Freezing Antonym

“Do you know what it cost me to stay away for five years, my Coral?” Clyde’s breaths fan against my cheek as his hand slides under my jaw, tilting my face up until I’m forced to meet his eyes. "W-what are you doing?" I whisper, heart hammering against my ribs. "It's nothing more than a temporary solution, as per the contract-" “To hell with the contract.” His scent of rain fills my senses. He drags his nose along the line of my throat, stubble grazing my skin. “I’m helping you because I’ve spent every night since that garden, imagining you exactly where you are now... breathless, trembling, and finally mine.” *** Coralina Jasper gave five years of her life to the Silver Azure Pack, building an empire for the man she loved. But to Alpha Maximus, she was just a placeholder for his dying "true love", Brielle Montrela. When Maximus shoves a pregnant Coralina into a freezing pool to save Brielle from a minor splash, Coralina loses everything: including her unborn son. While she lies in a hospital bed undergoing induced labor alone, Maximus is busy pampering Brielle and planning her birthday. Empty-handed and broken-hearted, Coralina realizes her marriage was a lie. She asks Maximus to reject her, but he laughs at her. Because Alpha Maximus thinks she’s a weak omega with nowhere to go, whom he can easily starve into submission. He doesn't even know how wrong he is! After Coralina finds herself penniless and hunted by her own pack's laws, she crosses the border into the territory of the "Shadow Alpha". The one man who can dismantle Maximus’s world: Alpha Clyde Everest. Coralina was just looking for a place to hide... But deep in the shadows of enemy territory, she finds herself again.

I never called my stepbrother, Victor Rossi, "brother." I loved him. In my previous life, I forced him to marry me, and we became the most infamously miserable couple in New Hampston's mafia circles. On Monday, he threw me into a lion's cage after starving the beast for three days. On Tuesday, I tied him to a spinning wheel and forced him to play Russian roulette. He hated me for tearing him away from the woman he loved. I hated him because we had grown up side by side, yet even after ten years of marriage, he could not forget the woman from the fishing village. Even in bed, wrapped around each other, we hurled the cruelest curses at one another. When the cruise ship went up in flames, Victor gave me his chance to live. He shoved me onto the last lifeboat, his voice gentler than it had ever been. "This life was exhausting. I don't want to fight with you anymore. Live well. In the next life, let me go." I watched the fire swallow him along with the ship. The deep sea buried everything. The light in my eyes went out with it. I threw myself into the freezing water and ended that absurd, painful life with my own hands. When I opened my eyes again, I returned to the moment I forced him to marry me. In this life, I would not destroy us both. As I watched him kneel before me, defiant even in the face of death, I did not drive away the woman he loved as I had before. "I will let you have her." Under Victor's stunned gaze, my eyes reddened as I spoke softly. "This time, I am the one who does not want you."