When Shen Qingyin woke, the entire Shen family had been wiped out. Her father was in prison, her mother had hanged herself, and her elder brother had died beneath a flurry of blades. The only reason she was still alive was that someone wanted her alive: her former fiance, Fu Chenzhou, now Commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard, had personally imprisoned her in a secluded courtyard called Qichi.
She hated him to the bone and thought day and night about escaping and taking revenge. But Fu Chenzhou never explained. Day after day, he brought her calming medicinal broth, retrieved her mother's keepsakes from the confiscation list, and, even after waking from a coughing fit that left him unconscious and spitting blood, asked first whether she had eaten. A letter hidden in the hollow of a silver hairpin revealed the truth: the confiscation had been a sham, and her imprisonment was for her protection. For three years, he had traded his life for hers, shielding her from the Crown Prince's assassins and gathering evidence to clear her family's name piece by piece. As for him, poison had already seeped into his bones, and he had little time left.
When the Crown Prince laid a deadly trap at the autumn hunt, Fu Chenzhou took a life-shortening drug and mounted his horse in armor. Shen Qingyin stood beneath the osmanthus tree in Qichi Courtyard, gripping the silver hairpin that concealed the list of names needed to reopen the case. One was a caged bird who hated him to the bone; the other, a prisoner who had woven a cage with his own life. When the truth came to light, she finally realized that what had trapped her was never the secluded courtyard, but the love he kept hidden until death.
