🌑 PROLOGUE — Five Years Ago
Thunder rolled across the night sky as Shi Anran staggered through the hotel corridor, her vision swimming, her breath shallow.
Her fingers clutched the wall, nails scraping against the cold marble.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Her heartbeat pounded violently, heat spreading through her veins like fire.
"Wanqing… Yichuan… what did you do… to me…"
Behind her, laughter floated faintly—sweet, soft, cruel.
Shi Wanqing, her stepsister, leaned against the wall with a smile too beautiful and too poisonous, her fingers intertwined with Qin Yichuan, Anran's fiancé.
"Don't blame us, Sister," Wanqing whispered. "You were always in the way."
Then the door slammed shut, and darkness swallowed Anran whole.
Inside the room, the scent of medicine and faint cologne mixed in the air.
A man lay unconscious on the bed—broad-shouldered, coldly handsome even in sleep.
He had also been drugged.
Neither saw the other.
Neither knew the other.
Two strangers forced into a night that would destroy both their lives.
Morning.
Light slipped through the curtains.
Anran woke first.
Her head throbbed. Her lips trembled. Her clothes were gone.
The man beside her was silent, still asleep, his face half-shadowed.
She stared—confused, horrified, unable to think.
A sound escaped her throat, half-scream, half-sob.
She stumbled from the bed, grabbed the sheet, and fled.
She didn't even see his face clearly.
She didn't know the name Mu Lingchen.
And he never saw hers.
Years passed.
Pain became silence.
Silence became resolve.
Resolve became steel.
Shi Anran gave birth to triplets alone, barely surviving the delivery.
But while she lay unconscious, the hospital stole one of her babies—
and delivered him straight into the arms of the stranger from that night.
When she woke and saw only two children left, something inside her shattered forever.
With blood on her lips and a newborn in each arm, she escaped overseas, disappearing from the world.
The girl who left was broken.
The woman who returned…
was a legend.
Three years later, under the bright lights of a grand audition hall,
Shi Anran walked in wearing a mask of cold beauty and indifference.
Every step was confidence.
Every breath was power.
In the front row sat a man with eyes dark enough to shake the world.
Mu Lingchen.
CEO of the Mu Corporation.
The man haunted by a nameless woman.
The father of a stolen child.
He looked up—
and their eyes met.
For a heartbeat, time fell silent.
Neither recognized the other.
But fate did.
And fate… never forgets.