If Only We Had Never Met in This Moment

In the twenty-first year of the Republic, misty rain shrouds Shanghai, and the blood-red flags of the Xie trading house fly over half the city. Xie Ciyuan is the most ruthless of the Xie family’s second-generation sons. Everyone says he is cold-blooded and merciless, but no one knows he keeps a charred fragment of a crabapple blossom close to his heart, along with the name Su Zhixia and an obsession bordering on madness that has endured for eight years. Su Zhixia is the mysterious physician Wen Xun, the most skilled doctor in Shanghai, or so everyone says. No one knows she is the sole survivor of the massacre that wiped out the Su family, and that the sanctuary she has created is a hell tailored specifically for the Xies. The day they reunite, she is engaged to his elder brother, Xie Cizhou, and is, in name, his sister-in-law. He pins her against the cold wall, his breath hot against her. “Wen Xun? Have you forgotten who broke off a crabapple branch and promised me forever?” A family grudge cuts like a blade, and the nation’s peril blazes like a torch. When Shen Yanchen’s scheme comes to light, when Lin Shuying’s obsession burns to ashes, and when war engulfs the cities of the north Only then do they realize their meeting, which began with a crabapple blossom, was never a coincidence. It was fate. “Zhixia, if there is another life, let me be the one to find you first.” “Xie Ciyuan, even if we had never met in this moment… I would still have fallen in love with you.”