My Husband Is the Future Emperor

"Rule #1 of accidentally time-traveling twelve hundred years into the past: Do not marry the man destined to become the most feared tyrant in dynastic history. Rule #2: Definitely do not fall in love with him."

When twenty-six-year-old museum conservator Shen Yuelan touches a fractured jade pendant in an imperial vault, she expects a historical restoration project—not waking up in ancient China betrothed to Xiao Jingyuan, the disgraced Seventh Prince. The history books are crystal clear about who Jingyuan becomes: Emperor Xuanming. The paranoid "Iron Emperor" who slaughters forty-two ministers, lives in an unheated palace, and paints the throne room in blood. Determined to keep her head on her shoulders, Yuelan offers the lethal prince a strict, no-strings contract: Marry publicly for survival. Remain strangers behind closed doors. And promise not to execute me. Jingyuan agrees. He has spent fifteen years surviving betrayal, poison, and northern exile; he trusts no one, especially not his sharp-tongued new bride. Except their cold arrangement refuses to stay cold. Between dodging poisoned tribute tea, surviving lethal imperial banquets, and auditing royal firewood, Yuelan begins to see the man behind the historical monster. A man who dives across a two-hundred-foot canyon to catch her hand, who fries midnight flatbread in a coarse apron just to hear her laugh, and who looks at her like she is the only light in an unforgiving world. When a vicious court coup forces Jingyuan into chains, Yuelan uncovers a conspiracy that shatters everything she thought she knew: the history she memorized was an engineered tragedy, and Jingyuan was never meant to become a monster. Now, with a fractured timeline and an empire on the brink of civil war, Yuelan faces an impossible choice—activate the relic to return to her safe twenty-first-century life, or risk it all to burn down a corrupt dynasty beside the man who would rather lose her freely than keep her in a cage.