_RelleLebby_
She was never supposed to be seen. Not by the palace. Not by a prince. Not by a court that had already decided what she was worth before she spoke a single word.
Mi-ran tends palace gardens in Joseon-era Korea, her mind sharp as any scholar's, her world deliberately kept small by people with every reason to keep it that way. When a lantern festival puts her face and a crown prince's gaze in the same moment, something begins that neither of them is permitted to name.
The court will not allow it. Lady Seon-mi will not allow it. Tradition, hierarchy, and centuries of rigid certainty about who belongs where will not allow it.
They will do more than refuse it. They will attempt to end it.
What follows is not a fairytale. It is an exile, a transformation, and the long hard road back to a palace that does not know what it is looking at when she walks through the gate. Mi-ran returns from the Ming Dynasty not as the gardener who was sent away but as something no one prepared for.
The court that destroyed her built the version of her that will take them apart.
But love was never the only cost. The people she loved paid portions of what she owed. The grief she carries is real and it does not dissolve in triumph. The man who signs her exile order loves her. Both of these things are true.
Some love stories end at the altar. This one is only beginning there.
A historical interracial romance set between Joseon Korea and the Ming Dynasty.