He's Crazy, He's Faking It, and He Loves Me to the Bone

He was the heir to a marquis’s estate, pretending to be a gentle, sickly man for three years, but going mad in front of me for seven.

The first time I saw him, his left arm was lacerated. He smiled and said, “I fell.”

The seventh time I saw him, I felt a bruise on the inside of his arm, shaped like half a fingerprint. He had made it himself by clenching his fist.

I went through the records of his twenty-three late-night visits.

Every one fell at the dead of night, when I was sitting alone.

The timing was never off by more than half an hour.

A woman in labor hemorrhaged in the middle of the night, and my hands began to tremble as my old ailment flared up.

A cold hand reached from behind the curtain and covered mine. It was perfectly steady.

The bleeding stopped. He was gone. Beneath the medicine bowl lay a silver needle.

Only after investigating an eight-year-old case for eight years did I discover:

He had been hiding for eight years.

Investigating for eight years.

And being poisoned for eight years.

Later, in a secret chamber, he said to me:

“Your father owes my Shen family a life. Now you’ll spend the rest of yours treating me.”

“If you cure me, I’ll give you the world.”

“If you fail, I’ll imprison you for life.”

I put the needle back in its case and looked up at him.

“I’ll treat you. For the rest of your life. No returns.”

He went mad for eight years.

I treated him for eight years.

In the end, I discovered that he had used his injuries as bait to lure me into his trap.

And I had used my needles as blades to cut open the light he had hidden for half his life.

A sickly, obsessive heir × a cool-headed female physician.

From “You can only treat me.”

He is gravely ill.

She is the only person he wants to see.

And the only medicine that can keep him alive.