Chapter 63 #3
JingYi pressed her palms flat against her thighs. Her breath came shallow, her rib cage too small to hold the revelations.
He had been watching, all these years. The thought surfaced, and with it, a wave of something she couldn’t name—grief and anger tangled together, sharp-edged.
“I understand,” she said finally. Her voice was steady, but it cost her. “I understand why you did it.”
She looked down at her hands. All the scars. The limp. The years of believing she was worthless.
“But understanding . . . doesn’t undo it.” JingYi’s throat closed. “I was still alone. I still thought I was nothing. I still spent years wondering what I had done wrong—what was so broken in me that my own family couldn’t look at me.”
She looked up at him. Her eyes were wet, but she didn’t wipe them.
ShunLi bowed his head. “I prayed every day since you left that your husband would treat you better than we did.”
He offered no defence, no excuses of palace bloodbaths or politics or what the crown had cost him. He let her words stand.
“But Alexander Wulfbane didn’t treat her better, did he?” LinXin snapped. “You promised King Ferdinand would find someone suitable. Someone worthy.”
ShunLi’s shoulders tensed. “I trusted Ferdinand to make that choice. He is not a man who treats marriage lightly, nor alliances. I gave him JingYi’s birth scroll and the year of the Raven.
I told him she was a gifted healer, an Omega of rare discipline.
I asked him to find her honour, if not affection. ”
He shifted his weight, turning toward JingYi. “He chose Alexander Wulfbane. An Alpha he trusted. An Alpha with a tarnished House, yes, but one known for strength and loyalty. Not cruelty.”
JingYi pressed her thumb into the fold of her palm, hard enough to feel the bone beneath. “He is, indeed, not cruel. He is honourable.” She released the pressure, and watched the blood rush back. “And that was the problem.”
“I didn’t think it would be perfect,” ShunLi admitted. “But I thought, in time, it might be enough to give you peace.”
She turned toward the window. Outside, the garden was still—too still, as if the world itself was holding its breath. “It might have,” she said. “But it’s over now.”
ShunLi and LinXin exchanged something across her—a shift in posture, a tightening of LinXin’s grip on the arm of her chair. Then ShunLi drew a breath, slow and deliberate.
“There’s more, JingYi.”
She faced him. She didn’t know what else was left to take.
“My mother was the reason the palace turned on your mother.”
Her teeth pressed together, her molars grinding, the only warning her body gave her before something inside her locked into place.
She wanted to laugh. She should’ve known: There were roots to every tragedy, and hers happened to be one consort’s ambition.
The second silence. The deadliest of all: A blade in the dark. The patient stillness of a concubine orchestrating a rival’s fall.
“She was the one who first whispered the lie,” ShunLi went on, “that you were the stablemaster’s daughter. She saw how much the emperor favoured Imperial Consort Jing Mei. She wanted to end it before it took root. Before more Alpha sons were born to challenge me.”
JingYi’s fingers found the edge of her sleeve and began to rub—back and forth, back and forth—the way she might examine a wound before deciding how deep it ran.
Everything slotted into place. ShunLi’s mother, the Dowager Shun Mīn, had set her sights on the crown for her only son—the fourth Alpha prince.
She had maneuvered each piece accordingly.
Sent him to Tremore under the guise of diplomacy while his three elder Alpha half-brothers tore each other apart.
Each death had thinned the line. Each time, Shun Mīn’s hands remained clean.
But that hadn’t been enough. She had planned insurance so ShunLi’s path remained unobstructed, cutting off potential adversaries before they could even be conceived.
And when the emperor’s gaze on Jing Mei lingered long after it should have passed, it had made her a threat.
And JingYi? A minor casualty.
Her thumb stopped rubbing. She pressed it flat against her thigh.
“All this time.” Her voice came out thin, reedy. “You knew?”
ShunLi’s jaw worked. “By the time I discovered it, your mother had passed. You were buried in the shadows of the Jade Mortar Hall, and the lie had taken root too deep to pull free. It didn’t matter that your mark was no proof of anything but coincidence.
The court had chosen its story, and the emperor was content to let it stand. ”
He paused. “I watched you when I could. Drove off the boys who tried to assault you.” His voice dropped, and for the first time, his gaze lowered. “But it didn’t absolve the wrongs done to you. I know that.”
JingYi’s hands stayed in her lap, fingers bloodless at the knuckles. She uncurled them one by one, forcing blood back into the joints.
“The Dowager didn’t need proof,” she murmured. “Only a whisper. She knew the court would believe it.”
Silence.
“She planted the rumour,” ShunLi said at last, “and we all let it grow.”