Chapter 1
**A Divorce on the Wedding Night**
Jiang Mianmian burst out of the rose-filled bathtub like the water had turned to fire.
She surfaced choking, petals plastered to her skin, lungs clawing for air. For one shattered second, she could not understand why she was breathing at all.
She had jumped into the sea.
Her gaze lifted to the mirror.
Young.
Too young.
Her skin was smooth, untouched by years of insomnia, humiliation, alcohol, and the slow rot of a disastrous marriage. Her face—God—her face still belonged to the twenty-year-old girl who had not yet learned how ugly obsession could become.
Jiang Mianmian stared until her hands began to shake.
“No…” she whispered. “No. This can’t be real.”
Then memory crashed in.
The wedding.
The bridal suite.
Tomorrow’s honeymoon flight.
Tonight—
Her wedding night.
Eight years ago.
Shao Chenyi was twenty-four. Newly graduated. Beautiful in that restrained, clean-edged way that made people lower their voices around him without knowing why. Broad shoulders. Sharp brows. Calm eyes with a faint chill beneath them. A man who looked gentle until you noticed how much pride he kept buried under silence.
Her husband.
The man she had chased.
For one frozen instant, Jiang Mianmian forgot how to move.
Then she saw the glass.
Her blood went cold.
Worse—she had arranged it.
On this exact night, Shao Chenyi had agreed to marry her only on the condition that theirs remain a nominal marriage for a few years. Panicked and greedy, terrified of getting only his name and never his heart, she had wanted more than a certificate. She had wanted his body, his attention, proof that she had won.
So she had listened to poisonous advice and crossed a line she could never uncross.
“Don’t drink that!”
The tumbler flew from his hand. Water splashed across the carpet. Glass shattered. He lost his balance, and because she hit him with all the force of panic and regret, both of them went down hard.
His back struck the floor first.
For one breathless beat, neither moved.
Then Shao Chenyi exhaled sharply and looked up at her from the carpet, suspicion darkening his face at once.
“Jiang Mianmian,” he said, his voice flat with anger. “Was that your plan?”
The old Jiang Mianmian would have denied it. Cried. Pouted. Lied. Pushed harder.
She scrambled back on shaking knees. “No. I mean—yes, there was something wrong with the drink, but I don’t want you to touch it. I won’t let you drink it.”
His gaze sharpened.
He sat up slowly, every line of his body drawn tight with contained fury. “You expect me to believe that?”
He shouldn’t. She knew that. He had every reason not to.
“Please,” she said, voice rough. “Just listen to me tonight.”
His eyes moved from her face to the broken glass and back again. He was not a man who reacted wildly. Even now, on a night when he had been forced into a marriage he did not want, his anger stayed elegant, tightly leashed, and therefore more dangerous.
“I won’t touch you,” she said. “Not without your consent. Not tonight. Not ever again.”
Shao Chenyi went utterly still.
He rose in one smooth movement.
Then he held out a hand.
“Get up,” he said.
The last version of him she remembered had known exactly how to offer tenderness while withholding mercy. Even simple kindness made her wary now. But this was not that man yet. This was the younger Shao Chenyi—humiliated, suspicious, proud, but not yet truly merciless.
Slowly, she placed her hand in his.
The contact jolted through her. He pulled her to her feet. Her legs, numb with adrenaline, gave way at once, and she pitched forward. Shao Chenyi caught her automatically, one arm firm around her waist.
Jiang Mianmian went pale.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted. “My legs gave out. I didn’t do that on purpose.”
His brows drew together. “What exactly are you afraid of?”
You, she thought.
He had not hurt her yet.
Shao Chenyi bent to pick up a shirt from the sofa, then paused when he saw her face.
It was not desire.
Not coyness.
It was the frantic focus of someone standing at the edge of a cliff and trying not to fall the same way twice.
Her throat tightened. This was the moment. If she hesitated, history would begin closing around her again.
She looked straight at him and said the one thing she had never managed to say until it was far too late.
“Shao Chenyi,” she said, every word trembling, “I want a divorce.”
Silence fell so hard it seemed to ring.
Shao Chenyi did not answer at once. Lamplight traced the line of his jaw, turning his face colder than it had been a moment ago.
“A divorce?” he repeated.
Jiang Mianmian nodded too quickly. The duvet slipped from one shoulder, and she dragged it back up. “Yes.”
His mouth flattened. “If this is another one of your tests, save it.”
“It isn’t.”
“You forced this marriage through, and now on the wedding night you want to talk about divorce?”
Forced.
Jiang Mianmian lowered her eyes. There was no point pretending otherwise. Her father had used pressure. She had used obsession. Shao Chenyi had been cornered from every side and dragged to the altar beneath something that looked like consent and was not.
Now it was the first truth she had to face.
She drew a breath. “I know you don’t believe me. But I mean it.”
He watched her with open distrust. “Then explain what changed between the bathroom and now.”
I died, she thought. I spent eight years destroying us both and walked into the sea because I couldn’t bear what I had become.
Instead she said, “I suddenly realized I was wrong.”
Shao Chenyi almost laughed.
“You?” he said softly. “Suddenly realized that?”
Jiang Mianmian forced herself not to retreat. “Mock me if you want. I deserve it. But I’m not here to make trouble tonight. I don’t want to sleep with you, I don’t want to fight with you, and I’m not going to take back what I said.”
That drew the slightest change in his expression.
She pressed on before fear could choke her. “You agreed to marry me because of a deal with my father, didn’t you?”
The instant the words left her mouth, she regretted them.
Shao Chenyi’s gaze sharpened. “How do you know that?”
A chill ran across her scalp.
“My father called before I got into the bath,” she said quickly. “He hinted at it. I didn’t understand at first.”
“A call?”
“Yes.”
He looked unconvinced.
Jiang Mianmian’s throat tightened. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” His voice had gone calm again, which was worse. “For your father’s methods? Or for yours?”
Both.
For every insult disguised as generosity. Every gift that bruised his pride. Every public display that made him look like a son-in-law living off Jiang family money.
“My father loves me in the only way he knows how,” she said quietly. “That doesn’t make it right.”
She lifted her head. “As for me… I liked you for a long time. I wanted this marriage so badly that I stopped asking whether I should. I thought if I got the marriage, everything else would come later.”
Shao Chenyi said nothing.
“I was wrong,” she said. “So I want to correct it before things get worse.”
Before I lose myself in you again, she thought.
A long silence followed.
Then he walked to the minibar, opened a fresh bottle of water, poured a glass, and deliberately did not drink from it.
Jiang Mianmian noticed.
He no longer trusted anything in this room.
She could not blame him.
At last he said, “You don’t need to perform sincerity for me. Since I married you, I’ll keep my side of the agreement.”
“Marriage isn’t charity,” she said before she could stop herself.
His eyes lifted.
She exhaled. “I mean… you don’t owe me that.”
Something like anger crossed his face.
“So what do you propose?” he asked. “That we tell both families tomorrow morning the bride changed her mind overnight?”
“If necessary, yes.”
“That would ruin your reputation.”
Instead she said, “That’s my problem.”
Shao Chenyi studied her, then took one step closer. “No. It would become mine too.”
So she changed tactics.
“What if I sign first?” she asked.
One of his brows lifted.
“A divorce agreement. I sign it now. When the deadline in your agreement with my father is over, you file it immediately. I won’t fight you. I won’t deny it. And you’ll never have to worry that I’ll change my mind.”
The suggestion was practical. Unromantic. Cruel in its own way.
Shao Chenyi finally looked genuinely uncertain what game she was playing.
She let him look.
There was no perfect way to prove she meant this. She had only one thing to offer—a willingness to surrender the thing she had once clung to hardest.
After a long pause, he said, “We’ll discuss it after the honeymoon.”
Her heart dropped. “The honeymoon?”
“Yes. Bali. Our flight is tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“You were the one who insisted on a honeymoon.”
“Can’t we cancel it?” she asked.
His expression cooled. “Why?”
Because I remember too much.
She turned her face away. “I’m tired.”
“So am I,” he said. “And yet here we are.”
He walked to the sofa instead of the bed.
Jiang Mianmian blinked.
He unbuttoned his cuffs, loosened his collar, and said without looking at her, “Dry your hair before you sleep.”
She lay stiffly beneath the duvet, damp hair cold against the pillow, eyes wide open in the dark. She listened to the quiet sounds of him moving across the room, the click of a lamp going out, the rustle of cloth as he settled onto the sofa.
Her body was still in the bridal suite.
Her mind was already back at the end of the marriage—on a dark shore, under a black sky, with the sea waiting.
She had asked for a divorce.
He had not agreed.
And tomorrow, no matter how badly she dreaded it, she would still get on a plane with the man she had already once failed to escape.
