Freedom: My Book Of Firsts Novels & Stories

I sat there in the silence, not moving a muscle for a very long time. After a while, I picked up the glass of cold tap water and the bag of bread crusts and threw them both in the trash. Then, I pulled open the bottom drawer of the TV console. Inside was a blue hardcover notebook, old enough that the corners had worn down to bare white. Presley and I had bought it together in our first year of marriage. He said that if a marriage was going to last, the finances had to be crystal clear.

I even helped her raise her pup and sent him to the best academy money could afford. But I never thought Lawson would make someone beside me serve his pup. When I stayed silent, her head hung low again. "Miss Monica, please let me stay! I won't do it again! If the Alpha asks anything of me in the future, I'll tell you first!" "With your back straight," I said with a sigh. "I'll deliver today's lunch." I picked up the warm lunchbox, but my heart had already gone cold. I still had not fully processed what I had learned.

He pulled his leg away coldly, wrenching his trousers out of my weak grasp. “But you made a mistake,” he said. “And when you make a mistake, you must be punished. Those are the rules. Lock her in the utility room. Once the doctors confirm the baby is perfectly fine, I’ll let her out.” However, I didn’t want to be locked away anymore. I had been imprisoned for three long years, and I refused to spend the final four hours of my life being penned up like cattle.

I didn't go home. Instead, I rented a tiny apartment in the middle of the city. As I stood in that little space with my suitcase beside me, a sense of freedom I'd never experienced before wrapped itself around me. No more surveillance or scolding, no more shackles disguised as redemption. The first thing I did was take out a sheet of paper and write a list. Every item on it was something I'd been forbidden from doing for the past ten years and desperately wanted to do.

Remember when my Mom told me to get some good sleep? Well that didn't happen. I stumbled and fumbled and fell on the bed. It was so hard to stop my excitement, with an enchanted ring, I could stay hidden from trackers. We won't have to move to a new place for a long time, also this could give me a chance to live normal, even just for a moment. There's not a day that I don't wish for the hiding to end. In the first place, my parents should have been free to love each other. Love is love, whatever the race, or the color or the gender.

He'd given me such a hard, unwelcoming look that a chill ran up my spine, causing me to shrink away from him instinctively. For a long while, we didn't speak. On our break between classes, the idea of sneaking past him while he was napping freaked me out so much that I decided to climb out the window just to get to the water cooler. It was my first time climbing out a window, and I'd unceremoniously fallen flat on my butt. "Pft!" I heard someone sputtering overhead, only to look up and see Julian leaning against the window ledge, grinning at me.

I'd sold the house, and now, with my mother healthy again, we were heading overseas to start anew. Leaving wasn't an escape—it was the beginning of my freedom.

"You're the one who made the first move. Ever since Sean left me, I wished you would die every single day! You still don't know about this, do you? When your loving mother heard you were trafficked across to the Northern Barrens, a vein in her brain popped, and it started bleeding! She's still in the ICU right now! No one in this world is coming to save you!" My heart went cold. I went through every humiliation one could imagine in the Northern Barrens. They broke all ten of my fingers and shattered the bones in my legs. In the end, I died because of all their torture. Everything was thanks to Flora. I died with my eyes wide open, filled with nothing but hate! Now that I had regressed and wa

Sera’s P.O.V I divorced Mark. The moment I received the divorce certificate, I let out a long sigh of relief. Mark looked a little dazed as if he wanted to say something to me, but I ignored him and brushed past without a word. At that moment, I was free. Free from following his orders. Free from rushing home every evening to prepare his favorite dinner. I once pretended to live a happy life, but maintaining that happiness was solely my effort—an effort he took for granted. He never learned to cherish it.

When the doctor shook his head and said no, explaining that my stomach would be too fragile to handle much stimulation, I closed my eyes and never said another word. Evelyn kneeled on the cold floor. Tears mixed with blood as they streamed down. She had always believed that she had given me a life of luxury. A life of comfort and dignity. What she never realized was that what she had really given me was humiliation day after day. And a despair with no bottom. "Nathaniel…" She repeated his name. In her eyes surged a hatred so intense it seemed capable of destroying everything.