The First-order

When the criminal tortured me to death, I was three-month pregnant. But my husband Mark - the city's most prominent detective - was at the hospital with his first love Emma, accompanying her for her medical checkup. Three days ago, he demanded me to donate my kidney to Emma. When I refused, telling him I was two months pregnant with our child, his eyes had turned cold. "Stop lying," he had snarled. "You're just being selfish, trying to let Emma die." He pulled over on the dark highway. "Get out," he ordered. "Walk home since you're so heartless. " I stood there in the darkness and was kidnapped by the vengeful criminal, whom Mark had once imprisoned. He cut out my tongue. With cruel satisfaction, he used my phone to call my husband. Mark's response was brief and cold: "Whatever it is, Emma's medical checkup is more important! She needs me right now." The criminal let out a dark chuckle. "Well, well... Seems like the great detective values his ex's life more than his current wife's." When Mark arrived at the crime scene hours later, he was horrified by the brutality inflicted on the corpse. He angrily condemned the murderer for treating a pregnant woman so cruelly But he didn't recognize that the mutilated body before him was his own wife - me.

On the day I discovered I was pregnant, my husband's first love—who also happened to be my half-sister—returned.

It was a national holiday and we decided to drive back to my husband's hometown to spend the holidays. One day before we left, my husband's childhood crush came crying to him that she had not managed to buy train tickets home. My husband immediately decided to let her have my seat in the car and insisted that I take the train instead. I looked at him in disbelief. There was shock in my eyes. Even my son insisted I take the train. "Mommy, Aunt Rosie is so pretty. How could you make her take the train?" I did not argue. I booked my train ticket right in front of them. However, it was to my own hometown. I no longer wanted a biased husband and a disloyal son.

My fiancé's first love was taking photos on a cliff before the landslide. To save her, he actually left me behind on the crumbling edge. I pleaded with him to save me. "Lucy isn't physically strong—she can't handle this alone. You've always been resilient. I'll get Lucy to safety first, then come back for you." Their silhouettes vanished over the ridge. After a brief commotion, everything went silent. Including me, with my freshly sprained ankle. When he saw the news of my death, he completely fell apart.

When the yacht was sinking, and only one spot was left on the lifeboat, Hendrix Zuckerman chose me. I was rescued, but Yana Bridgeton didn’t make it. She couldn’t wait for the second lifeboat and drowned in the ocean, her body lost forever. Hendrix pretended not to care and went through with our wedding as planned. For five years after our marriage, he trampled me into the dirt, blaming me for Yana's death. When I couldn't take it any longer and wanted a divorce, he decided to die with me. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day the yacht accident happened. This time, I’ve decided to give the chance to survive to the one he loves most.

When I had only three months left to live after taking the cursed blade meant for my husband Lucian, his first love Lily returned. When I endured the pain and prepared a dinner to commemorate our anniversary, he did not come back, he was having a steamy car session with Lily. When I went to the hospital alone to buy medicine, he was accompanying Lili for her pregnancy check-up. I pretended not to have noticed, I just silently played the role of a perfect wife, and wrote him four letters as a gift for our anniversary. After I die, he saw the gifts I left behind and went completely insane.

The emergency center I worked in went haywire as the typhoon closed in on our town. That night, my husband’s first love made seven emergency calls in a row to me. However, she did not say anything when I picked up. By the eighth call, I thought it was a prank caller, so I gave them a piece of my mind. Then, I heard my husband’s angry voice. “Melinda! This is the eighth time Sadie's called you for help! Haven’t you made her suffer enough?!” After that fiasco, he decided to avenge Sadie by taping my mouth, tying my wrists and legs up, and throwing me into our basement for three whole days, despite it being flooded with seawater, I begged for mercy, but it was to no avail. “You knew Sadie couldn’t talk because she hurt her throat, yet you still hung up on her! I'm going to make sure you feel the same hopelessness she felt!" Those three days left me with a collection of severe infections. I ended up having to remove my kidney. Even after all that, that man still had the gall to kneel by my bed and beg me to give him another chance.

My husband, Mark Thompson, and I went hiking. After eating some wild berries I picked, he was poisoned and died. When I got home, a woman named Sarah Miller and her son, Tommy Miller, showed up at my door. It turned out Mark had given them our house and car. On top of that, he owed them a huge amount of money. I ended up giving them all the savings I had. To care for my sick mother-in-law, Judith Thompson, I worked three jobs. I was surviving on basic meals like bread and butter. After years of exhausting work, I collapsed in the hospital. Judith told the doctors to stop my treatment. Just as I was about to die, Mark walked into the ward with Sarah and Tommy in his arms. He tossed five dollars at me. “Thanks for taking care of my mom all these years.” That was when I realized Mark had faked his death just to be with Sarah and their love child. When I opened my eyes again, I was back to the day we went hiking together.

“Do you, Alex Snow, take Jennifer Walker, to be your lawfully wedded wife?” My soon to be husband looks at me with the eyes of a beast, ready to rip me apart at any second as he says tightly “I do” Although he just vowed to take me as his wife, to love and cherish, his ‘I do’ vowed something else entirely. It was an oath to make me suffer horribly at his hands. As soon as the words “I do” left my own mouth I was certain, I just sealed my own fate by marrying Alex Snow. In a small town called “Snow” known in all of Alaska for its huge illegal smuggling business on the border of America and Canada, Alex Snow; the new leader of the Snow clan that controls and dominates the smuggling territory, forces Jennifer Walker into marrying him against her will. After his father gets murdered by Jenny’s father, Patrick Walker, the Snow clan vows to take their revenge on the whole Walker bloodline. But killing the responsible man, sends both families into a blood feud as both clans vow to make the other one pay. The only way to stop that bloodbath from turning into a massacre, and claiming more innocent lives was a peace offering in the form of marriage from both families. Jennifer’s world turns upside down as she turns out to be the one Alex Snow asked to marry specifically in order to stop that war. Her only thought at that moment was “He is going to make my life a living hell” *The town Snow and everything it represents is real inside the world I created in this book. It’s as real as you believe it to be, but It doesn’t exist in real life*

In a brutal all-male cadet academy where discipline is law and weakness is quietly erased, obedience is not requested—it is engineered. Elias enters the institution for survival. Debt, obligation, and limited options leave him with one rule: endure. He believes discipline is a tool, something external he can master and leave behind once his training is complete. He is wrong. The academy does not simply train bodies—it reshapes awareness. Silence becomes instruction. Proximity becomes pressure. Choice erodes long before it is ever questioned. Elias draws the attention of Instructor Vale, a senior authority figure whose control relies not on punishment, but on restraint. Vale does not command often. He observes. He waits. He allows Elias to adjust himself—until obedience feels voluntary and resistance feels unnatural. As training intensifies, Elias finds himself isolated, refined, and increasingly dependent on the presence that once unsettled him. The line between discipline and desire begins to blur, forcing him to confront a dangerous question: is he being controlled, or is he choosing alignment? In a system designed to strip autonomy while calling it order, Elias must decide whether obedience is something done to him—or something he is willing to claim. Under Orders is a slow-burn psychological MM novel exploring power, conditioning, and the unsettling intimacy of control—where submission is not demanded, but learned.