Award Winning Novel

At the banquet hall, I refuse to let my adopted twin pups eat the walnut cake. Ivana Lamont—the childhood sweetheart of my mate, Luther Hardwick—chokes up dramatically. She cries accusingly, "Yara, they may not be yours biologically, but you can't abuse them! Why won't you even let them have a slice of cake?" I'm just about to explain that the twins are allergic to nuts, but they point at me and complain in aggrieved voices. "Mommy often doesn't give us food. We never have enough to eat!" With that, I'm unceremoniously driven out of the banquet hall by the host. When I go to look for my mate to talk about it, I accidentally overhear his conversation with a friend. "Alpha Luther, it's been eight years. Are you still not going to mark Yara?" "There's no rush. I'll wait until the kids are a little older. We love each other very much, so it's fine even if I don't mark her." His friend responds disapprovingly, "You've been hiding from her that the twins are actually your and Ivana's pups. Aren't you afraid she may leave in anger if she finds out?" Luther shakes his head and replies with certainty, "She won't. Yara is an orphan, so she has no family. If she leaves me, where else can she go?" The ugly truth causes me to freeze on the spot. It turns out the pups I've loved for eight years were born to my mate and another she-wolf. What I thought was a happy life is nothing but a cold, heartless deception! I touch my belly, thinking of the pup I just conceived. My tears fall like a relentless downpour. In the shadows, I say inaudibly, "You're wrong, Luther. In fact, I found my birth parents three days ago. I just haven't had the chance to tell you. But it doesn't matter now because you don't need to know about that anymore." I have Luther sign the mate bond dissolution agreement before finalizing my withdrawal from the Sharp Teeth pack. Two days later, I give both my mate and the pups to Ivana. With the pup that Luther has never known or laid his eyes on, I disappear from his world forever.

My fiance told me, "When you grow flowers more colorful than Dimonous roses, we'll get married in a rose garden." With that as my goal, I worked day and night to care for the roses. Until one day when his first love said she wanted to see a rain of roses, my fiance shoveled 50 acres of my roses to make her smile. "Jeffrey, will Audrey be mad at us?" Jeffrey took out a ten-karat diamond ring from his pocket and knelt on one knee. "It doesn't matter. The only person I love is you." Pain pierced my heart. I called home, "Dad, if I break up with him, is the offer still open? Can I still inherit the family fortune?"

My son was kidnapped by a pack of rogue wolves. Two days later, the patrol team found his body. His limbs were broken, his entire body covered in bruises, not a single patch of fur left unmarked. I held his lifeless form and howled in anguish. My mate Damien, Alpha of the Stormfang Pack, swore the killers would pay. All evidence pointed to Sera, Damien's nominal Omega assistant, but in reality his mistress. As the pack's Luna, I publicly revealed the investigation results and evidence before all pack members. Under pressure from the pack, my mate was forced to execute his Omega assistant. A year later, I became pregnant again. But during my tenth anniversary Luna ceremony, my mate locked me in a burning chamber as punishment. That's when I learned the truth—he hated me for forcing him to kill his Omega assistant. He wanted me dead for revenge. In the flames, I felt the child in my womb slip away, and my own strength began to fail. After my rebirth, I still couldn't change my son's tragic fate. But when I chose to abandon my role as Stormfang Pack's Luna, the entire pack fell to their knees, begging me not to leave.

I had been with Cameron Stevenson for three years, yet he had never marked me. To win back the Silver Moon Pack's Alpha, I agreed to his ridiculous request of mating in the wild. Cameron snapped a pair of silver handcuffs on me and bound me to a tree. My pants had barely come off when his phone rang. It was that Omega, Rebecca Anderson. "Cameron, the pup is sick!" she cried. He pulled out of me instantly, yanked his pants up, and ran. "Don't worry! I'm coming!" I struggled and shouted after him. "Cameron! The cuffs! Uncuff me first!" He was already several yards away when he turned back with an impatient remark. "Just wait! Rebecca's pup is the hope of the entire pack!" I waited an entire day and night. The cold wind cut like blades. The silver cuffs ate into my wrists until skin and blood mixed. Cameron never came back. 'Cameron… Since you couldn't let go of that low-ranked Omega, I wouldn't mind burying the two of you together. You'll never be apart for the rest of your lives!'

My father bought twin brothers from the black market to serve as bodyguards for me and my sister. My sister chose the tall, strong older brother, leaving me with the frail, mute younger one. Feeling sorry for him, I kept him close, seeking doctors for his silence and maintaining distance to respect his apparent OCD. I thought trauma had shaped him that way. But when our father's enemies kidnapped us, he abandoned me without hesitation, choosing to die shielding my sister. In his final moments, he spoke for the first time. "You finally see me." To me, he said, "In the next life, please don't choose me." I realized then that he was neither mute nor afflicted with OCD. His silence and aversion were directed solely at me. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day we chose the bodyguards. This time, I'd grant his wish.

Three years of marriage, and every time we make love, he does it from behind. “Aidan! Why do you always avoid looking at my face? Is it because you're afraid of seeing the person you're sleeping with is me, not my sister?” “You want me to look at you while we do it? Then let me give you what you want.Anyways, Zoey is nothing like you. She is pure and innocent. Maybe Aidan is right. He was originally my sister's mate, 'stolen' from her, and he will never truly belong to me. But when I decided to break the mate bond with him, I found out I was pregnant.

The two childhood sweethearts swear that they'll marry no one but me, but they stand by as my dog of ten years gets killed in a car accident. I cradle the dog's mangled body, but no tears fall. Dante Battaglia stares at me in disgust and asks, "Why did you bring it home? Don't you know Anna's allergic to it?" Dario Battaglia immediately rushes over to snatch away the body in my arms. "This is a damned jinx. Get rid of it!" The Battaglia siblings and I are childhood friends. Dante became the Don, and Dario the Consigliere. I'm the precious princess in the two brothers' eyes, but everything changes with Anna's arrival. After burying the dog myself, I reply to the email inviting me to join an international classified project. The email reads, "Ms. Julia Costanza, we'd like to know if you're willing to participate in this institute's ten-year-long classified project. Upon joining, your personal information will be sealed for a decade, and you will be prohibited from contacting the outside world." I replied, "Yes, I agree."

Eighteen and desperate due to my mother's illness, I enter the orbit of Enzo Lombardi, a powerful, feared mafia boss. He treats me with impossible sweetness, and I find myself sinking into his possessive love and lavish spoiling. Everything changes the day a woman named Isabella Gallo shows up. She claims she's the one Enzo truly loves, and she laughs as she slides a two-million-dollar check across the table, demanding that I leave him. I turn down the money. She then suggests we both send him a message at the same time and see who he cares about more. Holding on to one last bit of hope, I text Enzo that I'm in a car accident. Isabella, on the other hand, tells him her plane is about to land. I wait for his reply, but nothing comes. Instead, I watch as Isabella picks up his call. At that moment, I understood it was time for me to go.

Just one week before my marking ceremony with Lucien, I discovered his heart already belonged to someone else. His secretary, Anika, walked out of his office with a smirk that was a little too knowing. Her blouse was askew, her usually neat hair a tangled mess, and only the faintest trace of her crimson lipstick remained. My heart seized in my chest, and my fingers went cold on the doorknob. Two years ago, she had been a timid girl fresh from the countryside. All that pretense of innocence had vanished, replaced by a brazen ambition written across her face. Her relentless eagerness around Lucien had always grated on my nerves, and I had asked him more than once. "Lucien, can't you replace her?" His smile would always fade. "Anika saved my life," he'd say. "I can't be so heartless." Now, that single triumphant smirk was all it took for me to understand. What others once envied in me had already been trampled beneath her heels. My phone vibrated. It was a new proposal from the event planner. [The marking ceremony plan is nearly perfect. Can we finalize it?] I refused to be consumed by sorrow. I wiped a tear from my cheek and made one last adjustment to the document.——Replaced the bride's name withAnika I didn't want a false love, or a fake Alpha Lucien. Let them have the marking ceremony. Let Anika stand at his side as his Luna, his chosen mate. In seven days, I would be gone with my pup.

"Are you sure you want to change your name, Ms. Anderson? You'll have to change your degree certificate, documentation, and passport once you do." Noelle Anderson nods. "I'm sure." The employee tries to talk her out of it. "It's quite troublesome for adults to change their names, and your current name sounds nice. Are you sure you don't want to think about it?" "No, I'm done thinking." She signs the form. "Sorry for the trouble and thanks." "Alright, then. The name you're changing to is… Aria Byrd, right?" "Yeah." Aria Byrd—it means a flight to freedom.