The Mad Dog by My Pillow - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Nanny Qin had been with me for seven years.

Her eyes were failing and her legs were weak, but she insisted on checking on me every single night.

She always said, “Your Highness has been a light sleeper since childhood. If I don’t see you with my own eyes, my heart won’t be at ease.”

Now, she was lying by the well, her face pale and sallow, looking like a piece of paper rotted by water.

The Chief Eunuch bowed low with a fawning smile.

“Please restrain your grief, Your Highness. It must have been the slippery path at night; the old soul simply lost her footing…”

“She walked this courtyard for seven years.”

I cut him off.

“She knew every loose brick by touch. Why would she suddenly slip today?”

The smile on the Chief Eunuch’s face stiffened.

No one dared to answer.

I crouched down and pried open Nanny Qin’s hand.

The fragment of a blue tassel was soaked in water, its color darkened.

I slowly stood up and looked back at Meng Yu’an.

He stood half a step behind me.

His back was perfectly straight and his face was expressionless, like a blade thrust into the snow.

“Yu’an.”

I questioned him.

“Did you go to the wing room last night?”

“I did.”

He answered quickly.

My chest tightened slightly.

“At what time?”

“After the hour of the Rat.”

“To do what?”

“Nanny Qin was bringing you a calming tonic, but her gait was unsteady.”

He paused.

“I escorted her back.”

I stared at him.

“And then?”

He looked back at me.

“When she was still alive, I escorted her back.”

When he said this, his voice was lower than usual.

It didn’t sound like a provocation. Instead, it sounded more like he was owning up to a sin he hadn’t managed to stop himself from committing.

The area by the well fell silent.

The Chief Eunuch’s face turned pale, and he hurried to smooth things over.

“Guard Meng’s words… they sound like a joke.”

But I couldn’t laugh.

Meng Yu’an didn’t like wasting words.

Normally, he considered even a glance at others a waste of time, and he certainly wouldn’t beat around the bush with me at a time like this.

When he said “when she was still alive,” it meant he knew what happened afterward.

In the past two months, four people who were close to me had died.

The young maid who brought me steamed sugar pastries was found hanged in the wing room.

The seamstress who drew embroidery patterns for me fell into the river on her way back.

The guard who blocked a toast for me at a banquet was beaten to death during the night.

The teacher who taught me the zither vomited black blood the moment he stepped out of my door.

Rumors were flying through the palace.

They said I was a deposed princess, a woman of harsh fate who cursed those around her.

Some even mocked me behind my back: “She carries a heavy aura of misfortune; whoever gets close to her dies.”

It wasn’t that I hadn’t investigated.

Every time someone died, the Judicial Bureau and the Imperial Household Department arrived before I did.

The case files were sealed that very day.

The young maid was labeled a thief who committed suicide out of guilt; the seamstress was ruled to have slipped while drunk. The guard’s case was even more ridiculous-he was framed for illicit relations with a palace maid, and his body wasn’t even kept until the next morning.

Mr. Pei’s death was the cleanest of all.

The Imperial Medical Bureau called it a sudden death from an old illness, and even the medical records were filled out perfectly.

It was as if someone had been waiting to provide an explanation for these deaths all along.

I didn’t just sit and wait, either.

After the maid died, I used my last remaining jewelry to bribe the eunuch on duty in the wing room. After the seamstress’s accident, I had Nanny Qin follow the trail to the Laundry Bureau to find out whose wine she had drunk that night. On the night the guard was beaten to death, I even secretly sent someone to flip through the confessions recorded by the Judicial Bureau.

But every time I touched upon a lead, the line snapped.

Either the person was transferred away, the files were altered, or the informant became too ill to get out of bed the next day.

At the time, I suspected Yan Yuheng.

He had confined me to Qiwu Villa for seven years, wishing for nothing more than for me to be surrounded by corpses so that no one from my past would dare approach me.

But I had never seriously considered Meng Yu’an.

Not until I saw that blue tassel in Nanny Qin’s hand, and his bloodshot eyes as he knelt before my bed last night.

That “she”-the one they spoke of-was me.

Bai Qingtang, the legitimate daughter of the former Crown Prince, who once lived in the Phoenix Palace and is now trapped in Qiwu Villa.

And the man standing behind me with blood on his hands, yet still willing to wrap my fox-fur cloak tighter, is the very Meng Yu’an I raised with my own hands.

He calls me Princess, blocks blades for me, and guards my door.

He might also be killing for me.

I didn’t believe it before.

Now, standing by the well, I suddenly felt that those people weren’t just unlucky.

Someone was culling the people around me.

I thought back to the Meng Yu’an of last night.

He had knelt by my bed, striking his forehead against the bedframe over and over, as if trying to force himself out of something.

I had never seen him like that.

He looked like he was on the verge of madness. Or perhaps, like he had been mad for a very long time.

As the body was carried away, Meng Yu’an tucked my fox-fur cloak around me.

“It’s cold outside. Let’s go back.”

His palms were as cold as ice.

I caught a very faint scent of blood on his sleeve.

In that moment, I suddenly realized that what I had raised for seven years wasn’t a shadow guard.

It was a rabid dog that knew how to bite.

And only now did I notice that his teeth were covered in blood.