In Prohibition-era Chicago, a slum girl named Evelyn, desperate to save her gravely ill sister, accepts her uncle's arrangement to pose as the fiancée of Peter, the useless young master of a gang, with the real aim of getting close to the true power: the iron-fisted patriarch Vincent. She plays every step carefully, unaware that Vincent has seen through her lies all along—he simply indulges her. When he shields her from humiliation and says, “If you ask directly, I’ll give it,” her rule of trading her body for survival crumbles. Her secret is exposed, Peter kidnaps her, and she once again chooses the defiance she made seven years ago. Vincent burns the evidence, executes his own brother, and unties the ropes. It isn't until she sees the deep crimson ribbon that she realizes: seven years ago at the Dublin docks, the boy she saved at sixteen with her mother's hair ribbon was none other than him. He searched for her for seven years and recognized her at a glance. She thought she was clinging to a powerful branch—but that high branch was the hand he had reached out to her from the very beginning.
