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"You were never her, Aria. You were just... there." Jason's words echo in my head as I stand in the back of the church, watching him mourn another woman on her sister's wedding day. Isabelle. The perfect dead girlfriend. The ghost I've been competing with for three years. I thought I could be enough. I thought love could grow where grief once lived. But when I find the evidence, when I see the hotel receipts, the text messages, the photos of Jason with Isabelle's sister Violet, I realize the truth. I was never the love story. I was the intermission. What I don't know yet is that nothing about my marriage was real. Not Jason's cruelty. Not Violet's affair. Not the stranger's rescue. They've all been playing a game, and I'm the prize they're willing to destroy each other for. When the truth comes out, when I discover why Isabelle really died and who's been pulling the strings, I'll have to decide: Do I let them destroy me, or do I burn their whole world down?

CONTENT WARNING ⚠️ These are not innocent stories. What's inside these pages is not for the faint hearted. You've been warned. Deliciously. **** Sins Worth Keeping is a collection of stories about men who want what they cannot have and reach for it anyway. In dark corners, empty locker rooms, late nights that last too long and hotel rooms that know too many secrets. These are not love stories that play it safe. These are the ones that burn. Find your quietest corner. Turn the pages and try to breathe normally. Fair warning — once you start, stopping will feel like the hardest thing you've ever done. Don't say you weren't warned. ⚠️🖤

Desperate and with nowhere left to turn, Ivy Carter accepts the strangest job offer of her life. Marry a dying billionaire. The deal is simple. A wealthy heiress who no longer wants to marry her disabled fiancé needs a substitute bride. Ivy looks enough like her to fool everyone. She only has to play the role of a loving wife for six months. After the billionaire dies, she'll walk away with a fortune, and the real bride will return to claim everything. It should have been easy, except the billionaire isn't the cold, broken man everyone believes him to be. Beneath his pain is a lonely soul who has been betrayed by the people he trusted most, and as Ivy's kindness begins to heal wounds no doctor ever could, the impossible happens, her husband starts to fight for life again. But miracles have consequences. When the woman who abandoned him returns to reclaim her place, she discovers the man she expected to inherit is no longer dying, and the substitute bride she hired has become the only woman he truly loves. With jealous rivals, dangerous family secrets, and a fortune worth killing for, Ivy must decide whether to walk away with the money she was promised, or risk everything for the man she was never supposed to love.

Luna Grimes has never believed in fate. As a photographer, she thrives on capturing truth—the unfiltered, raw moments hidden behind Hollywood’s illusions. But when she’s assigned to photograph Deverell Blackwood, the industry’s most untouchable star, truth becomes the one thing slipping through her fingers. He is arrogant, infuriatingly perfect, and worst of all—familiar. She hates the way he looks at her, as if he knows her. Then the impossible starts happening. Distorted photographs. A missing reflection. A name whispered in dreams that don’t belong to her. Luna knows she should stay away from Deverell. But he won’t let her. And the closer she gets, the more she realizes… this isn’t the first time they’ve met. It won’t be the last.

The tale of a widow's harrowing journey through grief and peril into the cold remnants of a dead world. Damon Sharpe had in part found victory, he believed, in his battle to unearth a truth obscured by time. By autumn, he was dead, leaving to his wife Anne a house of unfulfilled wishes, remnants, and the key to the enigma of his obsession, the Mourner’s Cradle. A journey through grief and peril delivers Anne Sharpe from her home in St. Charles to the faraway skeletons of a long-dead civilization where she will find the desperate answers she seeks…or die trying. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

There are monsters in this world. And they used to be us. Now it's time to euthanize to survive in a hospice where Emily, a woman haunted by her past, only wants to do her job and be the best mother possible. Post-infection Chicago. Christmas. Inside The Hospice, Emily and her fellow nurses do their rounds. Here, men and women live out their final days in comfort, segregated from society, and are then humanely terminated before fate turns them into marrow-craving monsters known as ‘Smilers.’ Outside these imposing walls, rabid protesters swarm with signs, caught up in the heat of their hatred. Emily, a woman haunted by her past, only wants to do her job and be the best mother possible. But in a world where mortality means nothing, where guns are drawn in fear and nobody seems safe anymore – at what cost will this pursuit come? And through it all, the soon to be dead remain silent, ever smiling. Such is their curse. It won't be long before that snow-speckled ground will be salted by blood. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing