I had let myself relax. I had let myself believe Gong Pingru's pregnancy was wrapped in enough political armor to survive. Then the armor cracked.
She was deep into her eighth month. Empress Dowager Li had publicly laid claim to the child, turning Gong Pingru into an untouchable extension of the Li faction. Every ounce of bird's nest soup, every bolt of tribute silk that entered the palace—the Dowager ensured a portion was personally escorted to Gong Pingru's quarters.
She's hoarding leverage, I had thought. A low-born mother with a royal child is the perfect puppet to hold against the Empress and Princess Shengyang.
That afternoon, the Dowager summoned Gong Pingru to her pavilion to listen to a traveling opera troupe. It was routine. But on the walk back across the icy paving stones, Gong Pingru fell.
It wasn't a stumble. It was a violent, heavy collapse that sent her crashing onto her side. The shock threw her instantly into premature labor.
By the time I tore through her courtyard doors, the air already reeked of blood and raw screaming. The entire Imperial Hospital had been dragged from their beds. Empress Dowager Li stood on the steps, ginger robes rigidly perfect, and gave one glacial command: "Save the child. At all costs."
The kneeling Head Physician touched his forehead to the stone, trembling. The child was under term. The mother was hemorrhaging. If a choice had to be made—
Save the child.
Noble Consort Qi was pacing the porch, her usual arrogance entirely shredded, her prayer beads clicking frantically through her fingers. Wei Zhang stood in the center of the chaos, his face an absolute, terrifying blank. He didn't look at the doors to the birthing room. He looked at the Dowager.
His eyes cut to me as I rushed the steps.
I dropped to my knees before the Dowager, driving my forehead against the freezing stone. "Your Grace. Let me go inside. I am her closest confidante. My presence will anchor her. Her panic will kill the child—if she gives up pushing now, they will both die."
Mention the child. The Dowager's eyes narrowed, calculating. Before she finished saying "Go," I was on my feet and through the doors.
The birthing room was a wet pit of copper basins and soaked towels. The military midwife my mother had smuggled in months ago was already stationed at the foot of the bed. Our eyes locked for a fraction of a second. I nodded once. She understood.
Gong Pingru was thrashing on the sodden sheets, her hair plastered to her skull, her face gray with pain and exhaustion. When I grabbed her hand, her nails immediately sank into my flesh, breaking the skin.
I leaned down, pressing my mouth directly against her ear to cut through her screaming.
"Listen to me," I hissed, my voice utterly vicious. "The midwife is mine. When the moment comes, if there is a choice to be made, she will kill the child to save you. Do you hear me? I will not let you die on this bed for them."
Her eyes snapped open. The blind animal panic cleared for a single, agonizing second. Her grip on my torn hand tightened until I thought my bones would snap.
It was a bloodbath. It took fourteen hours.
But as the first light of morning hit the frosted windows, a thin, furious wail shattered the silence. Both of them were breathing.
A prince. The Emperor's firstborn son.
Empress Dowager Li practically glowed. She swept through the courtyard dispensing massive bounties of silver and silk to the kneeling physicians. She even stopped to offer me a rare, predatory smile. "The Zhen family raised a useful daughter," she purred. "You anchored the mother well."
Once the Dowager and her entourage finally departed, the courtyard went dead silent. Wei Zhang stood alone in the center of the frost-covered stones. He didn't look toward the room where his firstborn son was crying. He walked straight to me.
He reached down and caught my right hand.
"Does it hurt?" he asked.
My hand was a ruin. Gong Pingru had crushed it for fourteen hours. The skin from my knuckles to my wrist was black, mottled with deep purple bruises, with four crescent-moon gashes where her nails had torn the flesh.
I looked around. Decai had silently cleared every eunuch and maid from the courtyard. We were entirely alone.
I used my uninjured hand to reach up and smooth the violent, knotted tension between his brows. Then I went up on my toes and pressed a soft kiss to his freezing, rigid jaw.
"It will heal in three days," I told him quietly.
The gesture caught him completely off guard. The terrifying, blank mask he had worn all night fractured. A slow, hot flush crept up his neck, and I felt the rigid, bone-deep tension in his shoulders finally break.
"Aren't you going in?" I whispered. "Your son is in there. She needs you."
He looked at the doors like they led to a butcher's block. He didn't move toward them. He wrapped his hand gently around my uninjured wrist and pulled me toward the palace exit.
He wasn't lying, I realized, shivering as we walked back to Ganquan Palace. He really does hate children.
* * *
Time inside the palace had a way of grinding people down. Gong Pingru's son learned to track light, then to wail, and finally to shriek with proper, terrifying royal entitlement. As Consort Ji had predicted, the First Prince—named Wei Jie—was immediately torn from Gong Pingru's breast and carried off to Empress Wang's pavilion to be raised as the Dowager's proxy heir.
Empress Dowager Li ruthlessly severed all contact between the biological mother and the child. I was the only one with enough standing and enough audacity to ignore the invisible boundary line. Every time I visited Qifeng Palace, I memorized every detail of the boy: the exact weight of him in my arms, the shape of his mouth when he was startled, the specific pitch of his cry. I brought these fragments back to Gong Pingru, laying them out for her like smuggled rations.
She had been promoted to Senior Consort and given her own principal suite, but a gold-threaded title cannot fill a hollowed-out womb. I had expected her to shatter. She didn't.
Instead, the aristocratic ice that had always encased her suddenly thawed. She became sharper, more talkative, almost dangerously alive. One evening, staring into the brazier, she turned to me with her characteristic bluntness.
"I hated you at first, did you know that?" she asked, not smiling. "You were beautiful, but you had this terrifying, deadened look in your eye. Like someone calculating the killing strike of a blade while everyone else was just trying to sip tea. I avoided you because I thought you were a monster waiting to happen."
I laughed, pouring her another cup of plum wine. "And I thought you were a paranoid crane. The way you held your neck—I was convinced you thought breathing the same air as us would give you a rash."
She barked a laugh, loud and totally unrefined. She was a survivor. She had to be.
But beneath the humor, a cold fury was still festering. Nobody had ever found out who had poured the bucket of icy water across her courtyard steps the night she fell. As the daughter of a judicial official, unresolved malice was the one thing she could not digest. She swore to me she would find the executioner. But with the Dowager suddenly freezing her out, and the Emperor maintaining his public distance, neither of us had the leverage to tear the palace apart looking for ghosts.
* * *
My third year in the palace. I was nineteen. And then, without warning, the entire imperial court detonated.
During morning assembly, a mid-ranking censor from the Ministry of Personnel bypassed every procedural channel, threw himself onto the throne room floor, and submitted a memorial directly accusing the Duke of Jinyang—Empress Dowager Li's biological father, a peer of the realm—of openly auctioning military and civil appointments.
The Emperor's reaction paralyzed the hall. He didn't order a measured investigation. He flew into a calculated, theatrical rage. He hurled the memorial at the censor's head, denounced him as a treasonous slanderer, and ordered him dragged to the deepest cell of the Ministry of Justice without so much as glancing at the evidence. Then, Wei Zhang marched straight to the Dowager's palace and knelt on the freezing stone outside her doors for a full hour to apologize for the insult to her family.
When I knelt on the carpet that night to massage the stinging red welts on his knees with medicinal oil, I felt the tremor running through his muscles. It wasn't pain. It was the pure, violently suppressed ecstasy of a slaughterer finally tasting blood.
"Bao Niang," he whispered, staring at the ceiling. "The fire is finally at the Li family's door."
He almost never dragged court politics into my bed. Tonight, he couldn't stop talking.
His performative, hysterical defense of the Li family had worked perfectly. By acting like a terrified puppet, he had forced the entire court to watch their sovereign humiliate himself for the Dowager. And in doing so, he had successfully weaponized the court's collective outrage. The resentment against the Li family had boiled over into a critical mass, and he was holding the match.
"There is a second gift coming for them in three days," he murmured, his eyes glittering with a dark, predatory light. His hand slid down to grip mine, stopping the massage. "Bao Niang. When spring comes, I am going to elevate you again."
I stared at him, confused. I hadn't birthed a child. I hadn't done anything to warrant a promotion.
He didn't explain. He pulled me up by the waist, dragging me over him, and began murmuring my name against my mouth in a tone so desperate and heavy it felt like a confession. We didn't talk about politics again that night.
* * *
The second memorial struck the court two days later—this time co-signed by the Ministers of Revenue and Justice. They dropped twenty-one irrefutable, heavily documented counts of embezzlement, treasonous overreach, and military corruption directly onto the Duke of Jinyang's head.
The civil service went feral. Several elderly censors threatened to literally dash their brains out against the dragon pillars if the Emperor did not act. Wei Zhang—playing the role of a sovereign overwhelmed by righteous fury—had "no choice" but to order a terminal investigation.
He bypassed the usual imperial investigators and personally appointed Gong Pingru's father, now the rigid, unbribable Chief Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, to lead the charge. As his deputy, he assigned Yuan Peiqing—the sharpest blade in Princess Shengyang's political arsenal.
It was a masterpiece of political knife-work.
The Emperor was using Princess Shengyang's faction to annihilate the Dowager's faction, keeping his own hands spotlessly clean while the two colossal women tore each other to pieces.
Every single one of the twenty-one charges held. In less than a fortnight, the Li family's fifty-year stranglehold on the empire simply ceased to exist. The exiles and executions were carried out in the dead of winter, methodical and without mercy.
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