Ten Years Novels & Stories

'Ten days' "You are kind enough, bu...." "No 'but' Ms. Schaeffer." "Fine...Ten days Mr. Reid."

Killian The loud noise that resonated from somewhere in the house violently yanked me out of my impromptu nap on the couch and the words. "100!" Flew right out of my mouth as I rolled off and fell face-down to the ground. Fuck. I groaned, using the coffee table as leverage to get my sore self back up. My eyes blinked a few times and without a doubt, I knew I'd slept too long. Crap. Still trying to process exactly how I had fallen asleep, I dug my phone out from underneath me to check the time but a message sent by Hope twenty minutes ago popped up on my screen.

And when she did she would understand what it meant. Killian stopped walking at the cottage gate and turned to look at the pack grounds behind us, the school visible across the grounds, the Saturday session still underway, the sound of it carrying faintly through the warm spring air. "Ten years," he said. Quietly. Not to me specifically. Just out loud. "Ten years," I agreed. He turned back and looked at me with the amber eyes in the spring light and the expression that was mine, still mine, had been mine since the pack square and showed no sign of becoming anything else.

Now, they only bore the marks of holding a pen. I could barely even remember that I'd once been so alive as well. The past ten years had changed me after all. Just like how my skin had turned pale, the calm composure I'd learned when grappling with life and death had carved itself into my bones. At the end of the day, I was human, not a machine. I couldn't just delete ten years of memories on command. Luckily, after all my wandering, I'd finally come back to where I started. I dialed the internal line. "Knox, let's get married."

I thought you could save yourself…" "You thought?" She cut him off with a mocking laugh. "So you sacrificed me without hesitation." "We were together for ten years," he said, eyes reddened. "You know what kind of man I am. How could I ever want you dead? Are you really going to erase everything between us over this one mistake?" Mabel looked at him with pity and ridicule. "Yes. Ten years. "It took me ten years to finally see clearly. "In your eyes, I was nothing more than a pawn you could sacrifice for the family's interests."

"You couldn't tolerate me showing Elena even the slightest affection, yet you can accept Vito sleeping with another woman? "It's only been a few months, and you already love him this much? What am I then? What about our ten years together?" I gave a soft, mocking laugh. "Ten years didn't stop you from changing the moment Elena appeared. So what right do you have to question me?" I closed my eyes, my face twisting as if in pain. After a long pause, I spoke again. "Come with me to see Vito one last time. After that, I'll give him up completely."

When Adrian Hale chose Rosalie Quinn for the tenth time, I was hanging helplessly over the cliff’s edge. He clutched a rope in one hand, the web between his thumb and forefinger worn raw and bloody. Rosalie was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. “Adrian, I’m scared…” He hesitated for only a second before pulling out a dagger and cutting through the rope on my side. “Clara, hold on. I’ll come back for you after I save Rosalie.” The system counted down in my ear. [The tenth abandonment has been confirmed.] [Life countdown: zero.] Before I fell, I didn’t wait for him to turn around like I had the previous nine times. I only smiled at him. “Adrian Hale, we’re even now.”

"That's impossible... How could she..." I watched the two of them standing there, utterly frozen. It had been ten years. "It's been a while."

The tenth spring arrived with a quality that Aria had not been able to anticipate, not because it was different from the previous nine springs in any dramatic way but because it was the tenth, and the tenth of anything was different from all the previous ones in the specific way that round numbers were different, not because the number had magical properties but because it invited a kind of looking back that the intermediate numbers did not, the natural human tendency to assess at decade points, to stand at the tenth and survey what the previous nine had made.

Leina’s POV “Happy tenth mating anniversary, my Luna!” Maya, my personal assistant, walks into my room with a bright smile on her face. Her cheerful voice fills the quiet room immediately, and I turn toward her with a soft smile of my own. “Thank you, Maya,” I reply quietly. Ten years. The words echo deeply inside my chest as I stare at my reflection in the mirror. Ten years of loving Kael. Ten years of standing beside him through every struggle. Ten years of defending him even when the whole world looked down on him.