Ten miles of red wedding finery, and the wrong bridal sedan. Shen Qingci was born the legitimate daughter of a distinguished family, but after her family fell into decline, she was forced to take another bride’s place and marry into the once-great Marquis of Ding’an’s household. Her husband, Lu Yanzhou, has the title of heir but is in fact burdened with the debts of the entire family. He treats her, the bride he married by mistake, with cold indifference.
The marquis’s household is a deep and dangerous place. Her mother-in-law is harsh, her sister-in-law makes trouble, and the second branch watches them like a hawk. Everyone laughs that she married above her station only to be left a neglected wife, waiting for her to weep and accept her fate. But she merely smiles, neither fighting nor making a fuss. With one hand, she takes charge of the household accounts and untangles the mess; with the other, she wins people’s hearts and exposes hidden schemes.
Only when the marquis’s household begins to turn its fortunes around does the cold-faced heir return home late one night and corner her at the door of the accounts room, his gaze dark. “So all along, what you wanted wasn’t my pity.”
She looks up, smiling as gently as a breeze. “Crying won’t help. What I want is to stand beside you and bring this deadlocked game back to life.”
This is a game of marriage, and she and he begin with a mistaken wedding. Yet every step is carefully planned, until they become each other’s only opponent and their only way home.
