Cerita Pendek & Novel Scumbag Female Growth

For our fifth anniversary, I planned to bid on a pink diamond ring. A young woman outbid me. I followed her outside to ask if she would consider selling it to me. She stood at the curb, showing the ring on her hand to the friend who had come with her. "I'm already tired of this one. "So my boyfriend told me to pick out something I liked for our first anniversary." I stopped. She would never part with an anniversary gift. Reese was busy handling the smuggling trade along the coast and could not come with me. He had only said he would not be home for dinner and told me to buy myself something nice to celebrate. When I heard her say her boyfriend had a candlelit dinner waiting for her, I smiled and envied their young love. My car pulled up. As I was about to get in, she turned around. I saw the ring on her hand, the one she was already tired of. My breath caught. Cold shot from the soles of my feet to the base of my skull. It was the ring Reese had given me last year, then discarded because it did not fit.

My husband, Nathan Ford, was grounded for two years after a plane crash left him badly traumatized. To get him through treatment, I sold the house my mother left me. I paid the compensation he owed after the crash and sat up with him every night he was too scared to close his eyes. The day he got back in the cockpit, he held me for a long time. "I owe you a honeymoon. I swear I'll make it up to you under the northern lights." After that, he picked up more and more flights. Every anniversary, every birthday, he had a reason: a delay, a diversion, a last-minute schedule change. I knew how hard he worked, so I never brought up the northern lights again. Then the airline I worked for sent me on a business trip, and I made a point of booking one of his flights. Before boarding, I overheard Lana Pierce, the young purser, asking him something outside the crew lounge. "You keep swapping shifts just to take me to see the northern lights. Is it worth it?" He was scrolling through photos of the two of them on his phone, his voice soft. "If you like it, it's worth it." So it wasn't that he couldn't find the time. He'd already taken someone else to see the northern lights he'd promised me. Before takeoff, I signed the divorce papers and accepted a two-year posting overseas. This time, I was going to see my own northern lights.

I'd been married to Cecil Smith for eight years. He was the youngest wedding planner in the country, yet our own wedding had been thrown together in a rush. I'd asked him about it many times. Each time, he'd take my hand and say the same thing. "Nora, once I make it into the Best of Weddings Hall of Fame, I'll give you a wedding the whole city will talk about. "I'll make sure everyone knows you're the wife I'd do anything for." He said it like he meant it, so I believed him. I gladly stayed up late rewriting proposals with him and worked alongside him on-site. When he needed cash to keep the business going, I sold the house my mother had left me. My coworkers would see how worn out I was and smile at me with a hint of mockery. "Mrs. Smith is so lucky. With a husband like Mr. Smith, who knows how spectacular that wedding is going to be." "Once the photos are up, we're all going to be very jealous of you." Then, on the day Cecil finally made the Hall of Fame, everyone crowded around a phone and gasped. He'd posted a photo on Instagram from a snow-covered mountain. It showed two passports and a wedding gown. Everyone assumed he'd finally taken me abroad for our bridal photo shoot. That was when I walked into the office with my suitcase. They stared for a few seconds. Then the questions came, their voices oddly hesitant. "Mrs. Smith, what are you still doing here?" "Don't tell me you weren't the woman Mr. Smith took with him."

Three years ago, Isabella Moretti was the sole heir to the Moretti family, the most powerful of New York's five crime families. She was supposed to inherit the Moretti name and most of the business flowing through New York Harbor. A Mafia shootout changed everything. To save her husband, Matteo De Luca, she deliberately drew the enemy away from him. Matteo got out. But Isabella was shot in the shoulder and captured by the kidnappers. They wanted information about Moretti operations. For three years, they tortured her to get it. She was carrying Matteo's child at the time. She did not know she had already been written off. She kept believing the husband she loved would come for her. The truth was that for three whole years, nobody came. She escaped by faking her death and made it back to New York alive, only to find that she had lost everything. Her loving parents were dead, while the husband she adored was rushing to bury her with his lover and their children at his side!

For our fifth anniversary, Zach Jennings made a reservation at an exclusive resort outside the city. But when Zach came to pick me up, Lily Lane was sitting in the back seat. She was the daughter of his former advisor and a junior in his program. He rolled down the window. "Lily's headed out that way too. I'll drop her off on the way." We'd barely been driving for ten minutes when we got caught in a chain-reaction crash on the overpass. In that split second, Zach yanked the wheel and flung his right arm across Lily to shield her. Five years earlier, he'd put his body between me and danger in the same way. It had convinced me I'd found someone who would always put me first, someone I could trust with my life. I sat in the passenger seat, and the impact threw me into the windshield. Blood immediately streamed down my forehead. Still shaken, Zach twisted around. The first person he checked on was Lily. "Are you okay? Did you get hurt?" It wasn't until Lily pointed at me, close to tears, that Zach spun toward me in a panic. His eyes darted away from my bleeding forehead as he hurried to explain, "Eva, don't read too much into it. There's an airbag up front. I only put my arm out for her on reflex." I wiped the blood from the corner of my eye. I'd never been more clearheaded. When lives are on the line, instinct doesn't lie. The person he cared about most wasn't me anymore. So I wasn't going to stay with him.

Adrian Mohr and I had been together for seven years. We'd tried to register our blood bond eight times and failed every single one. The first time, his father said the Mohr clan's nighttime shipping routes had been targeted by vampire hunters, and Adrian needed to attend an emergency family meeting. The meeting ran from dusk until the following dawn. He never showed up before the registry closed. The second time, my mother said she'd found hunters' silver markings outside our front door and insisted that leaving the house would expose the entire family. She blocked the doorway and even threatened that if I insisted on going, she would pull back the blackout curtains and step into the sunlight. The third time, my best friend, Claire Donovan, called me in tears, saying hunters were following her and she was hiding in a bell tower, too afraid to come down alone. I rushed to her side, and by the time we confirmed the area was safe, the registry had already closed for the night. ... The ninth time, we took care of everything ahead of schedule and got into a car with UV-tinted windows, heading to the registry through the underground tunnel. We had barely crossed one intersection when a black sports car shot out from a side street and slammed into us. The side window shattered, and a sliver of silver-coated glass lodged in my left shoulder. For most vampires, a crash like that was nothing, but silver suppressed healing. The wound burned immediately, and the bleeding wouldn't stop. Lillian Hart stumbled out of the sports car in a panic. She was my sister, a newly awakened vampire. She rushed to our car door, her face drained of color. "Oh God, I didn't mean to! Adrian, Eve, are you hurt?" Adrian grabbed her wrist first, checking whether she'd touched any silver. Only after confirming she was completely unharmed did he turn back to me. "Eve, looks like we won't make it to the registry today either." "Yeah. I guess not." I pressed my hand against my still-bleeding shoulder

My father disappeared for seventeen years. The first time he surfaced, it was to offer me fifty thousand dollars for my bone marrow to save the daughter he'd had with his lover. My mother slapped me twice right there, demanding I refuse his dirty money. But I got into the car the Alpha had sent, handprints still burning on my face, and walked into his multimillion-dollar estate. They all thought I was so desperate I'd sell my own blood for cash. That changed when I pointed at the most expensive car in his garage and told my father, "Either restore my name to the Blackwood family registry or give me the car's value in cash: three hundred thousand dollars." "Your daughter needs my bone marrow to survive. My mother needs three hundred thousand dollars to stay alive." "If you can't part with the money, then watch her die." After that, everyone thought all I cared about was money. Only I knew the truth: I was selling my own blood to buy my mother a chance at life.