"A woman is like water. If you do not contain a woman in a strong pot, she will rot the foundation of the house... They are objects of our comfort. Give them a voice, and they will burn the entire household down." To save her father from ruin, Y/n sold herself to the Jeon empire. The price was to become Jeon's wife and lose her voice, career and spine. She was to become a mute decorative trophy wife to a misogynist and patriarchal man. But the tragedy of a perfect cage is that the bird eventually stops fighting. And the tragedy of Jeon was that he didn't realize he was suffocating his most precious person until she was already slipping through his fingers. But at first, his efforts were bare minimum. "You want a medal for the absolute bare minimum of human decency," she finally snaps, "I have spent this entire engagement making myself a smaller, quieter woman so your father can feel comfortable... and you expect me to thank you for watching me bleed?" That is the night the obedience in him dies. Caught between the patriarchal father who owns the empire and the exhausted woman he bought but never earned, Jeon must learn to burn his own house down to protect her. He must discover that a woman’s respect cannot be inherited, it is EARNED. “I don’t care about the inheritance,” he swears, stripping away thirty-two years of arrogant privilege to kneel in the dirt at her feet. “I will let this entire empire burn before I let anyone in that house put you down again. This is exactly where I belong. At your feet. In your hands. Nowhere else.” But when a man finally chooses the woman over the empire… will the empire let either of them survive? Or will her ambitions be crushed? Join me in this story of deep-seated patriarchy, performative people, and a love that tries to find its way out.