Neither Falls Alone

In the life she has already been through, she came up from palace maid to empress, and Adrian was a eunuch she was tied to in secret. On the day of her coronation the prime minister and his daughter brought the arrangement out into the open, and the two of them were put to death for it. She wakes up five years before that. She comes back hard and calculating, and the first thing she sets out to do is keep Adrian from entering the palace, so that nobody makes a eunuch of him. What she does not know is that this time he is only pretending to be one. Both of them are working against the same ending, each in a way the other cannot see. She spends a long while testing him and trying to work out what he is hiding before the two of them start moving together against the emperor's consort. Adrian is put in prison and tortured rather than give her away. When she goes to plead for his life she gets her proof that he is not a eunuch, and he tells her he remembers the first life as well. After that they turn on the prime minister and the treason he is preparing.