Voice Crack

The moment I was pushed into the river by my six stepbrothers and drowned there, I was still clutching a piece of candy my mom had given me. When I open my eyes again, I curl up in my swaddle as a one-month-old baby. That's when I notice six children glaring at me darkly with their hands outstretched, ready to strangle me. As I stare at them, I begin cursing them out mentally. "Just you wait till the day I can speak, you bastards!" My mom rushes out of the kitchen instantly. "It's a rare occasion for me to cook for the family, so I told you to keep an eye on your baby sister. Why are you cursing all of a sudden?" The brothers swap glances with each other in confusion. The oldest brother, Alex Finch, scratches his head. "You must be hearing things, Mom. We were about to play with Meadow. No one was speaking just now." Upon hearing Alex's shameless words, I continue cursing him out silently. "You're the most shameless bastard I've ever seen! When I'm three years old, you'll plot to sell me to an old single man in the countryside! Screw you!" Mom's hands tremble slightly at that moment. She quickly picks me up, her eyes as wide as saucers. I flash a toothless grin at her in return. "Don't be scared, Mom. This time, I'll definitely protect you!" Watch as I, a one-month-old baby, send my bastard of a father as well as the six ungrateful brats to prison!

Alora Hale lost her voice five years ago. By the time she realized it, her husband had already replaced her. Silenced by an accident and slowly erased from her own marriage, Alora lives quietly beside a man who no longer sees value in her— until the night he sends her to a hotel under false pretenses and sells her body for profit. She escapes. But that survival leaves her with something she never expected. Pregnant by a stranger who vanishes without a trace, Alora is divorced, stripped of her child, and cast out with nothing into a city that rewards power and devours the weak. Determined to destroy her devilish husband, she begins hunting for the only person capable of crushing him. Morningstar. The most feared businessman in the city; the kind of man whose absence can collapse markets. Morningstar is stunning, untouchable, unapproachable, and rumored to be incapable of attachment. He is also the last man Alora ever expected to find… and the father of her unborn child. Bound together by a secret neither of them planned, Alora is pulled into Morningstar’s world under a strict contract— one that might dissolve into live love or chaos. In the end, secrets would be unraveled and betrayals would surface as the quiet woman everyone underestimated begins her rise. Because when a woman who has lost everything decides to fight back, she doesn’t beg. She destroys.

Meet Danielle, a feisty twenty-three-year-old who's lost everything. Jobless and alone, she's determined to find her independence after the death of her father figure and her mother's rejection. But when a long-held secret threatens to upend her world, she must confront her addictions and emotional turmoil to uncover the truth, Especially when she gets caught up with the arrogant lawyer who keeps crossing her path. Can Danielle pick up the pieces of her life and open her heart to love, or will the secret tear her apart? Join her on a journey of self-discovery, redemption, and maybe even a little romance

A modern-day fujoshi (a woman who’s obsessed with pairing men together in fictional or real scenarios) dies in an accident — only to wake up in the body of Lady Seraphina Edevane, a noblewoman in a world of arranged marriages and rigid social rules. Seraphina is married to Lord Adrian Vale, a stoic duke rumored to have a scandalous past. The twist? Whenever Adrian gets within a certain distance of her, he starts hearing the original woman’s unfiltered inner voice — full of snark, romantic theories, and wild speculations about pairing him with other men. As the woman begins to warm up to him, the “voice distance” increases, forcing them to stay apart or risk exposure… until they realize the connection might hold the key to unraveling a curse tied to both their fates.

Cracking His Code is a dark MM romance for readers who like their love stories dangerous, their heat explicit, and their anti-heroes completely, catastrophically gone for each other. Oliver Blaese has two rules. Never get caught, and never let anyone have the upper hand. He broke the first one the second he hacked a corrupt senator’s private server and downloaded a ledger tying him to a global human trafficking ring. Now half the billionaires in the world are trying to put him in a body bag. He needed a shield. So he hired Kirill Nikolaev. That was his second mistake. Kir is a Russian assassin who kills people for a living. He also possesses a calm that feels less like patience and more like a loaded weapon pointed directly at Oliver's self-control. While bouncing between European safe houses, systematically assassinating the syndicate's architects before they can find them, Oliver realizes Kir is the first person who's ever looked at him like he knows exactly what he needs. And what Oliver needs, it turns out, is someone who doesn't ask. Someone who takes. What starts as forced proximity becomes something neither of them immediately understand. Something that lives in the space between command and surrender. Between a punishment deferred and a promise kept. Oliver hates how much he wants to kneel. He hates, even more, that Kir already knows it. This is a story about two men finding, in each other, exactly what they didn't know they were missing. One a natural dominant who's never wanted anything this badly, the other a brilliant, defiant brat who's never trusted anyone enough to let go. Until now.

The entire ward could hear the thoughts of the beautiful intern nurse, Sonya Row. When a patient kept vomiting nonstop, and I suggested increasing the pain medication, she stood nearby, sighing. [What should I do? Should I tell the family this painkiller can be addictive and really bad for the body? If they just wait a few more minutes, he'll recover on his own. There's no need to spend money at all.] The room fell silent in an instant. Everyone's gaze shifted toward me, and the family quietly refused my treatment plan. After that, I became the joke of the entire department. Every patient specifically asked not to be assigned to me. Later, while comforting a terminal stomach cancer patient, I followed her family's wishes and lied, saying it was just gastritis. Sonya complained about it in her thoughts. [The patient's practically dying already, but she's still saying she can be cured. It's obviously just to trick this old woman into draining her life savings on treatment.] That night, the old lady jumped off the building so she wouldn't burden her family. Her family thought I had revealed the truth and driven her to her death. They reported me directly to the hospital director, and I was stripped of my position as department head. Then, on a holiday weekend, the hospital admitted a pregnant woman with a suspected amniotic fluid embolism. To save her life, I had no choice but to remove her uterus. At that moment, Sonya's thoughts rang out again. [She doesn't have an amniotic fluid embolism at all. She was on her phone during surgery, which caused this. Now look what happened. This baby's a girl. This family wanted a son, and now they'll never get one.] The family attacked me on the spot, recorded it, and posted the video online to harass me. The desperate husband, obsessed with having a son, stabbed me to death to vent his rage. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day Sonya first revealed her thoughts. This time, I could hear her thoughts, too.

I was just about to drink a soup meant to supplement my pregnancy, a frantic voice suddenly called out. "Mommy, don't drink it! It's an abortion drug. Someone's trying to harm you!" Startled, my hand jerked, and I knocked the soup over. My husband's cousin teared up, her voice choking, "B-But I cooked that soup myself as an apology…" I didn't pay her any heed, only checking the contents of the medicinal soup. There was a large amount of poison in it, enough to not just harm the baby, but even make it impossible for me to ever conceive again! "Mommy, it was me! I protected you!" I caressed my pregnant belly, listening as the child inside told me that he was the incarnation of a lucky star, sent to bring me good fortune. Because of this, we even gave him the nickname Lucky. And sure enough, under his guidance, I helped my husband secure numerous contracts. The whole family was overjoyed. I grew to love him even more, consuming precious supplements as if they were free. Within just three months, my family's assets grew tenfold, while I grew thirty pounds. Just as I stuffed the roast pork into my mouth, I heard a weak, faint voice. "Mom, don't listen to him! He was switched into your womb, and he stole my good luck! "If you continue listening to him, he'll be the death of us both after he's born!" Confused, I stopped eating. Who was I to believe, when there were two voices within my womb?

I was the greediest stand-in in high society, and my motto was simple. As long as cash kept coming, my dignity could take a back seat. For Frederick Jameson, I played the role of his obedient pet, so when his true love accused me of stealing her necklace, I just bowed and apologized. With Samuel York, I served as his lab rat, testing drugs meant for his sweetheart's condition until they left me with a bleeding ulcer. And for Theodore Xander, I acted as a scapegoat, getting pushed out to take the blame of extortion for his crush. They all assumed I was hopelessly in love with them, even forcing me to sign a confession at their joint engagement party. That was when the system's voice chimed in, "Host, the portal home is now open." I wiped the blood from my lips, splashed my wine into their faces, and grinned brightly. "Game over, losers!" Right in front of everyone, I leaped straight into the sea. Later, word spread that the three big shots scoured the entire ocean just to find my body.

Lyra Halstead is a hardworking young woman who spends most of her time creating and helping her fiance Elias build his company. She was so preoccupied with making everything work that she know that one person she trusted most in the world was orchestrating her downfall. On the morning she completes the final update for Aegis, the software destined to save his company, she walks into his office to find him in the arms of her best friend. In that crushing moment, her love, loyalty, and career are stripped away, leaving her with nothing but rage and a fierce desire for revenge. With Elias taking credit for everything she had worked for and created and Chloe smiling in triumph at stealing what was valuable to Lyra, Lyra realizes that talk alone won’t bring justice. She had to hurt him as bad as he had done her. She knew to destroy a man like Elias she needed an alliance with someone who has all the resources to dismantle her ex fiance's empire. from the inside to the outside. The only man with everything she needs is Xavier Thorne. He is the only man who ever challenged her genius and the one adversary Elias fears. Seeking him out in the city’s tallest tower where he is Lord, she offers her skills and her secrets in exchange for the resources to destroy the man she once loved. Xavier approves aof her strategy. He was game. Lyra transforms into a powerful executive face, ready to infiltrate boardrooms and manipulate contracts to destroy Elias. Xavier carries secrets of his own, secrets that could change everything if they came out. When Lyra glimpses a photograph of his daughter, she finds herself staring at the child that had been stolen from a few years ago.

Being a mute used to be simple before all the craziness started. I just can't talk and that's who I am. Mum has learned to accept that and I guess so have I. Everything was just fine in my high school in Shanghai. I had finally made it to year twelve and even though I was in China, I was actually being treated as a human being despite my disability. Things were definitely not perfect but I would give anything to go back to that, like it was before. I heard my first voice that year, right at the beginning of year 12. I didn’t really have any real friends, but I was used to it and before the voices started, I was fine with that. But it all changed when I first heard them. The voices inside their heads started then and my life was never the same. They weren't just thinking about school or they girls or guys they were into, no they were thinking about doing things, doing horrible things to each other and I was the only one that knew how messed up they really were.