At five years old, Ruan Ruo was abandoned at the entrance to an orphanage. She didn’t want to die there.
So she learned to smile, and to fool everyone with those clear, innocent eyes.
The caretaker said she was well-behaved. The chef said she was sensible. No one knew that beneath that obedient facade was a heart colder than anyone’s.
When she was seventeen, the capital’s Shi family came looking for their missing daughter.
By coincidence, the real heiress had just died in the pond behind the orphanage.
And by an even greater coincidence, Ruan Ruo had entered the orphanage the same year as her, was about the same age, and even bore a passing resemblance to Madam Shi.
A file, a forged paternity test, and a few perfectly timed tears. She became the Shi family’s heiress.
Life in a wealthy family wasn’t easy.
She trod carefully, maintaining her obedient persona, but her new second brother was always frowning at her as if looking for a flaw. And the young heirs of other prominent families kept approaching her, one after another.
Worst of all was her eldest brother.
In the dressing room, he accidentally caught her looking disheveled, and saw the heart-shaped birthmark on her lower back.
It was her one and only weakness. She thought she could keep it hidden.
Until one day, he cornered her at the end of a hallway and looked down at her.
To protect herself, she rose onto her toes and pressed her lips to his.
Watching her practiced movements, the man’s brow furrowed at once. “Have you done this with someone else before?”
She knew this was only the beginning.
She didn’t know which of the eyes watching from the shadows were real and which were fake, or who would tear off their mask the next moment.
But it didn’t matter.
She had never truly been Shi Songnian.
She was Ruan Ruo, and she would never be weak.
