Qi Jinshen and Qi Mingche were the Qi family's most unusual “twins”: one was born with the first snow of deep winter, the other amid the last cherry blossoms of late spring. Though they were not related by blood, their features were nearly identical, right down to the beauty marks beneath the corners of their eyes, in exactly the same place. When Qi Mingche was adopted at seven, Qi Jinshen tucked his little, trembling hand into his own clothes and said, “From now on, you're the present Mom gave me.” For the next ten years, they were inseparable, wearing matching school uniforms and sharing a heartbeat like mirror images of each other. When guests exclaimed, “Those twin flowers are closer than real brothers,” Qi Jinshen would always pull his younger brother tighter, his eyes burning with possessive pride.
The first crack appeared on a stormy night when they were seventeen. In his father's study, Qi Jinshen found a yellowed prayer register from Chanshan Temple. Beneath a vermilion note that read “Pray for Che'er to live longer” lay a photograph of his biological father with his mistress. The face, so strikingly similar to Qi Mingche's, shattered the fairy tale he'd believed in for ten years. And the truth about his mother, who had bled to death on the delivery bed, was that she had suffered a fatal hemorrhage after catching her husband cheating, far from the amniotic fluid embolism the family claimed had killed her.
From that day on, Qi Jinshen's world began to crumble:
He swept aside the birthday cake Qi Mingche had stayed up all night baking. As the cream splattered into the trash, he sneered, “A fake doesn't deserve a place beside the original.”
At an auction, he spent a fortune on a pair of Ming dynasty double-handled vases, then smashed one in front of everyone. As the shards flew, he glanced at his younger brother. “Only something broken could look like us. Understand?”
Then the marriage alliance proposal from the Yi family arrived. Gripping his brother's chin, he wiped away his tears and smiled, venom in his voice. “Yi Zheng loves breaking pretty things... How perfect for you.”
