She entered the palace for only two reasons: to imitate her sister and kill the emperor.
Song Ci would never forget that dusk. Her sister, Song Yan, was sentenced to death by the Empress Dowager, a white silk cord around her neck, and never once regretted her choices. Song Ci knelt on the cold stone steps, not daring to make a sound as she cried.
To avenge her, the laundry maid turned herself into her sister’s shadow. She wore the goose-yellow clothes her sister liked, styled her hair in the drooping-cloud bun her sister often wore, brewed the Junshan Yinzhen tea her sister excelled at, and played “Phoenix Seeks Its Mate,” her sister’s favorite. In just one year, she rose from palace attendant to Noble Consort, all so she could drive a poisoned jade hairpin into the emperor’s heart at the empress’s coronation.
But she didn’t know that the emperor had known from the very beginning that she had come to kill him.
“I’ve been waiting three years for you to strike that blow.”
When the jade hairpin snapped and the emperor’s gleaming armor appeared beneath his robes, Song Ci finally realized that the man she hated had been waiting for her to end his life with her own hands all along.
And the man she loved was the very man she had come to kill.
Stand-in romance × Dark-hearted heroine × Heart-wrenching love. When the blade of revenge pierces the heart, will hatred be satisfied, or will love prove impossible to relinquish?
