The day the Ghost Physician Valley was wiped out, Su Qinghe’s master locked her inside a stone vat. Through its lid, she heard the screams of forty-seven people burning to ash.
Seven years later, she took her older sister’s place and married into the Gu family. Her groom, the marriage meant to bring him good fortune, was Gu Beiting, a young military officer with paralyzed legs and half his face disfigured.
Everyone said the Su family had dumped a worthless bride on the Gu family.
No one knew that the silver needles hidden in her sleeve could mend bones and restore flesh, or that the poison on her fingertips could make someone die in their sleep.
She would break her stepmother’s schemes. She would investigate the fire at Ghost Valley. And she would collect, one by one, the lives she was owed.
On the day she married into the Gu family, she leaned down and whispered something in Gu Beiting’s ear. The man in the wheelchair looked up at her. The ice in his one eye, the only one not hidden beneath bandages, began to melt.
He recognized her: the girl he had personally rescued three years ago beneath a cliff on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway.
