For the first eight years of her life, she was the only jewel in her father’s heart, raised in luxury and honored as his legitimate daughter. But on the day she returned to the capital, she learned that her father had married and had children long ago, and that her mother had died in bitterness. She fell from legitimate daughter to concubine-born daughter, and was treated as a pawn to cement her father’s power, pushed into a hopeless political marriage. With nowhere else to turn, she took a desperate gamble and made a marriage pact with the man who held power over the entire court. She thought it would be nothing more than a mutually beneficial arrangement, but day by day, he came to cherish her above all else. She became the envy of every woman in the capital.
