Short Stories & Novels

The news said a massive hurricane would make landfall in Maisonet Bay by six that evening. By four o'clock, coworkers were already packing up to leave. The subways and buses had stopped running. Anyone with a car offered to give the carless a ride home. When someone asked if I needed one, I smiled and turned them down. "Thanks, but I'm good. My girlfriend's picking me up." They laughed and teased me about how nice it must be to have someone. At five, the wind outside picked up. I called Melanie Hayman, but she didn't answer. Our last messages were from an hour ago, when she'd said she was "almost there." I figured traffic must be bad and left it at that. By five thirty, the rain was coming down in sheets. I was the only one left in the office. The bulb overhead flickered, then went out with a pop. I dialed Melanie's number again in the dark. This time someone picked up, but it wasn't her voice. "Ryan?" I froze. "Where's Melanie?" "Mel's driving. She can't really talk right now."

My husband is a rock climbing route setter. It's our wedding anniversary today, but he brings his female best friend with him on an adventure to discover uncharted territory. It comes about because his female best friend says life is so boring. We're trapped in the mountains when we encounter extreme weather, and the rescue helicopter can only take two people with them. They climb up the ladder deftly, leaving me to slowly grow colder in the rain. I shout his name with all my strength. "I have a heart condition! I'll die if I don't get to the hospital soon!" He throws a rope down at me without even sparing me a glance. "Luna has menstrual cramps—she never says she's in pain. You, on the other hand, are only good at acting. Think of a way to get down yourself." What he doesn't know is that his "good friend" has already sliced the rope he threw to me.

It's Family Day at my daughter, Hannah Neel's, preschool, but my wife, Samantha Miller, says she has to work and tells both Hannah and me not to go. Seeing the disappointment on Hannah's face breaks my heart, so I bring her to school anyway. As soon as we step through the gates, I see Samantha. She's holding her childhood friend—Oscar Barnett's—hand, with a little boy clutching her other. The three of them look like a perfect family, laughing and chatting, as if they belong together. When Samantha sees us, her smile fades, and she lets go of Oscar's hand. "Zach, it's not what you think. Oscar's raising his son alone. Today's his fifth birthday, and he just wanted to give him a little taste of a mother's love," she says quickly. I study her for a moment, then kneel and gently take Hannah's hand in mine. "Sweetheart, say hello to the lady."

In a luxury boutique, a male influencer and I are eyeing the same watch. I'm about to give it up when I hear the salesperson yell at me in a shrill voice, "Get your filthy hands off it right now! Mr. Parr saw it first. How dare you compete with him? He's an important customer of our store!" I freeze and see Alan Parr staring at me with utter disgust, his arms crossed. "You think a country bumpkin like you deserves that watch? Do you even know how much its accessories cost? A pauper like you definitely can't afford it!" he snaps, then holds up a card and signs the receipt. However, the name he signs is my wife's. The supplementary card he's holding is the one I gave my wife for her allowance.

I'm married to Don Vincenzo Corleone of the Corleone family for five years. During those years, I'm the Donna whom everyone is envious of. But only I know that his love doesn't belong to me anymore. Vincenzo no longer takes me to core family gatherings. Our home is filled with photos of him and his childhood sweetheart, Lina Villo. At the banquet, Lina, who has won an award with the recipe she has stolen from me, nuzzles against Vincenzo's chest while receiving everyone's congratulatory wishes. Meanwhile, I get berated by the same man in public. Even when I get kidnapped, Vincenzo chooses to not save me just because he wants to take care of Lina. I've given Vincenzo five years of my love, only to end up with nothing good. So, I delete all of his contact information and board the ship meant for Castelloro. Vincenzo, I'm not going to pine for the genuine love and respect you owe me anymore. Let's not see each other again for the rest of our lives. We don't owe each other anything anymore.

On our third Valentine's Day since marrying the Don Arthur, he set the three places at the dining table. With the same hands he used to wield a gun, he carefully peeled shrimp. Shrimp was Lora's favorite, the first love he'd never gotten over. I was allergic to shellfish. He dismissed every hurt he'd caused me and sided with Lora every time. He was certain I loved him so deeply that I would swallow every insult and step aside forever. Everything changed when I discovered Lora's role in my father's murder and learned how completely Arthur's blind trust in her had buried the truth. That was when I finally saw him clearly. I was done with Arthur and the love he claimed to have for me.

My boyfriend, Allen, is a fitness coach who is cheerful, handsome, and has eight-pack abs. After getting together with me, he transferred all his female students to other colleagues and would send me daily check-in photos. In anticipation of becoming his fiancee, I happily prepared for our engagement ceremony. However, two weeks before the ceremony, I discovered a bright red lipstick mark on Allen’s workout pants. I quickly pulled up the check-in photo he had sent me that day. Through the reflection on a dumbbell, I saw a woman standing next to Allen—her lips painted in the exact same lipstick color. Most of the previous photos had flaws, but I had trusted Allen too much to notice them. Looking at his message under the photo, I let out a cold laugh. "Baby, I have to work overtime today to train a male student." He actually dared to deceive me. Just then, my phone rang. It was the wedding planning company confirming the engagement ceremony setup. I quickly responded with a confirmation. The ceremony would proceed as planned—except I had a special surprise prepared for Allen, one he would never forget.

On our seventh wedding anniversary, my wife handed me a divorce agreement that was valid for seven days. She had fallen for a male intern at her company who was seven years younger than her. She wanted to experience what she called a proper romance with him, one that would last exactly seven days. On the first day, they booked an entire private cinema and made love to each other from the entrance to their seats. On the second day, they went to the seaside to set off fireworks, and the light spread across half the skyline of Veyron. On the fifth day, the intern burst into an art exhibition I hosted and cried in front of the entire press. He accused me of coming between them. That same evening, the story of a rising painter becoming a homewrecker for love reached the top of the trending searches, and the hate comments poured in. On the sixth day, my wife apologized to me on the intern’s behalf, and his punishment was a three‑day ban from shopping. On the seventh day, my wife finally sensed something was wrong. She called me ninety‑nine times and reminded me that we were supposed to reconcile the next day. I replied with a single “okay” and quietly told my assistant to arrange for my luggage to be shipped out. What she did not know was that seven days earlier, I had already made plans to go abroad to continue my studies. This time, I was done playing her game.

I'm the daughter of a poor couple who make a living selling fish at a market. We're so broke that every penny counts. Even so, my parents scrape together everything they have to support my dream of becoming a professional dancer. They pay for my training and even spend their life savings on my scoliosis surgery without a second thought. However, when Sylvie Putnam throws me to the ground, leaving me on the verge of paralysis, and then beats me until my face is a bloody mess, Mom barely spares me a glance. Instead, she gently strokes Sylvie's head. "Good girl. You did the right thing after she upset you. Remember, never let anyone bully you." Dad even picks up a stick and strikes it against my spine. "Don't worry. Worst case, we'll just pay some compensation. What could this worthless life of hers possibly be worth? We have plenty of money anyway!" His words make the pain explode through my body and heart all at once. Just yesterday, Mom and Dad were keeping vigil at my bedside day and night, frantic with worry over my illness. Now, all I can do is curl up on the ground and let a stranger kick and beat me without mercy. "Good grief. She's practically being beaten into a cripple. How can something this serious happen and her parents still not show up?" "Isn't she a dance student? Their audition is in a couple of days. What a shame…" As the other students whisper around me, my consciousness slowly fades. Little do they know that the people who have just beaten me into a cripple are my very parents.

My name is Clara Kelly. I was born in Brooklyn, into an Irish-American cop’s family. My father spent his whole career walking a beat out of the 84th Precinct. My mother volunteered at the parish. I was the first girl on our block to get into Columbia Law. The year I graduated, I was volunteering at a charity gala. I picked up the wrong glass of wine and ended up dumping it down the front of a man’s Brioni suit. That man was Adrian Francesco Moretti. Fourth-generation Don of the Moretti Family of New York, and one of the five families of Cosa Nostra. He chased me for four years. I said no six times. The seventh time, he stood outside my law firm in the rain until three-fifteen in the morning. I married him. Two decades in, he’d handed me the keys to the entire Moretti Family. In our world they called me “the Irish Donna,” a woman with no Italian blood who somehow held the seat. Childless by choice, the two of us. Famously in love. Until that Wednesday afternoon, when my college roommate of twenty years, my best friend Vivian Sinclair, walked into my living room with a five-year-old boy. She said the boy was Adrian’s son. She said that five years ago, she’d taken a used condom out of the wastebasket in my upstairs master bedroom, kept it frozen for three years, and done IVF. She said she was the real mother of the Moretti heir. She was the real Donna Moretti. “Be smart. Pack your bags and walk out. You might even get to keep your life.” “You’re barren. The Moretti Family doesn’t need you.” I looked at the woman I’d called my best friend for half my adult life. I didn’t say a word. She thought she was holding the winning card. What she didn’t know was that she’d just stepped onto a board Adrian and I had been laying for twenty years. I needed exactly one sentence to shatter every piece of the Donna fantasy she’d spent five years building.

My wife had called me in the middle of the night with a hint of drunkenness in her voice. She admitted to having too much to drink and asked me to come get her. I hurried to the private club she mentioned, only to find myself having to change into a bathrobe as soon as I got there. Surrounded by a group of wealthy women in their fifties, they playfully flirted and teased me relentlessly. Suddenly, a few of them pounced, pushing me to the ground and demanding I crawl like a dog. Despite the humiliation, my main concern was still my wife's wellbeing. Hours passed before she finally showed up, disheveled, supported by her male assistant, looking at me with a cold smirk. It was then that the truth hit me. This whole situation was a scheme she had orchestrated to please him. My anger rising, I called and spoke through gritted teeth, "Three days. I want every single business under the Spencers wiped out."

My name is Mark Thompson. Not long after I became a mortician, I came down with a strange condition. The moment I touch a corpse, I see their final memories play out before my eyes. It's not that I enjoy sticking my nose into other people's business. Those visions just force their way into my head. The first body my mentor ever had me restore belonged to a wealthy young man who'd been mangled in a car crash. The second I touched his shattered neck, I couldn't stop myself from saying something to the grieving family beside me. "His car didn't malfunction. The brake line was cut. "The cutters are still hidden beneath the spare tire in his wife's trunk." The crying stopped instantly, and everyone turned to stare at the woman who had been pretending to mourn. Two weeks later, she was arrested. She had hired someone to kill her husband and staged the murder as a traffic accident. After that, people from both sides of the law started lining up outside the funeral home in the middle of the night.

"I'll cut to the chase. I'm the villainess in this story." Everyone in this wealthy, elite family adored my poor, fragile adopted sister. My older brother Damien would snap, "Don't scare Bella. Her weak heart can't take it." My other brother, Magnus, would add, "Lend Bella your nightgown, all right? It's wasted on you." Even my fiancé said, "This is nothing more than a marriage of convenience. My true love has always been Bella." In my last life, I humbled myself endlessly to please them. What did I receive in return? They sent me to a mental asylum and I died in agony. Then I came back to life on the day of my engagement party. A voice echoed in my mind and made its announcement. [The Madness Reward System has chosen you, Marceline Blanc. Any unhinged behavior will earn rewards worth hundreds of millions of dollars.] I grinned and sent the pompous, ten-tier cake crashing to the floor. "I'm done with this shitty family. Goodbye, you miserable bastards."

I only learned how to speak when I was eight years old. Everyone in the Wentworth family calls me an idiot. Even my mom secretly wipes her tears away, thinking that she's given birth to an autistic son. My dad looks at me with disappointment in his eyes. But he never sends me to a special-needs school due to his need to preserve the family's reputation. One day, Winston Pembroke from Broadwell Street comes over to purchase my family's company, Wentworth Group. He puts on a high and mighty attitude and berates everyone in the meeting room to the point that they can only hang their heads in shame. Despite the room being filled with the company's elites, no one dares to respond to Winston. As I stand in a corner, I feel my eyelids drooping while listening to Winston's tirade. Ugh. How annoying. So, I take a step forward and utter my first ever sentence in Winston's mother tongue.

From a stall in the office restroom, I overhear someone badmouthing me. Henry Fielder, the intern I've been mentoring for three months, grumbles, "The guy's got zero people skills. He's a total fossil, like a robot stuck in one mode." I'm about to push the door open and jump in when someone laughs and piles on. "The paperwork is incomplete. The receipts aren't compliant. I can't reimburse it without a manager's signature. We could recite his canned empathy lines in our sleep!" Once they're gone, I quietly head back to my office. Later, Henry drops a thick stack of expense reports onto my desk. "Quit waving the rulebook and rejecting everyone's reimbursements." I skim the fake receipts, and for once, I don't call him out. Instead, I give a thin smile and say, "I have a headache. I can't make out the words."

Esther, my adopted sister, drugged me to steal my position as the Divine Envoy. My skin erupted in rotting blisters, forcing me to miss the trials. She took my place, exactly as she planned. But she didn't know the Envoy was fated to marry Hades, the King of the Underworld, rumored to be a cruel, hideous monster incapable of siring an heir. That very night, his messenger brought the marriage pact, demanding the Envoy as his Queen. Esther refused. To save her, my fiancé, Samuel, slept with her. Stripped of her purity, she was no longer eligible to marry the God of the Dead. Swaying her hips, Esther proudly flaunted the hickeys mottling her neck. "Your fiancé is mine now. What are you going to do, sister? You turn twenty-five in three days. Unmarried, by law, you’ll be locked away in a convent to rot as an old maid forever." Samuel tilted his head in mock pity. "Don't worry. I won't let you fall that far. You can hide out at my estate, as a maid." They were wrong. I had another choice. I could take Esther's place and marry Hades. But after the wedding, I realized the Lord of the Underworld was nothing like the cruel, hideous monster the rumors made him out to be.

The day I died, the baby in my womb was only five months old. In that final phone call, my father, John Harlow, the godfather of the Harlow family, spoke with a voice as icy as a loaded gun. "A married woman belongs to her husband's family, even in death." When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day I had been placed under house arrest. He was circling my college application with a red pen. "Girls who study art are easier to marry off." In front of him, I tore the family's marriage alliance files into pieces. "I'm going to Camford University. I'm studying Computer Science." He sprang to his feet so suddenly that his finger nearly jabbed my face, his sleeve cuff revealing the family crest tattoo. "If you dare defy me, don't ever regard me as godfather." I smiled. "Exactly what I want." Meeting his stunned gaze, I spoke each word deliberately. "The name Harlow. I have long stopped wanting it."

The weather is -4 degrees Fahrenheit in Snow Park. The menstrual cramps are too much for me to handle, so I can only crouch beside the snow paths in order to rest. The new beautiful ski instructor, Sandy Hatfield, who Owen Schultz has hired, skid to a stop all of a sudden. The flurry of ice and snow gets splashed onto my face as a result. "Oh my, the snow quality here really is amazing! Unlike a certain someone, whose health is weaker than that of an average child…" Sandy takes off her snow goggles before flipping the bird at me tauntingly. "A dainty maiden like you should just go home and enjoy the heater. Don't take up precious space on the snow paths!" Unable to take it anymore, I grab my ski pole and try to strike Sandy with it. The next thing I know, Owen comes skidding in my direction on his snowboard and quickly shields Sandy from me. In doing so, he knocks me to the icy ground. He frowns at me, his voice colder than the icy winds. "Sandy is a professional athlete. What she did is a professional ski move. Can you stop being unreasonable?" As I slump on the ground, I find myself staring at a pink turtle cushion hanging from Sandy's hip. That was a cushion I’d sewn for Owen over three sleepless nights before this trip, with a safety charm hidden inside.. Back then, Owen thinks this charm is childish-looking and embarrassing, so he has tossed it into the boot without looking at it. Sandy follows my line of sight and feels the turtle cushion near her hip. Then, she brushes the snow off the charm with a scowl on her face. "Owen told me that this is a piece of garbage that's taking up space at home. So, it serves as my cushion now. I don't think even old ladies are prone to making such lame crafts nowadays, right Brooke?"

"Evelyn Vane. You conspired with the Fallen. You tried to murder Tania Swann, future Lady of the Nightfall Court. Today, your blood wakes the Blood Mirror. We will rip out your memories. We will seal your fate." In the ancient catacombs, the Blood Mirror cast a dark red halo in the candlelight. My former fated mate lounged on his black velvet throne. He was Valerius Cross, the noble Lord of the Nightfall Court. Those eyes used to look at me with love. Now, they held only disgust. "The Blood Mirror will show every betrayal you've committed against this Court. Our entire kind will see the monster hiding under that pretty skin!" Tania clung softly to Valerius's broad chest. She traced lazy circles on his skin. A sweet, smug smile played on her lips. She was so sure the mirror would condemn me tonight. She was so sure I'd burn to ashes. The rune-carved silver chains bit deep into my flesh. Black smoke hissed from my burns. Even so, I spoke. My voice was broken. "Valerius, are you sure about this? Do you really want my blood to show you my memories? Once it starts... none of you can turn back."

I knew my husband, Josh Perkins, had faked his death and taken on his younger twin brother's identity—but I never said a word. Instead, I went straight to the commander of the military district and filed an official report of my husband's death, requesting his name be permanently removed from the service rolls. In my last life, my brother-in-law died in an accident. Josh gave up his rank as regimental commander, abandoned his own name, and stepped into his brother's shoes—all to spare his fragile sister-in-law from becoming a widow. Back then, I recognized him immediately. I confronted him and demanded to know why he was pretending to be a dead man. But Josh just looked through me, cold as a winter morning. "Riley, I know you're grieving Josh. But I'm not him. Don't mistake me for my brother." He shielded that delicate sister-in-law of his behind him, then shoved me into the icy river and warned me not to harbor delusions. Later, our five-year-old daughter cried, asking why her daddy didn't want her anymore. For that, she was dragged to the cowshed for "reflection"—left there, starving, for three days and nights. My mother-in-law called me a curse, a jinx who'd killed her son, and threw my daughter and me out with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Josh made sure everyone knew I'd "gone mad"—that I was lusting after my brother-in-law before my husband was even cold in the ground. The whole town turned their backs on us. That last winter, I wandered the streets with my girl, dazed and numb, until the cold finally took us both. But when I opened my eyes again, I was back. Back to the very day Josh buried his old life and stole his brother's.