored daughter of the nobility to the descendant of a “criminal minister,” and is swept into the heart of a struggle for imperial power and a decades-old miscarriage of justice.
On one side is Xiao Ruojun, who stands by her through life and death and will defy the throne for her. On the other is her family’s blood-soaked past, a case crying out for justice. Caught amid palace infighting, brothers turning against one another, and corrupt ministers’ schemes, she struggles forward through conspiracy and devotion. When the blade of truth cuts through the façade, and love is crushed beneath imperial power, can these star-crossed lovers break their chains, clear her family’s name, and win a peaceful life for themselves?
