Familial Bond Short Stories & Independence Revenge Novels

The day my brother, Aaron Payne, is abducted by human traffickers, an older woman in our town tells me that if I can come up with 80,000 dollars, I can get him back. Desperate to save him, I return to the home I haven't set foot in for two years and beg my wealthy parents for the money. But they fly into a rage. "We sent you two to the countryside to toughen you up, not to give you an excuse to scam us for money!" "Human traffickers? You really expect us to believe someone could kidnap a child and then just give him back? Stop making up stories." With nowhere else to turn, I hear that I can make money by selling a kidney. So that same day, I go under the knife. As soon as the anesthesia wears off, my parents call. "Steve just told us he lost 80,000 dollars, and then we found out you received the exact same amount in your bank account. We were too soft on you. We've raised a thief!" Without giving me a chance to explain, they hang up and transfer the money straight out of my account. Later, my adopted brother, Steve Payne, walks past me with his arms linked through my parents', grinning from ear to ear. "Mom, Dad, thanks for buying me an 80,000-dollar watch. I'm so lucky to be your son." Is he? Without a word, I slip a missing-person flyer under their windshield wiper. If they can help me find Aaron, I'll gladly let him have that luck instead.

On the day of my daughter Eleanor Baldwin's second birthday party, my entire family stood nervously by the banquet hall entrance. They were not there to greet guests, but rather to keep me from showing up and causing a scene. Mom's face was written all over with anxiety. "Lucas wouldn't actually crash the party, would he?" Dad's brow stayed tightly furrowed. "Who knows? That disgrace of a son is capable of anything." My younger brother, Cody Baldwin, had his arm wrapped gently around my wife, Kendra Clarkson, trying to reassure her. "Don't worry. If Lucas dares to show up, I'll keep you and Ellie safe." Kendra nodded slowly. "If it really comes to that... maybe we should just let Ellie be his goddaughter. At least then, we're still family..." However, the party came and went, and I never appeared. I had already made up my mind to join a classified national defense research program. Only this time, it was for good.

My mom is a woman who takes frugality very, very seriously. When I suffer from a high fever, she feeds me moldy chicken noodle soup. In fact, I can only wear my older sister's hand-me-downs since I was a little girl. After working hard for so long, I finally qualify for the final interview of a top-500 company. I keep telling my mom repeatedly to not cause any trouble for me. Alas, my monitor winks out when I've reached the most critical point of my interview. At the same time, the router has lost access to the internet. I rush out of my room hurriedly, only to see my mom flipping off the main switch in the darkness. "Why did you leave the lights on at night? Imagine how much money you'll have to pay! I've already calculated everything for you. If we turn off the lights, we get to save a few pennies per night!" Thanks to those pennies, I end up losing my job that can guarantee an annual salary of a million dollars. Later on, my older sister, Andrea Fletcher, is diagnosed with a kidney disease. In order to latch onto Andrea's rich husband, Kirk Herrera, my mom forces me to work overtime at a shady factory just to gather enough money for Andrea's medical bills. Even when I'm about to die, my older brother, Anthony Fletcher, and my dad keep blaming me. "You can't even get hired at a proper factory! You really are useless, Alice! Your mom went through all those frugal nonsense just to raise you for nothing!" When I open my eyes again, I've returned to the day I'm about to attend the online interview. I just chuckle coldly as I look at Andrea, who has just found out about her kidney disease and is waiting for me to earn enough money for her kidney transplant. Then, I toss her expensive, specialized medication into the trash can. "What use is there for you to take the medicine, Andrea? What a waste! Mom already stated many times that being frugal is the way of life! "You should drink more water instead. Once your rich husband finds out how good you are at saving money, he'll definitely compliment us for knowing how to balance our finances!"

Despite dreaming of attending university all my life, I ended up stuck in my farming village. I married my brother-in-law and became my nephew’s stepmother. This all happened because my sister died trying to make money for my tuition fees on the day my results came out. I thought I had failed to secure a place at university and stopped thinking about higher education out of guilt. I married my brother-in-law according to my sister’s wishes. To pay for my sins, I raised my nephew and treated him like my own son. I made money and tutored him so that he could get into Northside University. In the end, I developed late-stage cancer. Before dying, I attended my nephew’s celebration, but he publicly accused me of being a homewrecker while my husband agreed that I had seduced him. They brought out my sister, dead for eighteen years, and made me apologize to her. It was then that I found out she had faked her death and used my university admission letter to finish her study. She had become a university lecturer after tricking me into taking care of her family. Outraged, I had a cerebral hemorrhage. When I woke up, I found I had gone back to the day my sister faked her death.

The first thing my brother did after returning from his studies in Europe was drag me before the family council. I ran the rundown bar our Capo father left me, stocking shelves at dawn and scrubbing counters past midnight. I even took on debt from loan sharks to keep him afloat. "Just one last time," he always promised over the phone. "I'll pay you back once I marry rich." But today, a summons from the family arrived at his request. It demanded I be stripped of my birthright and forced to hand over the bar and our territory. My phone pinged. A photo flashed on the screen: my brother in a silk shirt, sitting close to a woman, her hand digging into his thigh. The message followed: Meet my fiancée, the daughter of the Valenti family boss and their Chief Legal Counsel. She says you don't stand a chance. I stared at that hand for a long, long time. Then I crouched down and pried open the hidden compartment beneath the bar.

I'm an elite animal behaviorist in the country as well as the only person in the world who has the ability to communicate with wild beasts of bigger stature. When my daughter, Harper Sheffield, falls into the tigers' enclosure at the zoo, I decline the SOS phone call that my wife, Madeline Cross, has dialed. Then, I start a livestream coolly and begin recording the thrilling scene. A few minutes later, my father, Randall Sheffield, calls me in a mixture of alarm and rage. "Harper will die at this rate! Where the hell are you? I order you to find a way to save her right now, or else you can kiss the inheritance right to my company goodbye!" I adjust the focus intensity on my phone calmly before replying, "I'm busy right now. Stop disturbing me when I'm trying to make money from my livestream."

My classmate Bianca and I have the same taste. She wants every man I’ve ever dated. She says I’m too naive. That I don't see how powerful men think. She calls it “testing” them for me. She says she’s helping. Then she sleeps with my boyfriend. Then she rubs it in my face. “See? I told you that you can’t handle them. These men are sharks. If it wasn’t for me, you’d have been eaten alive by now.” I choked on my rage. I said nothing. This time, I went behind her back. I went after the king of New York's underworld. When she found out, she made her move. But she has no idea. This man isn't my endgame. He's the trap I set for her.

After five years of being forcibly institutionalized in a mental hospital by my parents for “rehabilitation,” I awakened the “Slap System” skill. One slap, a million dollars deposited into my account. Another slap, my combat power skyrocketed. Just as I was thoroughly enjoying my slapping spree and preparing to leap over the asylum walls to break free, my parents suddenly arrived to take me home. The moment I stepped through the front door, I saw my adopted brother Atticus Hawthorne, eyes reddened, holding my fiancée, Cassandra Vaughn, in his arms. Meanwhile, my real brother Roman Montgomery was locked in a dog cage, bitten and torn by vicious hounds, covered in wounds, and breathing his last breath. The moment he saw me, a faint light flickered in his eyes. Using the last ounce of his strength, his lips trembled slightly. “Lysander... run…” Before the words could fully leave his mouth, his hand went limp and dropped. I smashed the dog cage open with everything I had, scooped up his still-warm body, and rushed outside like a madman. “Stop right there!” Cold-faced, my parents blocked the doorway. “Roman is pure evil. He tortured Atticus’s dog to death and drugged Cassandra. Suffering a little punishment like this is light for him! Why take him to a hospital over a tiny injury?” Atticus fell to his knees before me with a loud thud, tears streaming down his face. “Lysander, after five years, you still hate me this much... I’ll go die right now so I don’t stay in your sight…” Cassandra immediately shielded him behind her back, harshly berating me. “Lysander! The moment you return, you force Atticus to die! You should never have been released from the mental hospital!” I looked at their hypocritical, evil faces, then down at Roman’s closed eyes that would never open again, and slowly raised my hand. Bullying me? I could bear it. But torturing Roman to death... I was going to make them find out whether their bones were tougher, or my slaps were harder.

When they dumped my sister Ayana Vale's body into the altar, it was in pieces, mangled beyond recognition. I overheard the warriors who had dumped her body there. They said she had been framed for conspiring with a witch to harm Lilith Voss, Silver Moon's future Luna, and had been subjected to dozens of brutal tortures before she finally died. "No one really believed she was working with a witch. They only had Lilith's word for it. But the Alpha refused to let Ayana defend herself. He simply decided that Lilith's miscarriage had been caused by a witch's curse. Poor girl kept calling out for her sister right up to the end." That was how I learned what had happened to Ayana. I was away sacrificing my wolf in exchange for the Moon Goddess's protection over the pack. Before I left, Soren Blackwood, my childhood friend and the Alpha of Silver Moon, had sworn to protect Ayana. But he had branded Ayana a witch's accomplice and condemned her to brutal torture for the sake of another woman. I looked down at Ayana's broken body, and a bitter laugh escaped me. Day after day, I prayed at the altar, sacrificing myself to secure a century of prosperity for the pack. And they had repaid me by torturing my sister to death. If that was how it would be, then the pack I'd spent so long protecting was also mine to destroy.

I was in the living room, handling some work, and casually asked the smart assistant to play some music. "Alexa, play some jazz." "Sure. By the way, just a reminder—four days from now, at ten in the morning, you're scheduled to accompany Sienna to her prenatal checkup." My hand froze midair. My name is Victoria. And I'm not pregnant. Jonathan was walking out of the bathroom, towel-drying his hair. He saw the look on my face and pulled me into his arms. "What's wrong, sweetheart?" I casually darkened my phone screen and smiled. "Nothing. Just a little tired." Jonathan kissed my forehead, his eyes tender and full of love. "Go get some sleep. Don't miss your birthday party tomorrow—you're the star of the night. I can't wait to spend it with you." I leaned into his chest, my lips curling into a cold little smile. My dear husband, you'd better not have done anything to betray me. Otherwise, you're about to find out exactly what it costs to betray the daughter of a mafia family.

The Volkovs. The most brutal family in Russia. Their Don was holding our arms deal hostage. He wanted the De Luca princess. Isla. My adopted sister. I was their biological daughter. The blood heir they found in the slums twenty years too late. But Isla was the one they actually loved. The news broke. My mother walked into my room for the first time in forever. “Aurora, my best girl. You know how fragile Isla is. If she marries him… that man will break her. He’ll kill her.” My fiancé, Julian Caldwell, heir to the Caldwell family, made me a candlelit dinner. He held me, kissing me softly. “You’re so much stronger than her, Aurora. Please. Do this for her. I’ll give you a private wedding. Just us. Even if I can’t marry you for real, you’ll always be my wife.” Even my father—a man who never smiled at me, the Don of the De Luca family—actually slid a blank check across the desk. “Take her place instead of Isla. Name your price. Anything you want.” They were so sure I’d say yes. Because I’d always been that pathetic girl. Desperate for their approval. Willing to do anything. But not this time. I was done. I looked at the blank check and laughed. “A blank check? Not even close. I want one hundred million dollars. And a blood contract that cuts all ties. Forever.” They had no idea. I wanted more than that. In seven days, I was going to give them a gift. I wanted their lives.

On the day of the topping-out ceremony for the resettlement housing, my mother, Diana Knowles, insists on reporting me to the authorities for shoddy workmanship. It's all because my cousin, Marco Sanford, went to play at the construction site, stepped into the freshly set cement, and scraped his knee. "You think you're so great just because you built a couple of buildings?" Mom screams at me. "I can't just stand by and watch you put the whole town in danger just to make millions of dollars by pocketing the difference!" Marco clutches his bandage and explains quietly, "It's all my fault for climbing over the fence to play there, Aunt Diana. The construction workers even tried to stop me. It really has nothing to do with Kevin." The project supervisor, Pete Warner, and the town mayor, Hugo Larkin, also hurriedly produce the inspection report. "Mrs. Sanford, the cement, steel bars, and load-bearing cement are all up to standard. This project is a public housing project that the state government is monitoring very closely, and it's going to be a huge deal if we even stop work for a day." Mom, however, holds her head high and yells in a voice louder than a megaphone, saying, "If Kevin dares to let his relatives get hurt at the construction site, then who knows what else he'll dare to do to the rest of the people by giving them shoddy construction? "Stop flattering him! The fact that he became the project manager for this proves that I understand better than you what it means to be a reliable person!"

Six years ago, my sister and I fell for the same man, Edmund. But he only had eyes for Rosalie, the sweet, innocent type. With them, I was always the third wheel. They got married, of course. And on their wedding day, I overheard my parents whispering. "The company's strapped for cash," my father said. "What if we marry Corinne off to our business partner? That'd solve our problem..." This "partner" was over fifty and twice divorced. So I ran. I fled to Sicily with the only five thousand dollars to my name. I ran on pure bitterness. In four years, I brought dozens of small-time Sicilian crews to heel and forged my own family: Vexille. In another two, I came back to New York and quietly became the most powerful woman in the North American underworld. By then, Edmund's power was crumbling, hit hard by a rival family. That's when my mother called, her voice full of that same old entitlement. "Your brother-in-law's in some trouble. Figure out a way to help him." Then a text from my sister, Rosalie, dripping with contempt: "Sister, I remember you have a little casino in Sicily, right? So you must know something about that Vexille family." "Edmund needs their help. See what you can dig up." They still don't know. I'm the Don of the Vexille family. I glanced at the schedule my advisor had prepared. Tomorrow, 9:00 AM. A sit-down with some minor family looking for a handout. The name on the file: Edmund.

I am an orphan who was adopted, yet I live like a king in my house. While my older brother, Eric Jones, sleeps in the attic, which is freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer, I get the nicest bedroom, the south-facing one with the best sunlight. Eric wears worn-out clothes from the flea market, the kind sold by the pound. As for me, I get new clothes from the mall every year. Some still have the tags on. Eric starts working at a construction site right after high school. As he works three shifts a day, his hands are covered in calluses. I, on the other hand, attend the best private high school in the city, where one year's tuition costs as much as two years of his wages. My adoptive mother, Dolores Bender, looks over my straight-A report card, wipes away her tears, and says, "Even if I have to sell everything we own, I'm putting you through college." Whenever relatives come over, they tell me how lucky I am to have been taken in by the kindest family on earth. That's what I've always believed, too, right up until Thanksgiving, when Eric had too much to drink.

The Moretti Family raised a stable of orphans to be its next heir. I was one of them. But in every test, I always came out second best. Lucia always came out on top. Then, just before the bid that would decide the heir, I was bound to a Switching System. Comments scrolled past my eyes: [Oh, it's over. The villainess has always been jealous of the main character, Lucia, for getting first place. She’s definitely using the system to swap their proposals!] [Good thing Lucia can hear Olivia’s conversation with the system. She’s already planning to hand in a blank sheet of paper.] [So what if the villainess schemes all she wants? All she’ll get is a blank page! In the end, Lucia will inherit the Moretti Family and become the new Don! So satisfying!] Just then, the system prompted: [Please designate your switch target.] Without a second's hesitation, I thought, "Lucia." The moment I did, I saw Lucia shoot me a strange, triumphant look. I knew then. She'd heard everything. But she had no idea. I wasn't swapping her proposal. I was taking what was most precious to her.

For my son's birthday, I booked his favorite mecha-themed hotel. But when we checked in, the hotel changed our room at the last minute. After my son drank from one of their bottled waters, he found pieces of a torn colored contact lens inside. I immediately called the front desk. "Because of your hotel's poor management, my son had just drunk water with pieces of a torn contact lens inside. I want to speak with your manager." A man answered from the other side, but he simply yawned and said annoyingly, "Why are you asking for a manager in the middle of the night? Do you have proof? I've seen plenty of men like you. You're just freeloaders trying to get the room comped. Stop making a fuss!" After he hung up, my expression darkened. I'd let them know if I was a freeloader.

During the Christmas holiday, a fire suddenly broke out at my family’s factory. My younger brother, who had gone there to inspect operations, was trapped inside the burning building. As the captain of the fire department, I calmly ordered my team not to go in to rescue him. My mother, Susan Tatcher, and wife, Willa Sutton, begged me desperately to go in and save my brother, but I pulled out my phone and started playing Poker. My mother was on the verge of breaking down. “Zayne Luke, hurry in and save your brother! He’s so young. He can’t endure this kind of suffering!” My wife was also pacing anxiously. “Honey, with a fire this complicated, only you can save Mors!” After all, this was my family’s factory. No one knew the escape routes better than I did. However, I turned a deaf ear to them and leisurely topped up my token balance by 100 dollars to keep playing. Having no other choice, Mom splashed cold water on a thin blanket and prepared to rush into the fire. I blocked the key rescue entrance. “What’s the rush? Wait until I finish this round.”

My ex-husband was dead, and when his wife called me, it was not to inform me about the funeral. She wanted my six-year-old daughter to stand vigil for her father at the funeral parlor. “People will talk if his daughter does not do it.” I was away on a business trip, and I had to ask my ex-husband’s sister to look after my daughter. That lasted until two in the morning, when my daughter left voice messages on her smartwatch. “It’s cold, Mommy. There are so many drawers. It looks like someone is lying inside. The door is locked. I can’t get out.” She was locked inside the mortuary refrigerator at the funeral parlor. Her pediatrician had said that if a six-year-old remained in forty degrees Fahrenheit for more than four hours, their organs would start to fail.

There were two famous good-for-nothings the gods loved to gossip about. One was me, Vera, the little princess of the Star Court, with most of my twin starblood ruined, good for nothing but eating, drinking, and playing. The other was my twin brother Orson. His life-fire was broken, and he was unable to stand being anywhere with too many people. But our eldest brother, Theron, was the next King of the Gods. Our second brother, Drake, was the Dragon Sovereign, who held every gold vein of the dragon clan in his hand. Our elder sister, Sylvia, was the heir to the Sacred Spring, the one art that could rekindle a dying life-fire. Our mother was the last High Priestess of the Court of Chaos, born able to carry different bloodlines of the gods. The day the star sea collapsed, Orson and I gave up most of our twin starblood to mend our siblings' fates. They lived. They became the three strongest elders the gods had ever known. And Orson and I became two cripples. Our days were simple: mooch meals off our eldest brother, spend our second brother's gold, and wait for our sister to feed us. That was until my sweet tooth carried me to a banquet thrown for Circe, the woman everyone said would become our eldest brother's bride. At that banquet, Circe, the daughter of House Siren, held up one blurry memory echo and insisted it was me who had climbed into Lord Theron's carriage the night before, stealing her betrothal to the Divine Court. I explained patiently, "You've got the wrong person. That was my brother. And this is my brother too." Circe exploded on the spot. She used her power to cripple me all over again, and nearly killed Orson. "One shameless slut, one useless idiot. A match made in heaven." It wasn't until my brother and I lay barely breathing that my three siblings tore House Siren's wards to shreds, and the whole realm of the gods shook.

In my last life, I single-handedly wiped out a rival gang, winning great honor for the Family. My mother handed me control of her private arsenal, worth hundreds of millions. Before I could even take inventory, the convent orphan my family had adopted quietly changed the codes, and handed the entire shipment to homeless men in slums controlled by our enemies. Staring down my gun, she crossed herself, her face full of pity. "God tells us to love the world, Alessia. Sitting on all those instruments of murder is a sin. I am only atoning for you." I scoffed, but one second before I pulled the trigger, my childhood friend, the Family's top killer, shot the gun from my hand and denounced me as bloodthirsty, cruel, and incapable of empathy. My older brother, the new Don, only sneered and stripped me of my inheritance on the spot. He threw me into the lowest end of the red-light district to wash dishes until the violence had been ground out of me. That same night, addicts from the rival gang cornered me at the end of an alley, stabbed me more than twenty times, then dumped me into the Thames. I opened my eyes, and I was back on the day the orphan girl walked toward the arsenal with my key in her hand.