Counter Attack

At sixty-five, I got served divorce papers. The same day, my husband Sebastian — decked out in his wedding suit, of all things — popped a handful of sleeping pills in a suicide attempt. For years, we were the perfect couple. The kind of pair neighbors whispered about with envy. I couldn't wrap my head around it. The divorce. The pills. None of it made sense. Not until I found the photo and letter in his pocket.

In the third year of my engagement to Jack, he found himself a pureblooded, sharp-fanged huntress up in the Northern Territory. The night before my birthday, he brought her to me—just to call off the bond. He looked at me, cold and distant. “Bethel and I both live for the thrill of the night hunt. You're just a greenhouse wolf—soft and sheltered. You’ll never get what makes it all so addictive.” I asked, holding back the hurt, “Did it really have to be today?” He chuckled, “Did breaking a bond require a date on the calendar?” I nodded without arguing. But the next month, we ended up in the same Blood Moon Trial up north. What he didn’t know was—I tasted the rush of the hunt, the heat of blood, and got the champion long before he even came of age. Later, on his birthday, I sealed a life bond with another powerful wolf. He looked at me, red-eyed and hoarse, voice barely his, “Did it have to be today?” I smiled back, “Life bonds need good omens. The moon’s just right tonight.”

My husband's true love and I are trapped when a fire breaks out. He's a firefighter—when he arrives on scene, he chooses to save her without hesitation. I barely make it out alive. Once I do, I demand a divorce. He doesn't understand why. He asks, "Why do you want to divorce me? Because I didn't save you first?" I angrily throw the divorce agreement in his face. "Yes, that's exactly why! Because you chose to save your old flame when she was further from you!"

My fiancée is a DINK. She lies to me about going abroad for a year to further her education—she's actually left to have a child with her childhood sweetheart. He shares a photo of her after she's given birth. It's captioned, "This is the world's best childhood sweetheart. My family's line shall continue!" I'm furious when I see their mutual friends leaving comments urging them to get married. I comment, "May you be together forever and end up with no descendants." My fiancée immediately calls me and snaps, "What the hell are you doing? I'm just fulfilling a promise I made to him during our childhood!" I hang up and call off the engagement. There's no point in continuing with this relationship!

At the full moon party before our marking ceremony, my mate Lucas got wasted. I went to pick him up, just like we agreed. Only to walk in on him burying his face in his first love’s neck, marking her with his scent. "Don't ever leave me again, Willow. My wolf only wants you." His first love shot me a triumphant smirk and shoved him into my arms. "Your mate is here. You should go." But Lucas, hiding behind his drunkenness, just looked at me with disgust. "You're the only one for me, Willow! She's just some lowly half-blood Omega. She's just my ride home, don't worry about her." I swallowed my humiliation and took him home, only to find out he wasn't drunk at all. He claimed he only said those things to appease Willow, for the sake of her pack's power. I just turned away. So on the day we were supposed to be bound for life, I ran. If Lucas was still hung up on his first love, then I would grant him his wish and disappear. But I never expected that after I left, he would lose his mind, crying and begging for me to come back.

In the three years since I became Zander's mate, I've tried to kill myself ninety-nine times. Kidnapped by a rival pack in my youth, years of torture nearly destroyed me. I clawed my way back to the Crescent Moon Pack, only to find my place had been taken by an adopted daughter, Vivian. My Beta parents doted on her, and my fated mate—the Alpha himself—had eyes only for her. I begged them, told them my kidnapping and my suicide attempts weren't accidents, but all I ever heard was: "Ember, you're delusional. You just wandered off and got lost." "You tried to drown yourself in the river." The people closest to me, and not one of them believed me. Until the ninety-ninth time. Another "suicide." When I woke up three days later, I rubbed my aching head. My eyes were vacant, my own gaze foreign to me. I had forgotten who I was, forgotten the humiliation I'd endured, forgotten the desperate girl who had thrown away her dignity for a scrap of her Alpha's affection. At the pack ceremony, while everyone waited for me to fawn pathetically over Zander, a single tear slid down my cheek for reasons I couldn't comprehend. I wiped it away and, under the shocked stares of the entire pack, announced calmly: "Zander," my voice was steady. "I don't love you anymore. So I, Ember of the Crescent Moon Pack, hereby reject you as my mate." "This little act again?" Zander sneered, his eyes glinting with the same casual contempt they always held for me. But he didn't know. This time, I was leaving him for good. It wasn't until I vanished completely that the ones who'd never believed me were the ones who truly went mad.

I get picked up by the cops in the middle of the night for street vending. While questioning me, they pull up my file. One officer eyes me suspiciously through my mask and asks, "What's a Clairefield University graduate like you doing selling stuff on the street at midnight?" I freeze and lean over to look at the file. The ID number matches mine, but the photo has been replaced with one of Madison Bass. That's when it hits me—20 years ago, I was the one who got accepted to Clairefield University! Dazed and numb, I stumble home only to hear my husband, Joseph Gunther, speaking on the phone. "Madison, don't worry. I won't let Lucy interfere with your life. Just go abroad in peace." It's him! Joseph helped Madison steal my identity and my future. My stomach twists. I turn to confront him, to expose the truth. But before I can, he strangles me to death with a belt. "I'm sorry, Lucy. You can't ruin Madison's future…" When I open my eyes again, I'm back in the classroom. Our homeroom teacher is handing out university application forms. This time, I'm taking my life back.

My sister, Yvonne Jones, tried to murder the childhood friend of a rich heir in order to seduce him. Yvonne poisoned the woman's drink and pulled out her oxygen tube after she was sent to the hospital. When the rich heir arrived in a rush, Yvonne cried in his arms daintily. "I'm so sorry. This is all my fault. I failed to protect her." I witnessed everything in the ward but didn't say a word about it. In my previous lifetime, I stopped Yvonne from poisoning the woman. I knew the rich heir would never let her get away with it if he found out about it. Yvonne was forced to give up her plan and even praised me for my foresight. However, she ended up poisoning me instead and stabbed me in the heart with her dagger when I got dizzy. "This is your fault! Die! If you hadn't stopped me, Sean Graham would've been mine!" When I opened my eyes next, I had returned to the day of the poisoning.

My neighbor is a physics genius. He's spent the past six months preparing for an important physics competition. However, he wants to skip it to care for his girlfriend, who has a fever. I tell his parents about it. So, he's forced to participate in the competition. He wins first place and is admitted to Quinver University. Later, he establishes his own business and finds success. I become one of his employees. He looks down at me imperiously in a dim basement. He stomps on my fingers, shattering them. "You deserve this for being so wicked, Larissa Clarke." When I open my eyes again, I'm taken back to before any of this ever happened.

That year, during the Sicilian arms trafficking conflict, my lover of three years, Silvio, deliberately betrayed my transport routes at a critical moment in a deal with the rival "DiMarco" family, causing me to lose all my territory. He immediately defected to the DiMarco family's leader Marina, becoming her lover. As he left, he didn't even bother to disguise his betrayal, coldly tossing out, "What we had was just business, nothing personal." While I was burdened with my family's blood debts and pushed to the edge of a cliff, Lorenzo, who had secretly harbored feelings for me since childhood, found me and offered his family's entire fortune. "Isabella, don't be afraid. In my eyes, you'll always be Sicily's most formidable Queen of the Arms Trade," he said. He took the Colt pistol from my hand, and his voice was gentle yet resolute. Five years later, my power resurged. I was about to completely crush Marina's smuggling network and reclaim everything I had lost. My caporegimes, the captains of my organization, were ready and waiting for my command. But on the night before the operation, my weapons warehouse suddenly exploded, turning priceless arms into worthless scrap metal. I barely escaped through the thick smoke, my body covered in burns. In a secluded monastery, I overheard Lorenzo and Silvio whispering outside my door. "You really had the guts to blow up the arsenal. Weren't you afraid of blasting her to pieces too?" Silvio's voice carried a mocking tone. "If she died, just died. I've always loved Marina. If it weren't for that unlucky family marriage lottery five years ago, I wouldn't have had to endure this ugly bitch for all this time." Lorenzo's voice was ice-cold and unfamiliar. I closed my eyes, feeling like a dagger had pierced my chest. Explosion. Arranged marriage. Ugly bitch. So those five years of shared hardship were just his unwilling choice after losing a high-stakes gamble. "I married her to keep watch. If it weren't for me paving