For three years, Su Weiwan has been known throughout the capital as the frail mistress of the Jingbei Marquis’s household. She is constantly taking medicine and rarely leaves her rooms. Even the maids serving her dare to pretend to obey while doing as they please. After all, she is a pawn her family traded away for military power, and she has barely even seen her husband, Xiao Jinghan.
Then one night, coughing blood as she exposes the steward’s embezzlement, she turns and runs into a man dressed in black. Xiao Jinghan rolls half of a tiger tally she accidentally dropped between his fingertips, his dark eyes unreadable. “Are you so ill you can’t even recognize your own military authority?”
That’s when she realizes this iron-fisted marquis, who guards the northern frontier, has long seen the sharpness she concealed behind her medicine jars.
The Empress Dowager sees her as a thorn in her side and schemes to implicate her in a sorcery case. Her cousin, once her closest friend, covets her place as the marquis’s wife. Even the remnants of the Su family, which she thought had long since been wiped out, are watching from the shadows.
Only Xiao Jinghan appears whenever she is in the greatest danger. He slips a hand warmer into her cold hands, then says curtly, “I just don’t want the military authority to fall into the wrong hands.” He takes a deadly poisoned arrow for her, then scoffs, “Your life is worth more than the tally.”
When an old case is finally brought to light, she smiles, holding a bloodstained embroidery needle. “If you won’t let me live, then none of you will get to live in peace.”
He catches her wrist, his voice more earnest than ever before. “I’m here to protect you. Let’s see who dares touch you.”
