Thorns Beneath the Veil

Wen Ruyi is called back to the marquis household to marry in her legitimate sister's place. She is the concubine's daughter, sent away as a child and left there for years, and everyone in the house reads the summons as exactly what it looks like. What none of them know is that she came back for her mother, who died badly and not by accident. Behind that death was a plan. Wen Ruyi puts away the meekness she was raised into and starts working through the household one faction at a time, pulling apart the legitimate mother's show of kindness and opening up the sealed old case layer by layer. The capital around her is unstable, and as she moves the ones who carried out the killing and the ones who ordered it surface one after another. Old scores and fresh danger arrive together, and she has to decide what to do with both.