Romance

Beneath The Fallen Blossoms

by Shell Flower

On the day of my coming-of-age ceremony, a group of bandits stormed into my home. They robbed us of everything we owned and burned our estate to the ground.Then they used my six-year-old sister as leverage, forcing me to show myself.More than a dozen bandits dragged me back to their hideout and tortured me for three days and three nights before selling me to a brothel.I had thought about dying, but even death was beyond my reach.When I was at my most desperate, Duke Landon Knight paid for my freedom and asked if I was willing to go home with him.After crawling through the darkness for so long, I suddenly saw a light that had never gone out.Three years into our marriage, I once asked him why, among all the flowers in the world, he had chosen this withered one—me."When I caught my first glimpse of you as a child, I swore I'd never marry anyone but you."I thought he truly loved me. I thought that was why he was willing to marry a brothel girl whom everyone else called a woman who had been with countless men. I spent those three years healing from my wounds, hoping that one day I could give him a son or daughter of our own.Until I overheard a conversation between him and his closest friend in his study."Lucia Bellamy is arriving in the capital tomorrow. Are you really planning to bring her into the estate?"Isabel has already suffered the loss of her family and been humiliated and sold to a brothel. Her life has been tragic enough. Can you really bear to bring Lucia into the estate and hurt her all over again?"Landon answered without hesitation, "What do the lives of a few dozen Conrads matter? If the Conrads hadn't reported the Bellamys back then, Lucia wouldn't have been exiled to Southvale, and we wouldn't have been prevented from marrying."As for Isabel, I bribed the bandits to sell her to a brothel. I did it only to spare her life and leave her alive long enough for Lucia to come back and take her revenge herself."So that first glimpse he'd never forgotten had been of Lucia, and I was nothing more than a tool for him to use in taking revenge for the woman he loved.The next day, I used the Conrad family signet my grandfather, Leonard Conrad, had left me to secure two imperial decrees.The first was my own request for a divorce, so Lucia could enter the estate as his legal wife.The second ordered a full investigation into the truth behind the massacre of my family, so that their names could finally be cleared.

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