Cerita Pendek & Novel Bittersweet Fake Death

Caleb Finley tells me he wants to have a child with me during the year when our love is at its strongest. I agree, but that very same night, I fake my death and make my escape, becoming his first love who meets an early death. Six years later, the system seeks me out, on the verge of a breakdown. "Ms. Rockworth, Mr. Finley told me to let you know that your son has just entered the operating room. Do you want to visit him?" "I never gave birth to his child," I answer calmly. The system breaks down even more. "He lost his mind and suddenly turned evil on the night you faked your death. To maintain the balance of the world, we gave him a child who has both your genes. "Now that he has completely gone insane, he told me to tell you that you must meet with him today. If you don't, he'll remove your son's oxygen tube."

Everyone in New York knew Damian Moretti loved his wife. He removed anyone who questioned my place beside him. After five failed rounds of IVF, I finally saw two lines on a pregnancy test. That same day, I learned my husband already had a one-year-old son. Yet Damian still held the test in trembling hands and looked at me with the wonder of a man becoming a father for the first time. He touched my still-flat stomach and said, “We waited six years for this child.” I almost laughed. We had not been waiting together. I had been enduring injections, procedures, and one failed treatment after another while Damian was secretly raising another woman’s child. He had given the boy the medallion passed down through generations of Moretti men, along with a private home, guards, and a family trust. Damian had not replaced me. He had simply built another family in secret and decided I never needed to know. So I stopped waiting. I boarded a plane that would soon disappear over the Atlantic. Damian believed he could keep his wife, his son, and every lie under his control. He was wrong. This time, he would lose the only weakness he had ever admitted to having.

"Take off your clothes. Spread your legs." "...What? Why?" The voice cut through the silence, and my heart seized. I instinctively covered my stomach. It was the first anniversary of my marriage to Alessandro, the Don of the Santoro family. I was pregnant and had wanted to surprise him. But his secretary, Liliana, had blindfolded me and brought me to this unfamiliar place. "Donna, stop playing the victim. Seducing men is your specialty, isn't it?" "Tonight, in this underground auction house, you are the final item on the block." A chill shot down my spine, and my voice trembled. "Are you insane? I'm the Donna of the Santoro family! I'm carrying his heir! Alessandro will kill you..." Liliana scoffed and ripped off my blindfold. Blinding lights bore down on me. I squinted, and gradually, a man sitting in the VIP section came into view... It was Alessandro! I stared in disbelief as he slowly extinguished the cigar in his hand. "Pregnant? Whose bastard are you carrying?" "It's yours!" I cried out. "Liar!" He raised his hand, and a report was tossed at my feet. The bold letters "PROBABILITY OF PATERNITY: 0%" burned my eyes. He came closer and gripped my chin. "Liliana was right. Women like you are rotten to the core." "My love was never enough to satisfy your greed." "And I, Alessandro, will never raise another man's bastard." Later, he finally learned the child was his. For the first time, the man who was always so composed, arrogant, and in control knelt before me, his voice trembling. "Celeste, I'm begging you... even if you can't forgive me, please, let me make it up to you." But I felt nothing for him anymore.

My fiancé proposes to my stepsister Thalia Yates in front of everyone at our engagement party. Furious, I pack my stuff and leave home. That's when Jude Pearson, heir to an international medical group, entered my life. He's a surgeon rumored to have zero interest in women. Yet he pursued me passionately for six months. Eventually, I accepted his proposal. For seven years after our wedding, he's been gentle and considerate, always putting my needs first. Then, I overhear his phone conversation with his mother, Helena Roberts. "Jude, it's been seven years, but you still have no kids. It's time for a divorce." "Since I couldn't marry Thalia, it doesn't matter who I married instead. I'll keep playing this role forever. As long as I'm around, she'll never be able to intrude upon Thalia's happiness." That's when the truth hits me—Jude has given up the family business to become a surgeon just to treat Thalia's heart condition. Our years of marriage are actually his way of protecting Thalia from afar. If that's the case, then I'll disappear from their world and let my absence be their happy ending.

Ever since I lost my Alpha, Kael, in a brutal fight with some nasty rogues, I've been raising our young son, Finn, all by myself. My old pack has been pushing me to take a new Alpha, you know, so Finn and I would have protection. But I truly believed my Mate Bond with Kael was unbreakable. Then, on the Blood Moon ceremony, the fifth anniversary of Kael's “sacrifice,” I overheard Kael's father, old Alpha Marcus, tearing into Kael's quiet twin brother, Ronan: “Kael! You damn wolf! It was Ronan who went down on Blood Moon Cliff five years ago! He was the cursed one! You faked your death, lived as Ronan, all to protect Alina? You lied to the whole pack, to your sacred mate, and your own flesh and blood! Was it worth it?!” “For five years, Elara has raised Finn from a tiny pup all alone. You gave your so-called 'niece' a fake 'father,' but did you ever think? The day you put on Ronan's mask, Finn lost his real father for good!” I felt like I'd been struck by lightning. After Kael “died,” Ronan had been the dutiful uncle, “looking after” Finn and me. I never dreamed he was Kael in disguise. And he did all this just to protect Alina, Ronan's destined mate, who was already pregnant?! That night, under the bright moon, I snuck away and sent a message to my cousin, the Head Beta of the Silver-Moon Pack: “Tell your Alpha Lucian that I, Elara, accept his courtship offer.”

In the fourth year after my husband, Jayden Stone, falls to his death, I finally save enough to pay off the 300,000 dollars in debt he owes. I drag my sick body there to repay the debt, but a security guard shoves me to the ground. "Today is the wedding of the century for Marilyn Jagger, the Jagger family's true heiress. Get lost, you filthy beggar!" I turn my head and see Jayden's face in the wedding photos. How is that possible? I watched him fall off a cliff and die! I go around to the hotel to find out the truth. Instead, I overhear Jayden's friends joking. "Jayden even faked his death just to marry Marilyn. Now that's true love!" "She's the real Jagger heiress, after all. A fake like Vivian Jagger doesn't even deserve someone like Jayden." Jayden clears his throat. "With Marilyn's health, she won't make it through this year. I'm marrying her to fulfill her final wish," he says. "When the five years are up, I'll go back to Viv." I clamp my hand over my mouth as blood seeps through my fingers. But Jayden, I won't make it to the fifth year.

It was at our engagement banquet that I finally learned the truth. I wasn't the true heiress of a noble human family. I wasn't the "fated bride" destined to bear a half-blood child for the vampires. I was just the wrong baby someone had brought home from the hospital. A fake. I'd thought that Alexander, the boy who'd risked his life to drag me out of a burning house, the boy I'd grown up beside, would love me the same as always. Instead, in front of everyone, he let go of my hand and looked down at me with cold eyes. "Without that bloodline, do you really think you deserve to stand beside me?" Then he reached out and slid the engagement ring off my finger himself. He turned, and led the true heiress up to the high platform. Everyone laughed at me. The fake heiress, delusional enough to think she could marry the vampire heir. I was thrown out of the only home I'd ever known. The only kindness left to me was Alexander's, a scrap of charity that let me stay at his side as the lowest thing a vampire could keep. A blood slave. And then, later, I died in an explosion. Saving him. Alexander knelt in the blood and lost his mind, screaming at everyone around him to save me. But there was something he didn't know. I hadn't died. Later still, at a vampire banquet, he saw me again at last. I walked past him on another man's arm, smiling. And this time, it was his turn to lose his mind begging me to look back at him.

The blood diamond necklace was a symbol of power. The moment Dante Corsini fastened it around Elena Ferri's neck, the banquet meant to seal a blood pact between our two great families turned into a complete farce. "And now, the heir of the Corsini family will place the token of loyalty on Ms. Serena Rossi." The voice of the Don presiding over the ceremony echoed through the hall. Dante picked up the necklace and walked toward me. Then he walked right past me. The heads of the five families stared in shock. The necklace represented control over half the underworld, yet Dante had fastened it around Elena's neck. She was the daughter of his trusted underboss. My hand froze in midair. "Dante, have you lost your goddamn mind?" A Rossi elder slammed his hand on the table, and the hall filled with the clicks of guns being cocked. Dante snapped out of it and jerked his hand back like he'd been shocked. He strode back to me, braced both hands on the back of my chair, and lowered his voice with his usual arrogance. "Serena, don't make this uglier than it has to be. The lights were in my eyes, and you were both wearing black gowns... It was a mistake. We'll do it over." When you're in real danger, the person you instinctively trust to watch your back is the one who matters most. "It's fine." His eyes were dark and dangerous. For three years, I'd been crazy about those eyes. But now I glanced sideways at the new bodyguard in the corner. If I had been in Dante's place, I might have walked straight toward that man in the shadows too. I knew the old scar on his wrist. It belonged to my first love, Gabriel Falcone, who had died in a car bombing seven years ago. So really, it was fine.

The day I found out I was pregnant with twins, Vincent Castellano celebrated like a man who had been handed heaven. Fireworks over Brooklyn. Vows whispered against my stomach. Promises that his empire, his loyalty, and his life were mine. That same day, I found out the hospital built in my name had been sheltering his affair. While I was throwing up and fighting to keep our babies safe, he was holding another woman in the next room. So I made my choice. I would keep the twins. But Vincent Castellano would lose all three of us.

After I married Riccardo, the Don of the Moretti family, he paraded a string of mistresses in front of me. He never gave me a second glance. But on our tenth anniversary—right after my father’s death—he suddenly promised me half of his empire. The catch? In return, he planned to seize control of all my family’s arms-dealing routes. That pissed off his favorite mistress. She cornered him on his yacht, demanding he take his words back. Then she fell overboard and died. An “accident.” After she died, Riccardo went insane. He took it all out on me. He tied me to the back of his yacht. He dragged me through the sea, a human anchor, until the rocks shattered my legs, crippling me for life. I became the family’s shame. Then, as I lay helpless, he finished the job with poison. Then I opened my eyes. I was back on the day Angelo Marino—the head of our rival family—proposed to me. In my last life, my family forced me to say no. He came for me, a one-man army. He killed Riccardo, but died in the process. This time, I looked at his kind face and nodded. Yes. But as we embraced, Riccardo appeared. He ripped me from Angelo's arms and claimed me as his own. That’s when I realized the cruelest joke of all. My monster was back, too.

Alpha Scott hated me, his fated mate, more than anything. All because I was just a human, a useless creature without claws. His heart belonged entirely to his childhood sweetheart, Joanna. After Joanna died in an accident, he hated me for ten years. But when an enemy pack’s bomb exploded in front of our den, he saved me. Before he died, covered in blood and lying in my arms, he used his last ounce of strength to push away my trembling hand. "Elena, if only the Moon Goddess had never let us meet..." At the funeral, the former Luna—Scott's mother—grabbed my collar, sobbing uncontrollably. "Scott, it's my fault. I never should have forced you to accept this human. If I had supported your choice of Joanna, would any of this have happened today?" I didn't answer. Because she was right. After being dragged out of the funeral, I climbed Skyfall Ridge—the pack's sacred ground—alone and leaped. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day the Moon Goddess designated me as Scott's mate. This time, I decided to sever all ties with Scott, to give everyone what they truly wanted.

It was the third year of my secret relationship with Garrett, my Alpha brother's best friend. Marcus laughed and nudged Garrett playfully. "You've been with that little mate of yours for three years now. When are you going to introduce her to the pack?" I pressed myself against the doorframe, my heart racing. Had my brother figured out our secret? Garrett just laughed it off. "What mate? Just some crazy she-wolf who won't leave me alone." Marcus caught sight of me and grinned. "Sage, you see this? Never pick a mate like Garrett here." "Takes everything a female offers but won't even acknowledge the bond." Just then, more of Marcus's friends arrived, and they joined in the teasing. "Your brother's right, but Garrett's had his heart set on someone for years." "What was her name again? Oh right, Aria. She's returning to the pack soon." I'd heard that name before - Aria. But Garrett had never told me she was his true love.