At this hour, no one in the Gu household should be moving about. So when Gu Jiangyue heard the sound, she stiffened, then scanned the darkness with wary eyes. “Who’s there?”
A soft chuckle answered her. From the pavilion roof, someone dropped down with effortless grace and landed in front of her. He was cloaked in black; the pale face beneath his hood gave nothing away—no joy, no sorrow—yet his posture and the slight lift at the corner of his mouth betrayed a private amusement.
Gu Jiangyue squinted and, at last, recognized him.
He crossed his arms and leaned against a pavilion pillar as if he’d never moved at all. “I went to your courtyard earlier and couldn’t find you,” he said. “Didn’t expect to run into you here.”
He spoke with a casual air that suited the black cloth hiding him. He frowned a moment, as if recalling something, then asked with curiosity, “The gift from Xie Chengrui—didn’t like it?”
Gu Jiangyue didn’t bother concealing her expression. She had already decided: “I hate him. I hate anything connected to him. Besides, I’m already betrothed to Xie Jiu’an. I can’t accept anything from that man.”
The scandal at her coming-of-age ceremony had been loud enough to echo through the capital. People gossiped—such news was useful, and Gu Jiangyue had let it spread without interference. She suspected the man in black knew what had happened; he must have seen her fling the qin away earlier, too. It was simpler for him to speak plainly.
Behind the mask, Xie Jiu’an felt a bloom of pleasure he couldn’t entirely explain. If she refused Chengrui’s gifts out of dislike, then—he allowed himself the thought—accepting gifts from him would be proof she liked him. He had worried, briefly, what would happen if she discovered his disguise, but he wasn’t yet ready to drop the black-clad identity. It made it easier to be near her, to worry for her, to help without the awkwardness that their more public relationship would bring.
“So? What do you want?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level. Even the usual rasp had smoothed into a hint of amusement.
Gu Jiangyue didn’t answer right away. The Gu household was full of eyes and ears, and she had not been foolish enough to call him out in the open. She invited him into her courtyard, shutting the door behind them with a soft click. Only then did she relax, and the crease at the corner of her mouth softened into something like a guilty smile.
“I need a small favor,” she said.
“Say it straight,” he replied.
Xie Jiu’an watched her—he thought he could guess what she would ask. But he let her speak.
She hesitated for a beat, and he let out the lightest of laughs. “Short on funds?”
Her surprise at his guess was plain, but she nodded. “Yes.”
He had expected as much. He’d known she planned to open a shop; the prudent Ninth Prince certainly would not give a girl a house without making sure she had the means to go with it. It was deliberate—an inducement to make her come to him.
He wasn’t short of money. He was short of her.
“I can provide it,” he said, tamping down the pleasure that threatened to shine through.
She looked up at him, then away, and for a moment something fragile flickered behind her calm. When his name fell from the corner of her lips—“Why don’t you ask Xie Jiu’an? Aren’t you supposed to be his betrothed?”—she sounded like she was testing herself more than him.
His smile faltered. For all the black cloth and the practiced lightness, she was right: their relationship was odd, layered, and not something she could face easily. The life she’d lived before—broken and mistrustful—made her close off before anything could truly begin. She had sworn, in the quiet of her second life, to lock away her heart and avoid being hurt again. Yet she couldn’t deny it; she had come to rely on him, in ways that frightened her.
“You and Xie Jiu’an—are you close? Has he always been... frivolous?” Her voice wavered. Gu Jiangyue had learned, through two lives, to distrust surfaces. She sensed there was more behind his easy smiles than anyone realized.
Xie Jiu’an had been studying her expression, trying to glean what she thought of him. But when she called him frivolous, he stopped mid-thought, struck suddenly by doubt—had he played the part too well, or was the capital’s gossip worse than he’d believed?
To the world, he had it easy: favored by the emperor, the pampered prince. But no one understood the reason behind that favoritism. No one knew the night his mother fell from favor, framed and cast into a cold palace like rubbish—no one knew how the emperor had turned a blind eye until she hanged herself with three feet of white cloth. The court’s cruelty had left him with nothing but the sharp memory of injustice.
Only later—when the truth about his mother’s identity surfaced—did the emperor’s attitude change. Remorse arrived too late; it could not bring back what had been lost. The emperor’s sudden tenderness, like late rain on scorched earth, meant nothing to Xie Jiu’an. It was a hollow apology, and hollow apologies were worse than hatred. They cut like a blade that called itself regret.
Because of his mother’s past, because of the scandal and the timing of the emperor’s affection, Xie Jiu’an had been kept from any real claim to the throne. He had been given favors, but those favors were strings—evidence that he could stir, but never seize power. He would not accept being played for a pet by the court that had killed his mother’s dignity. He would not be satisfied with their pity.
So he chose a different course: to play the fool until the moment they let their guard down, then strike. He would make the world pay for what it had done. If the court thought him expendable, he would become the knife that reshaped their world.
After a long pause, he said softly, without irony, “He? He’s a good man.”
The words surprised her with their simplicity. In his own story—flawed, relentless, shaped by sorrow—being good meant one thing: chasing justice for the woman who had been betrayed. In that sense, he had never been anything else.