Chapter 1

The day I wed the Golden Saint, Patrick Henson.

In front of the whole immortal order, Demon Sovereign Selene worked her spell and melted my bridal robes away inch by inch, leaving me bare beneath the eyes of every immortal there.

I could not bear the shame. I threw myself at a pillar, and though my broken body clung to life, my sight was gone for good.

Everyone in the immortal order knew it: Patrick grieved for what had been done to me, and he loathed Selene for the evil she had wrought.

He seized her, and made her kneel at my bedside in penance day after day, for ten full years, without a single lapse.

The demon race's young lord snatched her away again and again, and each time Patrick took her back, he would chain her to the stone pillar in my chamber and whip her.

Selene sobbed and wailed, on and on.

I could not stand it. And when I begged him to spare her, my eyes saw light again.

Patrick was pinning Selene beneath him, the rims of his eyes red:

"You dragged Ruthie into this state, and still you dream of running. Truly the demon race has not a shred of a human heart."

But I read the shape of his lips, and what they truly said was:

"Sel, everywhere I have been, has he been there too?"

I was about to cry out and demand an answer when a wave of dizziness took me, and a screen of light flared in the air:

"Heavens, I can't watch. This is the very moment Ruth Pruitt walks in on the two of them, enrages Patrick, and ends up flayed and picked apart, bone from bone."

"Poor Ruthie. Her skin was made into a human-skin lantern. Patrick loved her all along, and when he couldn't have her he destroyed her with his own hands, then used Selene to make sure Ruthie could never enter the wheel of rebirth!"

1.

A chill ran through me, and my eyes fixed, beyond my will, on the two of them tangled together by the stone pillar.

Patrick heard the faint stir and was on his feet in an instant:

"Don't be afraid, Ruthie."

He walked toward me slowly, his hand reaching out as if to steady me without quite touching:

"Selene is beyond all forgiveness. She humiliated you on our wedding day, and these ten years of the whip in penance are nothing but what she brought upon herself!"

"Now the demon race stirs up trouble again and again, one more crime on her name. Will you take up the whip yourself and deal with her, to let out the hatred in your heart?"

The light screen flared up again, dense with words:

"He isn't avenging Ruthie at all! He's suspected for ages that she got her sight back!"

"Here it comes again, steering her into raising her hand. The moment she truly punishes Selene, he can turn around and tell the world the Saint has a cruel and violent nature!"

The fingers at my side clenched all at once, a bone-deep cold creeping up through me.

I kept up the lost, helpless look, let my gaze drift on purpose, and gave a timid shake of my head:

"I... I can't see. I don't dare touch the instruments. Whatever my husband decides is best."

Patrick gazed at me quietly for a long moment. Then, as if setting his suspicion aside, he lifted a hand and brushed lightly over the crown of my hair:

"Ruthie has a kind heart. Have it your way then. I won't force you to touch such filth."

I kept my eyes lowered, and inside me everything was clear.

He wasn't yielding to me. He was only testing me.

Patrick turned his head and gave an order toward the door:

"My wife has just had a fright and her strength is low. Fetch a bowl of the soothing restorative tonic."

A maidservant answered, and in a moment she returned carrying a bowl of pitch-black brew.

In the instant his back was to me, Patrick took the bowl and let a drop of blood from Selene's fingertip fall into it.

The movement was hidden past all seeing, immortal art veiling it, and no one else caught a thing.

"This is bad. Nothing curses a Saint's pure blood like demon filth! Drink this bowl down and it will force-taint the heroine's bloodline, cutting off for a time her spirit-vein bond with the Pruitt maternal house!"

"But not drinking gives her away as guilty, and drinking is severing her own road back. Forward or back, it's a dead end!"

I stared at the tonic, the demon aura shimmering off it, my throat tightening.

My elder brother came to visit me every five days. If I drank, there might still be some turn for the better. If I didn't, I'd give myself away on the spot.

I lifted the bowl and drank it down in one breath.

The moment the tonic reached my belly, the light screen crashed into my eyes:

"The cruelest part is still to come. In her one moment of hopeless despair, the heroine reaches out to her family, and calls for her own elder brother, Tyler Pruitt!"

"But Tyler's every thought, every glance, belongs to Selene. To protect the Demon Sovereign, he turns around and sells out his own sister's whereabouts, pushing Ruthie into the place where she dies with his own hands!"

"And that's not all. In the end the whole Pruitt family falls, a thousand years of legacy destroyed, all of it the tragedy Tyler brings about, giving ground step by step for Selene, betraying his own kin from within and without."

A shudder went through me, and something roared inside my chest.

Tyler?

The elder brother who had been gentle and courteous since childhood, who protected me in everything, whom the whole world praised?

So all that warmth had been a lie.

So the fall of the Pruitts, and my wretched death in my last life, all of it had come from the brother I trusted most.

I bit down hard on my lower lip, forcing every trace of shock and hatred back down.

On my face I kept the soft, dazed, know-nothing look, not daring to let a single thing show.

"Ah, if only the Pruitt Ancestor were still here. He'd surely punish that monster Tyler and protect Ruthie."

In a flash, the one road to life rose up in my mind.

A hundred years ago, the demon race threw the three realms into chaos, and to steady the peace of those realms, my Pruitt family gave everything.

Among us was an Ancestor whose cultivation reached the heavens and whose lifespan had no end. He overdrew that cultivation by force and sank into the forbidden rear-mountain ground, into a century of sleep.

That cold, proud, solitary Ancestor was the one in the whole Pruitt family who cherished me most, who favored me above all others.

If I could only wake the Ancestor from his hundred years of sleep, perhaps I could defy the heavens and change my fate, and break free of this destiny that had death written all through it.