Beneath the Fallen Blossoms

On the day of her coming-of-age ceremony, bandits storm Isabel Conrad's home, strip her family of everything and burn their estate to the ground. Using her six-year-old sister as leverage, they force her to surrender, torture her for three days and nights, then sell her to a brothel. When she is at her most desperate, Duke Landon Knight buys her freedom and offers her a home.

Three years into their marriage, Isabel believes she has finally healed, until she overhears Landon confess to a friend that he bribed the bandits himself and that she was only kept alive so Lucia Bellamy could return and take her revenge. Armed with the Conrad family signet her grandfather Leonard Conrad left her, Isabel secures two imperial decrees: her own divorce, and a full investigation into the massacre of her family.

When Lucia arrives at the estate and orders the apricot trees Isabel has tended for three years cut down, Isabel sees how little remains between her and Landon—and begins to pull away from the man whose tenderness was never meant for her.