That night, the palace was as silent as a tomb. Lin Rui sat at his heavy desk with his fingers resting lightly on the edge of the polished wood, while his gaze remained fixed on the darkness beyond the candlelight.
He had been sitting there for a long time.
Lately, he found himself doing this often, staring into nothing while his thoughts wandered in circles that felt more like the walls of a prison than a mind.
Earlier that day, he had ordered Princess Lian Zhi to be confined to her quarters. He tried to use soft words in his head: Protected.
But no matter how he tried to phrase it, the truth did not change. He had turned her room into a jail.
He told himself it was the only way left to save the story. It was the only way left to preserve the story he had written. Yet lately, even that certainty had begun to slip away. Every time he tried to correct the course of events, the plot seemed to bend and dissolve in ways he could no longer control.
