He returned as the General Who Guards the North, stepping through bloody smoke, his dark armor rimed with frost and his features hardened by ruthless slaughter. Yet he gave her alone the full force of his mad, obsessive devotion.
In the Golden Throne Hall, he pointed his sword at the imperial throne and seized power in a coup, dragging her down from the clouds with his own hands. The once supremely honored princess became his prisoner, a songbird in his palm.
“Jiang Si,” he said, gripping her chin, his thumb brushing the reddened corner of her eye. His phoenix eyes brimmed with possessive obsession. “They say I murdered the emperor and usurped the throne, that I'm cold-blooded and ruthless. I don't care. I only want you.”
He promised her the dignity of an empress, abolished the six palaces, and favored her alone, but he also cut off every path of escape. The palace gates were as deep as the sea. He was her heaven, and also the cage that held her captive.
He would carefully do her makeup and arrange her hair, placing the world's finest treasures before her. But the moment she showed even the slightest distance, he would seize her wrist, a world-ending madness in his eyes. “You want to run? Jiang Si, in this life and the next, you'll never escape my grasp.”
The whole court feared him. They said the new emperor would leave a million corpses and rivers of blood just to win a smile from his consort.
But no one knew what turbulent undercurrents were hidden in the schemes he had laid, and no one could tell whether the obsessive devotion in his eyes was honey or poison that would burn through her insides.
He schemed for an empire stretching ten thousand miles, but above all, he meant to lock her within his very bones, for all eternity, never to part.
A blood-soaked struggle for power, an obsessive romance with her as his sole beloved.
He offers an empire as his bride price, and makes his captive phoenix his empress.
Is this imprisonment in the name of love a salvation, or an abyss?
