Shanghai, 1932. Professional assassin Gu Duanling uses a fire to carry out an execution, while the female assassin Shen Yuetang poisons her target through the art of tea. Two seemingly unrelated assassinations are linked by a pearl earring left behind at the fire scene. At a silver-dollar gambling game in the Paramount Ballroom, they feel the thick calluses at each other’s thumbs and realize they are cut from the same cloth. Their masters were both killed by the Japanese agent known as “Chessboard,” and their paths of revenge converge.
From sharing a home on Avenue Joffre to joining forces to eliminate Chessboard’s seven sleeper agents, the two lonely assassins draw closer in the darkness. But the mastermind, Iwane Yoshiaki, forges a letter to drive a wedge between them, and their trust nearly collapses. On the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, beneath a begonia tree, she withdraws the poisoned needle from her palm and says softly, “I’m pregnant.” After a long silence, he answers with four words: “We’re getting out.”
Fourteen years. From taking a bullet for her at the docks to the Sihang Warehouse, from fleeing across Lake Tai to planting trees in Yan’an. On the day the war ends, he buries the scissors he has sharpened for fifteen years beneath the begonia tree in their Shanghai courtyard. She takes apart sixteen pearls and divides them among three trees.
This is a pact sealed with their lives, and a begonia planted in a bomb crater.
