Bias After Death Short Stories & Novels

My younger brother, Owen Rivera, and I are playing in Dad's refrigerated truck. Owen wants to grab my ice cream from me, but I refuse to let him have his way. He shoves me forcefully, causing me to lose my balance and fall to the floor, knocking me out on the spot. When I finally wake up and locate him in the freezer, I find out that he's gotten reduced to a frozen statue. The security footage shows that Owen has been screaming the words "Mommy, help me!" hysterically for three hours before his death. After Mom is done watching the footage, she breaks down on the spot. Then, she yanks me by my hair before slamming me against the wall. "What were you doing? You were at the entrance, dammit! Why didn't you open the door for Owen?" With reddened eyes, Dad throws me into the freezer. "Owen was cold and frightened in the freezer! You should have a taste of the same thing too!" The thick and heavy door is slammed in my face. Darkness and a bone-chilling coldness devour me instantly. I curl into a small ball in the corner Owen has just died in. My teeth are starting to chatter, and my consciousness is starting to slip away. I'm sorry, Mom and Dad. I don't feel cold. I'm not cold at all. I will never eat ice cream ever again in my next lifetime.

My wife's first love broke into our home and killed me. Yet my wife, one of the world's top defense attorneys, stood in court to secure his acquittal. She insisted that the entire incident was nothing more than an act I had staged myself—a desperate attempt to win her attention. She even appeared at my funeral. Pointing at my coffin with open disgust, she sneered, "You'd stoop this low just to get my sympathy? Stop pretending and come out right now to apologize to Marvin."

If it was my sister being bullied, Mom and Dad would have believed her right away and fought for her without a second thought. However, it did not matter anymore. In my next life, I would pick parents who really cared about me.

According to the family tradition of the Denvers, I could only marry Elaine Denver if I picked an ace out of a pack of cards. I had picked out other cards for the past five years, but this year I cheated by bringing my own ace card, and I waited happily for Elaine to return home to marry me. However, she suddenly went missing. My childhood friend suddenly appeared after getting drunk, and he leaned in close to me with a puzzled look on his face. "How did you manage to get an ace when there wasn’t one to begin with?" That was when a notification from a family group chat that I had seen before popped up on his phone. Elaine had just shared a picture of my illegitimate brother, Scott Jones, and her getting married. She was leaning in his arms and smiling happily. "I have gotten married to the love of my life and had the cutest baby in the world." This was followed by a picture of a newborn baby. My father was the first to tag Scott. [I'm so happy for you, Scott!] [This is for my grandson!] My future mother-in-law had transferred $400,000 to them and sent a screenshot of the transfer to the group. The family group chat included my childhood friend and several of Elaine's best friends, who used to see me as Elaine's husband. "Elaine and Scott are finally together! Congratulations to the happy lovers!" "Lucas was so gullible to believe that excuse of picking aces. It was a great way to stall for time, and the only way to find some peace for all of us." Something broke inside of me once I knew the truth. My mother was seriously ill, and her dying wish was to see Elaine and me get married. However, everyone knew about her relationship with Scott, and they let me continue waiting for a marriage that would never be. I wiped away my tears and added myself to the group. [Congratulations on your wedding and the baby.]

It was my daughter's first day of kindergarten, but she was nowhere to be found. My wife's first love texted me. "Guess where your daughter is." This was already the fourth time Donald Shaw had played a cruel joke like this. On the day Claire Wilson and I went official, he told me she got into a car crash. I cried as I ran nearly two miles through the freezing night to reach her. When the truth came out, Donald hid behind Claire and laughed. "Just a prank. I only wanted to see how much you loved her." On the day of our wedding, he took Claire away and disappeared with her for twenty-four hours, leaving me alone to face the guests' mockery and her parents' anger. The next day, he came back holding her arm and said casually, "I just wanted to play a little game." When Tina was born, he came with a fake DNA test and said she was his. Only after I was overwhelmed with rage and ended up in the hospital did he finally reveal the real report. Every single time, my wife protected him like a heartbroken girl defending her first love. Then she would turn around and scold me. "He's just a bit childlike. Don't be so serious." And now, that bastard was using my daughter as the punchline of his latest joke. I was shivering with fury and I called my wife. But Claire only said impatiently, "He just wants to play hide and seek. Stop crying already." Then she hung up. My eyes stayed fixed on the screen. It showed my daughter's location. And right now, she was in the middle of a river.

When my ex-wife, Clara Quinton, holds a wedding ceremony with her first love, they put me in a coffin. Sha says this is a new immersive experience at the cultural village and asks me to play along with a staged scene where the ex-husband crashes the wedding. The guests gather around the coffin and cheer. The host grins and calls out, "Bury the ex, and may the newlyweds live happily ever after!" Her first love, Kevin Irwin, is dressed in a suit. His eyes glisten with tears. "Clara, is this really okay? After all, Sam has been with you for seven years," Kevin says. Clara gently fixes his hair and says in a soft voice, "Back then, he was the one who forced you to leave the country. Because of that, you got into an accident that nearly ruined your career. "Today, we're only making him lie in there for a little while." Before they close the coffin lid, I desperately grab onto the edge and scream, "Clara, Max is inside the coffin too!" Everything outside falls silent for a moment. Then, Clara lets out a cold laugh and says, "I can't believe you'd make up something so ridiculous. Max went to Southville with your friend, Noah. "There is a ventilation hose in the coffin. The camera is rolling too. So, stop pretending!" The dirt slowly covers the coffin. From inside the coffin, I hear her coldly order, "Let him out when he admits he was wrong and apologizes."

On the day the SAT scores are released, the reporters track me down, the top scorer of the entire nation, in order to get an interview with me. That's when they find me fishing for a corpse by the river. When the reporters ask me who I'm thankful to the most, my mom, who's allegedly been dead for ten years, makes an appearance. She gets out of the Maybach, looking very high and mighty. "Your dad didn't remarry for ten years, and you've become the top scorer of the nation. As expected, both of you have passed my test." I can only grip my pole while staring at her in confusion. It turns out that ten years ago, Mom's adopted younger brother, Donald Ferguson, suggested to her, "Why don't you fake your death and test your husband's mettle? You should pretend to go bankrupt and jump off a building. If he can stay single for your sake for the next ten years, that should prove that he didn't marry you just for your money." Mom had laughed back then. "When we were still dating, I pretended to be poor for three years. Walter could take five jobs just to put food on the table for me. It's so evident that he loves me to the moon and back. Ten years isn't a problem; heck, he'll definitely remain unmarried for 20 years, or even for the rest of his life!" The fact that I, the top scorer of the nation, am actually the wealthiest woman, Eloise Ferguson's son, gives a huge boost to the shares of her company. The entire nation looks forward to seeing Mom and me hugging each other while bawling at the top of our lungs. Mom looks around her surroundings. "Where's Walter? I'm here to take both of you home with me." "He's dead." The pole in my hands slowly cracks into splinters as I look up at Mom and spit out the answer word by word. "Three years ago, Dad kept working his ass off day and night just to buy the best burial plot for you. That was when he died in this very river."

On New Year’s Eve, I ran after my sister, Yelena Smith, who had left the house in anger. However, a bunch of thugs dragged me into an alley. The torture ripped me apart, both inside and out, and I had been living with severe PTSD ever since. I tried to hurt myself countless times. My sister would grab my hand as I held the knife and drive it into her own body. It was as if she was punishing herself. For every cut I made, she gave herself two. Our blood would mix while she held me and cried. “Felix, please! I’m begging you. Stop hurting yourself! “I swear I’ll heal you!” After that night, my sister, who had always been careless and aimless, seemed to become a different person. She burned her racing cars, which she used to be so proud of, to ashes. She also started studying, which she used to hate. It took her five years to become a chief psychiatrist. However, just when I was finally starting to get better, I heard voices outside my door. “Miss Smith, your acting’s too convincing. If I hadn’t known the truth, I would’ve never thought that you hired those thugs. “To avenge your step brother, you’ve been interfering with Felix’s recovery with medication while guilt-tripping him with love just to make him suffer. Aren’t you being too cruel?” My sister let out a dismissive snort. “He bullied Julian like that in the past. He deserves every bit of this. “But I know my limits. Felix is still my biological brother after all. I’m just teaching him a lesson. I could never bring myself to make him end his life.” I felt like I had fallen into an ice-cold abyss. I even forgot to breathe for a moment. Everything turned out to be my sister’s punishment all along. That night, I dragged my broken body up to the rooftop. ‘Yelena, you don’t have to punish me anymore this time,’ I thought.

For as long as I could remember, whenever my sister Bella made a mistake, I was always the one who got punished. My mother used the pain of my punishments to teach her a lesson. When Bella was caught stealing from a store in the territory, my mother made me apologize in front of everyone. She wanted to teach her that she should never touch anything that did not belong to her. When Bella lost the territory's tribal amulet, my mother made me take the whip in her place. She wanted to teach her to be more careful and stop being so careless. Later, Bella became obsessed with drinking cough syrup. My mother was afraid that drinking too much would hurt her health, so she mixed lethal wolfsbane into a bottle of medicine and left it in the most obvious place in my room. I drank it by mistake and writhed on the floor in agony. My father drove me to the royal infirmary that same night. On the way, we ran into a group of guards checking travel permits. My father's permit had clearly passed inspection, but my mother insisted that it was fake. "You wolves these days are absolutely useless. You can't even tell that it's a fake travel permit?" I was in the back seat, too weak to even shift into my wolf form anymore. Yet my mother was still sternly lecturing Bella. "Look carefully. This is what happens when you drink things you're not supposed to." She kept talking, completely unaware that she had blocked the mind link between us. Due to that, she could not feel my wolf spirit weakening little by little. I had given my life for this final lesson. Was she satisfied now?

After my family goes bankrupt, my younger brother, Simone Novello, is diagnosed with ALS. Just as I think I can't do anything anymore, Don Luigi Sartori decides to propose to me. Five years into the marriage, not only have I obtained all of Luigi's love, but he's also groomed my body to the maximum in bed. Thinking that this is a sign of love from Luigi, I cooperate with him even more passionately in bed. But when I'm delivering wine in a clubhouse one day, I witness Simone, who's supposed to be wheelchair-ridden, chatting with Luigi with a smile while clad in a high-end suit. "Simone, you've been pretending to be afflicted with ASL for five years just to punish Caterina for scolding Maria back then. Now that Maria is in a good mood and plans to return to the country, shouldn't you stop punishing Caterina then?" Simone sneers at Luigi. "I'll have my doctor inform her that I will recover after some time." "ASL is a deadly and incurable disease, you know. How can you possibly recover from it? Will Caterina even believe that excuse?" Simone flashes Luigi a confident smile. "Caterina is stupid, remember? Since when doesn't she believe anything we spout? Anyway, we'll just make it up to her in the future." I lower my head, feeling my tears rolling down my cheeks quietly. The thing is, Simone, there's no more future for me. Your ASL is a lie, but the deadly disease plaguing me is real.

Three years after I died, Stella, my wife, decided to divorce me and marry her dying ex. She stormed into my old house like she owned the place, forcing me to sign the divorce agreement. Mom told her the truth—I was already gone. Stella rolled her eyes. "Why's he still pretending? Harvey's dying. I just wanna be there for him. What's so wrong about that? If he won't come out, I'm done paying your medical bills." She thought threatening Mom would shake something loose. But what Stella didn't get? Mom had already stopped treatment. She was just hanging on to watch her crack.

After my parents adopted my sister, we started drawing lots whenever we wanted the same thing. A long stick meant I won. A short one meant she did. Dad was our pack’s Alpha. Mom was its Luna. They could have given us both almost anything. I was the one who had asked them to bring Lily home. At first, she followed me everywhere, calling me her big sister. I loved the sound of it. But for the past year, I hadn’t drawn a single long stick. Even Ethan, my childhood sweetheart and the pack’s Beta, told me to stop keeping score. “She’s already lost one family,” Mom would say. “Do you really need to make her fight for this one? It isn’t her fault you’re unlucky.” So I practiced. Surely, if I kept trying, my turn would come. On my eighteenth birthday, my parents promised to spend the day with me. Then Lily decided she wanted to go to the amusement park by the coast. Mom brought out the box. I secretly joined two short sticks together. Just once, I wanted them to stay. Mom caught me. She snapped the sticks apart and sent me to my room. Then my chest tightened. My rescue inhaler didn’t help. I caught her sleeve. “Mom. I can’t breathe. Please take me to the medical center.” “You lose the draw, and suddenly you’re sick? You’re not ruining Lily’s day.” Lily called from the stairs. Mom took my phone and closed the door. “Don’t call us home with another emergency.” Their car pulled away. My inhaler slipped from my hand. I couldn’t pick it up again. I’m sorry, Mom. Next time, I’ll try harder to draw the long stick.

Five years ago, my family died in a car crash. My parents. My adopted sister, Liz. Everyone but me. They left behind grief, an empty house, and a debt so large it swallowed my life. When the collectors came, I turned to the only person I had left—my husband, Adrian. He told me he had cut ties with his own family to marry me and had nothing left. I believed him. For five years, I worked every job I could find, paid every dollar I earned, and told myself love was worth the suffering. When the balance dropped to its final $18,000, I signed up for a paid drug trial at a private clinic. They handed me a waiver, warned me about possible delayed reactions, and promised fast money if I swallowed the experimental dose. I thought it would buy us a new beginning. Instead, I came home early and heard Adrian on the phone. “Let Liz use the card. Evelyn still doesn’t know. She took away Liz’s money five years ago, so she has to earn every dollar back herself.” Then he laughed softly. “One more year, and her punishment is over.” That was how I learned the dead were alive. The debt was fake. My husband had never been poor. And the life I had fought so hard to survive was only a sentence they had given me.

As Gamma of the Creed Pack, I'd held the Northern Border alone for three full years. Every time I called in to ask when I could come home, my mate — the Alpha of Creed — picked up the phone himself. He told me the rogues weren't cleared. He told me the rival packs were still circling. He said, "Nora. One more year. Once we have completely eliminated all our enemies, I will hold the grandest mating ceremony for you. I swear it on the Moon." I believed him. When I dragged myself out of a pile of dead rogues with a silver arrowhead still lodged an inch from my heart, bleeding too fast for a medevac, my warriors had to shift and run me back in wolf form all the way to Creed territory. The moment we crossed the border, I saw fairy lights strung from every streetlamp along the road to the pack house. Pack wolves on the sidewalks were talking loud, smiling at each other. "The Alpha's Mating Ceremony is tonight. He's taking the Elder's daughter as Luna. Three years of peace on the border. It's a good time to be Creed." I coughed dark blood into the fur on the back of my warrior's neck and laughed, short and bitter. He hadn't needed me holding the border. He just hadn't wanted me home.

The day I died was Mommy’s birthday. For once, she left me an unusually large slice of cake. I hovered before it, greedy, leaning in to breathe in its sweetness. But the very next second, she handed the cake to my younger sister, Bella Tesla. “Have some, Bella. Better you than that ungrateful girl!” Then she turned to Daddy, who was filming nearby. “You recorded everything, right? When she returns, make her watch it. Don’t let her say again that we play favorites! “Of all things to learn, she learned how to run away from home! “We spoiled her! If she has any sense, let her never come back!” She sneered as she slammed the table and cursed at me, never noticing the panic on Bella’s face as she held the cake. She also failed to notice Bella’s disheveled hair. She noticed even less the dark stains of blood on her sleeve. Blood that belonged to me.

Three years after my death, my mother finally remembered my existence. As my older brother was having kidney failure, she wanted me to give him my kidney. To force me to make an appearance, she pushed my severely depressed wife into committing suicide and left my daughter roaming the streets to be killed in a hit-and-run. However, she still did not give up. She started making up things about me on the internet. In the end, my friend told her, “Mrs. Harding, Aiden died in the earthquake three years ago. A steel girder pierced him right through the heart after he saved you, and he died on the spot due to blood loss.”

The day my birth parents found me, the reunion banquet they threw turned into their funeral. My parents and their adopted daughter, Leila, died of food poisoning that night. The only one who survived was my older brother, Alpha Kian. He didn’t like sweets, so he never touched the cake. The cake that I handed to them myself. “So you want to take Leila’s place. “You’re just jealous because she got all our love! “She was the only one who ever accepted you, and you still killed her!” Those were Kian’s exact words as he shouted at me right outside the hospital room. From that day on, I became a sinner. To make up for it, I barely slept four hours a night and worked five jobs just to buy back the villa the rival pack seized during the chaos. However, the day I finally saved up enough, I saw my dead parents throwing a birthday party for Leila in that very villa. Kian stood among them, looking at her with a warmth I didn’t recognize. My mother said, “Isn’t today also Lily’s birthday? It’s been eight years. Maybe it’s time to forgive her.” However, Kian didn’t hesitate to refuse. “No. Even though Leila sniffed out the wolfsbane and saved you, we agreed that Lily gets ten years. “We can’t risk her ever trying to poison Leila again. Not even a day less.” I clutched the diagnosis paper from the clinic tightly and laughed through my tears. I knew I wouldn’t get to ten years. I was already dying.

I am the daughter of the Alpha of the Blood Moon Pack, my parents are very rich, but I have nothing. When black magic was eating away at me with a month to live, I asked to borrow ten dollars and they said I was "not worthy." I dragged my sickly body to buy the cheapest herbal medicine, but I saw them spending billions of dollars to celebrate my foster sister Vivian's 18th birthday. Tears streamed down my face, I just wanted to spend ten dollars on a piece of fabric and make my own ceremonial robe, even though I wouldn't live to be eighteen.

When the fire broke out, Mom instinctively scooped up my younger sister, who had asthma, and ran for the exit. Dad shielded them as they rushed toward the stairs. A cabinet toppled over and crushed my leg. The pain was so intense that I could not even scream. Mom glanced back at me, but all she shouted was, "Suzanna, keep up!" It was the phrase she had said to me more than any other throughout my childhood. At the amusement park, when my shoelaces came undone, Mom told me to keep up. By the time I looked up, she was already far ahead with my sister in her arms. On rainy days, she told me to keep up too. She put a raincoat on my sister while I pedaled my bicycle behind them, struggling to catch up. "Your sister is sick. We have to take extra care of her," she always said. I had always been a good girl. When I fell, I did not cry. When I was hungry, I did not complain. Even now, as the flames threatened to swallow everything around me, I lay in the thick smoke and watched their retreating figures disappear into the distance. All I could manage was a soft whisper. "I'm sorry, Mom. "This time, I don't think I can keep up."

I was slowly dying from Silverthorn Wolfsbane, and there was only one cure—the Miracle Elixir. But my mate, Leo Ashford, bought it and gave it to my adoptive sister, Jane Smith. He did it because he thought I was faking my illness. I gave up on the treatment and swallowed a potent painkiller instead. It would kill me in three days by shutting down my organs. In those three days, I gave up everything. I handed over the fur manufacturing business I built from the ground up to Jane, and my parents praised me for caring about my sister. I offered to sever our mate bond, and Leo praised me for finally being sensible. When I told my son he could call Jane "mommy", he happily said that his new mommy was the best! I transferred all my savings to Jane, and no one seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. They were just pleased with my "better behavior". "Viola is finally not so bad." I wondered—would they regret it after I was gone?