Lord Seo struck one hand against the table hard enough to make the tea tremble inside her cup. Instead of shouting, he leaned toward his daughter and reminded her that the King was still a man, regardless of the palace rumours calling him a monk. "Sukbin has already proved that. Stop treating his rejection as something permanent and find whatever she found. His interests, his weaknesses, his sympathy for the poor—use something. I did not place you close to the throne so you could surrender because another woman reached him first."
His daughter looked away toward the garden and remained silent, but resentment began replacing embarrassment. She had spent weeks watching Lee Yeong behave as though every woman in the palace were invisible while rumours surrounding Sukbin grew more outrageous by the day. Now her own father expected her to compete with a woman nobody properly understood, and unlike the Queen, she had no official position strong enough to survive endless rejection.
