She is an assassin. He is a soldier.
She marries him to hide. He marries her to save her.
At the age of five, Shen Ye was torn from her mother's side.
At fourteen, the only friend she trusted betrayed her for a ticket into the elite class.
At sixteen, she killed with her own hands the boy who called her "big sister" and plotted a rebellion to escape that hell.
At nineteen, she returned to China bearing a body covered in scars, memories of a piano, and a knife that never left her side. She thought this was all her life would ever be: a tool, with no need for feelings, a home, or anyone.
Until Lu Heng appeared.
A special forces brigade commander, the military's finest, and a decorated war hero. He fell for her at first sight and proposed outright.
On their wedding night, she said, "I've killed people."
He smiled. "That won't scare me off."
She wouldn't let him touch her, so he waited. She avoided his gaze, so he pursued her. She pretended not to care, and he called her out: "You're lying."
He kissed every one of her scars: the knife wound on her left ribs, the gunshot wound in her right shoulder, the crisscrossed lash marks on her back. He waited for her to draw near on her own, waited for her to say those three words, "I don't know"; that was the closest she had ever come to falling in love.
"I don't know if I've fallen in love," she said.
"Take your time," he said.
But her past caught up with her.
The man who had climbed out of hell alongside her, the new master of Luo Wang, came to her with a twisted love and said, "You belong to no one, but you chose him."
"If you were the one to kill me, as I died I'd think: there are still good things in this world."
He stepped in front of her.
