For a moment, the courtyard was charged with tension.
Duan Zhengchun's furious roar would have made any ordinary woman—caught being intimate with another man by her husband and then harshly rebuked—turn pale with fright and fall to her knees to beg forgiveness.
Lin Xuan narrowed his eyes slightly, about to smooth things over with a few words and muddle through it.
Yet, to everyone's surprise—
"Duan Zhengchun! What are you yelling for?!"
A roar even sharper and more furious than Duan Zhengchun's suddenly exploded from inside the room.
Dao Baifeng, who had just been tender and gentle before Lin Xuan, her eyes full of dependence, now seemed like an entirely different person.
Her beautiful face, which had carried a trace of sorrow, instantly frosted over. Her phoenix eyes widened as she glared fiercely at her husband standing in the doorway.
Not only did she show no guilt or unease whatsoever, she instead resembled a cat whose tail had been stepped on. She took a step forward and pressed directly toward Duan Zhengchun, her presence actually three parts stronger than that of the Prince Zhennan of the Kingdom of Dali.
"What do you mean by that?"
Dao Baifeng pointed at Duan Zhengchun's nose, her voice icy. "Are you suspecting me? Are you saying that Young Master Lin and I are engaged in some shameful, unspeakable affair?!"
Duan Zhengchun was stunned by the sudden counterattack.
He had burst in brimming with jealousy and rage. Seeing the two standing so close together, their posture looking utterly intimate no matter how he viewed it, his first instinct as a man had naturally been to fly into a fury.
But after Dao Baifeng's righteous rebuke, his blazing arrogance was like a fire doused with cold water, extinguished by more than half with a hiss.
For