After Death Short Stories & Scumbag Karma Novels

Three months had passed since my husband vanished while hiking in the fjords. Then I spotted him in a VIP room at a Manhattan strip club, one arm wrapped around my adopted sister's waist, looking like he didn't have a care in the world. "Thank God you came up with this idea. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to be free of that control freak." His friends raised their glasses and cheered, asking how much longer he planned to play dead. Alex swirled his drink as he considered the question. "Next week. Once the guilt and panic drive her crazy, I'll show up and give her a nice surprise." I stood in the shadows, watching him enjoy his newfound freedom. Then I called a friend who worked at the courthouse.

I was human once. Three years ago, Count Dorian Draven turned me into a vampire and took me as his wife. Back then, I believed he truly loved me. But he would often get lost staring at an oil painting that hung in the tower. I knew it was a portrait of Lenore Blackwell, his dead lover. Then, one night at midnight, I saw it with my own eyes. Dorian's soul slipped into the painting, where he wrapped his arms around a completely naked Lenore. Dorian's voice was lazy and husky. "By tomorrow, you'll be fully alive again. Then you'll take Alyona's place as Countess." Lenore laughed softly. "Dorian, I knew there was no vampire more powerful than you. To think you actually found a way to use necromancy to resurrect my soul in her body." I stood outside the door, my face expressionless. So he'd never loved me. He'd only turned me to bring his lover back to life. I didn't storm in and confront him. Instead, while they were lost in each other, I ripped down the blackout curtain and draped it over the painting, covering it completely. Then I fastened the curtain securely to the frame with the Holy Silver Lock. Now that his soul was inside the painting, the frame would be his prison forever. I sold the painting to the Blood Pit, the most depraved underground nightclub in the city. It was a haven for every kind of vice, and I made sure the painting hung right at the center of it all. For a single copper coin, anyone could humiliate the pair however they pleased. I used my power to reverse the necromancy spell, trapping their souls in an endless loop along the edges of the painting. No matter how far they went, they'd never find a way out. Once so proud and untouchable, Dorian was now trapped inside the painting, humiliated again and again until he finally snapped.

The first experiment in the world of retrieving memories after death succeeds, and my memories are going to be broadcast live all over the Internet. My dad has just learned about my death, but he only says in a disgusted tone, "Who would want to see the memories of someone who is selfish, mean, and has nothing commendable at all about them? Today is the wedding day of Zoe and Cameron. Pause the live broadcast and stop being so sickening!" Zoe is my stepsister, and Cameron is supposed to be my fiance. After that, my father finds out the truth from the live broadcast of my memories. He begs for my forgiveness tearfully but… I'm already dead.

Josephine Ellery was dead, and everyone said Tessa Wrenford had killed her. "Tessa Wrenford, you have been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. I sentence you to five years in prison." The judge brought down his gavel. Still dressed in her jail uniform, Tessa was led out of the courtroom by officers gripping her arms. From the gallery, Beckett Lockridge watched her with an icy stare. He was the man she'd loved for ten years. Now he was also the man who had put her behind bars. When their eyes met, she could almost hear the words he wanted to say: "Tessa, I'll make your life a living hell."

Before our marking ceremony, Alpha Theodore Pierce let his childhood sweetheart, Eliana Vale, throw me into a walk-in freezer for a pre-wedding test. I have cold agglutinin disease. Prolonged exposure to cold can trigger acute hemolysis. The pack's chosen best man and maid of honor stood outside the freezer. They held up their phones and started a livestream. "If you want to be our Luna, kneel and beg Eliana." "Promise that once you accept the mate bond, you won't come between her and Alpha Theodore." Half an hour later, the freezer door finally opened. I was on my knees on the ice, my fingertips frozen blue-black. I no longer had the strength to lift my head. Jeering comments flooded the livestream. Theodore ignored my pain. Instead, he shrugged off his coat and draped it around Eliana. All because she had complained of the cold when the freezer door opened. "You know she has a soft heart. Is that why you put on this act, so she would pity you?" Theodore held the list of pre-wedding tests, never imagining I had read every item. Hiding my emergency medication, sabotaging the radiant heat at home, staging a rogue kidnapping, causing me to fall through the ice of a frozen river... Each time they completed one, he checked it off. The freezer challenge was number eleven. Eliana had invented it. The final test was scheduled for the day of the marking ceremony. Stage his death and test the Luna's loyalty. So that was it... Every time I woke in the medical wing after almost dying, it signaled the start of their next game. Theodore lifted my chin with the toe of his shoe. "Show up on time to the marking ceremony tomorrow, and I'll consider keeping tonight's video private." I stood, removed the pack Luna's crest, and dropped it at Eliana's feet. "I'm done playing." "From this moment on, I reject you as my mate. As far as you're concerned, I died in that freezer!"

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!

Twelve years after I burned to death at the border sanctuary, I stood before Ryan again during his final Moonlight Trial. My name was Erin. At eighteen, I was the packless lone wolf everyone on the border knew as trouble, and Ryan Blackwood was the nameless boy who had grown up beside me. We hunted together, fought together, and survived winters that should have broken us. Before the fire, his wolf had already recognized me as his fated mate. We had not completed the bond yet. We thought we had time. Then an enemy pack attacked the sanctuary at night and set the cabins on fire. I dragged Ryan, bleeding from a silver wound and barely conscious, through a burning hallway and shoved him outside. Then I went back for Mara and the last pups. I never came out. Ryan survived with severe smoke inhalation, broken memories, and a wolf that went completely silent. When he woke, he no longer remembered me, the promise he had made to me, or the bond his wolf had already chosen. Vera Ashford stayed beside him and gave everyone a simpler story. She said she had saved Ryan. She said I had sold the sanctuary routes and caused the fire. For the next twelve years, she stood beside him through trial after trial. The pack came to treat her as the woman who would one day stand beside the heir for good, even though Ryan's wolf never woke enough to complete a true mate bond with her. By the time his hundredth trial began, my grave had been cold for twelve years. The first sign that the trial had called me back was not a voice. Every wolf in the stone hall lifted its head at once, hackles rising as a faint smell of charred wood drifted through the moonlight. Then I stepped out of the forest mist.

I am diagnosed with severe systemic lupus erythematosus, and I only have three days left to live. When my husband rejects my 188th plea for help, I take my test results and enter the hospice care center. "Hello, I'd like to schedule my own cremation process and apply for government aid." Ten minutes later, they arrive. Before I can speak, my lawyer husband, Jasper Horton, coldly slaps me across the face. "You're faking a terminal illness just to steal attention from Janice?" My doctor brother, Casey Carter, snatches the medical report from my hand and scoffs at it. "Lupus? If you're going to fake being sick, at least make it believable. Only one in a million people gets this." I endure the pain in my body, return to the counter, and hand in the application form and my medical records once more. The staff member sees the butterfly-shaped rash on my wrist and sympathizes with me. "I have no family left," I say. "I'm requesting cremation in three days, location doesn't matter. I just don't want my death to burden anyone."

After the cruise ship strikes a hidden reef, panicked passengers shove me and Kristen Langford into the sea. My boyfriend, Elijah Jensen, is the ship's captain, so he plunges into the water. But instead of saving me, he grabs Kristen and boards the last lifeboat. I thrash and cry for help, but he slaps my hand away. "You can swim. Stop pretending for attention!" Elijah snaps. "Kristen's body temperature is dropping. I have to get her to a hospital!" The waters around me are pitch-black, and his words feel like a death sentence. When the tracking bracelet I always wear is discovered inside a shark, Elijah dives alone into shark-infested waters, searching for three days and nights. In the end, the brilliant captain who once ruled the oceans can never sail again.

I was once the Pythia, an oracle of Apollo. After marrying the late king, I became known as the Oracle Priestess. When my husband died in battle, I faked my death and returned to the temple. From then on, I devoted myself to protecting the capital with the gods' blessing. Then one day, they brought my daughter's body into the temple. She was covered in raw, unhealed wounds, and her eyes were still open. The attendants tossed her body, wrapped in nothing but a straw mat, onto the floor. Then they stood nearby whispering. "Poor princess. The king cared more about the Rose of Highcourt than his own sister. He let her suffer until her wounds became infected and she died in agony. "King Theron was the one who sent her to the beastmen for a marriage alliance. Duke Charles was supposed to marry Princess Callista, but he later fell for Naia instead." So that was what had happened. While I was hidden away in this temple protecting Ostan, my son had turned his back on his sister for another woman. He let Naia take Callista's place, then sent his sister to live among savages. Callista survived the beastmen and everything they did to her. When they were finally defeated, she must have thought she could come home and put it all behind her. But Naia still wouldn't leave her alone. She bullied Callista every chance she got. Then she framed Callista for plotting to hurt someone, and Theron had her thrown into the dungeon. As I held my daughter's body, I couldn't bear to imagine what she had gone through in that dark, waterlogged dungeon, where prisoners were interrogated on the upper level and executed below. A corrupt kingdom like this didn't deserve the gods' protection. I begged the gods to forgive me. If this was how they treated my daughter, then I no longer cared what happened to this country.