Winter Garden

"I, Alpha Dean Smith, reject you, Tamara Brown, you pathetic little orphan, as my mate and Luna," Alpha Dean Smith says. He has plans for his pack, and he first wants to eliminate all the pathetic wolves in his pack. Dean can not believe that the Moon Goddess played such a trick on him by giving him the most pathetic she-wolf in his pack as his mate. Tamara and her wolf Winter feel the pain of his rejection where they stand in front of the Alpha. She refuses to beg or cry. For too long did she allow everyone to walk all over her. "I, Tamara Brown, accept your rejection, Alpha Dean Smith. I may be a pathetic orphan in your eyes, but my parents gave their lives for your pack," Tamara says. Dean is furious! How dare she not beg him to make her stay? "Get out! Take the pathetic bunch of wolves with you! I never want to see you again! The Red River pack does not need useless wolves like you!" Dean shouts. Dean has plans for the Red River pack. He plans to make it the biggest and best pack in America, and he has no place for wolves who can not fight! Tamara starts walking away, and the other "pathetic wolves" follow her. "Why are you following me? You also do not like me! Go your own way," Tamara says as she walks towards the border of the Red Wood Pack.

On the day I receive my Distinguished Service Medal, I also receive word that my grandma has passed away. My superior grants me special leave to return to my hometown to mourn her death, so I rush to my ancestral home at once. But when I reach the ancestral graveyard behind the hill, I witness something that makes my blood boil. The graves of my deceased family members have been razed to the ground. Even my parents' graves have been brutally dug up. Their urns are now placed under flower pots filled with blooming red roses. Grandma's coffin has been pried open as well.Her body now lies strewn on the ground and has started to rot. I also see Lucy Stewart, my autistic younger sister. Melissa Abbott, my wife's assistant, orders Lucy around like a maid, forcing her to move heavy construction materials around. Enraged, I grab Melissa by the throat and throw her to the ground. "How dare you destroy my family's ancestral cemetery and make my sister do hard labor! Do you want to end up buried here too?" Melissa coughs up blood before crawling back onto her feet, her expression vicious and scornful. "I'm simply carrying out Ms. Fuller's instructions. She says that your ancestral cemetery is located in a good spot. It's also the perfect size to be turned into a private horse ranch and a garden for her future husband. "Ms. Fuller calls the shots here in Joverton City. Who the hell do you think you are, huh?" Resisting the urge to put an end to her life, I call up Eva Fuller, my wife. "I heard you call the shots here in Joverton City. Well, I shall put that to the test today!"

“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.

As a low-income student who's specifically recruited by the elite college this year, I can still feel my hands trembling as I clutch the letter that tells me I get to study for free. Not only are my tuition and miscellaneous fees waived, but I also get to receive 30 thousand dollars' worth of student grant per year. I even get to have free access to the leather seats inside the library, the equipment inside the gym, as well as the aerial garden on the roof. The best surprise for me has to be the cafeteria. All low-income students get a 50% discount on their meals, but the quality of their food doesn't decrease at all. Best beef is used in the steak dinners offered by the cafeteria, whereas a seafood platter showcases the entire huge lobster. Even the most basic mac and cheese meal has different types of freshly grated cheese baked into it. As I sit in the brightly lit classroom and look at the rich students around me, who wear custom-made uniforms and have branded watches latched around their wrists, all I have is one thought. I must be on good terms with them. But my seatmate, who's also a low-income student, isn't as thrilled as me. In fact, she just looks at the people around her with disdain in her eyes. After the first lesson, a rich student arrives at our table. He might not sound polite at all, but at least he's not putting on airs. "Do any of you have time to head over to the cafeteria and buy me breakfast?" I'm about to respond to him when a shrill voice booms out next to me. "You're so annoying! What, you think you rule the campus since you're rich? Had I known that this classroom is filled with useless scions like you who just waste their lives away on nothing, I wouldn't have enrolled in this college in the first place!"

Three year after my death, my former mate returned— not to mourn me, but to make use of me one last time. It was the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year—the night when wolves whispered to the dead. “Where’s Mira Thorne?” Rowan demanded as he strode downstairs into the tavern beneath the den. “Her lived here—Gavin’s sister. I need to find her.” Dorian, the tavern keeper, glanced up slowly. “Mira?” he repeated, wiping his hands on a cloth. “She’s gone, Doctor. Died three winters ago. Same night the Moon rose red.” Rowan’s brows knit. “Dead? That’s impossible. There’s no record.” Dorian’s voice softened. “The family from that healing case—remember them? They found her in the alley behind this inn. Tore her apart before dawn. The healers couldn’t even retrieve her wolf.” Rowan froze, a flicker of disbelief passing across his face before irritation took over. “No. She’s pretending. She’s doing this to make me feel guilty.” he said sharply. “She’s hiding. She always was weak. Tell her if her doesn’t come out within three days, I’ll stop sending money for brother’s treatment.” He turned abruptly and left, the tavern door slamming behind him. Dorian sighed after him., shaking his head. “brother? Her brother died before the healers even arrived… there was never any money for treatment.” The silence that followed was heavier than snow. Dorian watched the falling snow and murmured to the empty air, “No one pretends death, Doctor. Not when they’ve already lost everything.”

Being the only child to the Queen of Castle Grey, lost within the confines of mount Trenon, Kilvic is made to learn a number of things best suited to the heir to the Elzcrid bloodline at the hands of tutors handpicked by his mother. However, his fifteenth birthday sends him beyond the reaches of his mother’s domain. She has tasked him with the duty of learning more. Understanding greater things than she can teach him, greater things with which to cope with the curse upon his bloodline as she had been taught by her father and mother. Finding himself in a new kingdom, in an academy designed for only the most elite of mages, Kilvic is tasked to survive the new things he will come to learn, while struggling with the chaos of human association, as he comes to understand that while he may know a great deal about the world from the castle archives, it is a different thing to experience them. The association between people isn’t as easily deciphered as the books made them seem. As he struggles with the task of becoming a mage and a student along with surviving new friendships, failure threatens him at every turn and people prove pettier than the books would have him believe. Yet, despite all these, somewhere hidden in the shadows of the kingdom, a creature stirs, taking from the academy the one thing it values most. Kilvic must survive the trials of the academy, keep his friends, best his first enemy, and ensure that what stirs must not cause more damage than the kingdom can bear, lest the supremacy of Castle Grey be called into question in realms beyond that which most know. And all in time to attend the Winter Hall Fest.

Suerinity has always been one to believe in mates. She believes the goddess will fate you with someone who would hold you forever, to love you at your best, and worship you at your worst. When Suerinity got rejected by her first mate, Harris, she felt as if it would be the end of the world for her. Anger and pain consumed her when she saw her supposedly soulmate in a bed with another she-wolf. The bond between the two was severed and Suerinity embraced the pain it came with. Suerinity had a moment of weakness upon losing a mate. She blamed herself for not being enough and for being different. She loathed herself for some time until the day came she would decide for herself to finally move on. When Salazar met Suerinity he knew she lived up to the definition of a soulmate. They fell. They fell hard and fast. She was his light, the biggest ray and slightest dim in the dark. He was her apricity, her warmth in the winter season, through the cold nights and cold days. But Suerinity was a flame waiting to be put off. The monsters enchanted by her fire, they seek to claim her and she weeps. Salazar was her redemption but did she truly deserve him? She burned for him and yet she fears most that she'd burn him with her flames. He gave her another reason to live but a life without him would be similar to death. She was his supernova spreading cosmos like wildfire, and he would capture each heavenly body with so much delight. Will she finally have her happily ever after? Or will fate once again take another unexpected turn

“I was looking for a man named Zarion, but I ended up here.” Most of them gasped when I uttered Zarions’ name. “Don’t mention that name because it’s cursed!” someone hissed. My brows furrowed at her reaction. “Why? "He's the Alpha of this pack. He was banished because he didn't want to take the position. Rumour says that he's out in the woods, looking for his mate, and..." she trailed off. "And?" I swallowed. "Kill her. He wants to kill his mate." *** Alpha Zarion is on a quest to find his mate and kill her because he despises the idea of a mating bond due to his father leaving his fated mate (his mother) for another woman. During a winter storm, he met Cassidy Bentley who saved him from death. He knows he has no time to waste but Zarion was curious about her, deliriously wanting every inch of her skin and touch…until he found out that the girl is mated to his number one rival, Alpha Brandon. Alpha Brandon rejected Cassidy because she’s a human—which he greatly despises. She eventually started getting over him, pouring out her love to Alpha Zarion who obsessively wants her in return. During the night Alpha Zarion watches Cassidy transforms to a werewolf, leaving her humanity behind for her love for him, Alpha Brandon comes to his senses and goes to find her. But her first mate already found Cassidy in another Alpha's arm, in his half-brother’s arms, who was just about to mark her…

In this lifetime, Lyana Coiningan, the widow, laments about how envious she is about my bedroom by telling Alpha Theron Ulrick, "Luna Astra's bedroom is so huge and beautiful! If Dexter could stay here, he'd definitely forget all about the sorrow caused by his father's death…" While Theron is still hesitant about giving my bedroom away, I've already taken the initiative to pack up my things and give it to Lyana. On the coldest day of winter, Lyana's son, Dexter Ulrick, suddenly wails and complains about how cold the weather is. He then demands to have my son, Cayden Ulrick's fur cloak. Cayden doesn't hesitate to take off the cloak and give it to him. Everyone in the Silverfrost pack says, "Luna Astra is the embodiment of the Moon Goddess. She knows when to let others have all the good things. On top of that, she doesn't fight over anything with anyone else. Even her son is as understanding and demure as she is." Theron compliments us on how understanding we've become as well. But what they don't know is that I've already bought flight tickets in preparation to leave the Silverfrost pack. Once I get my hands on the mate bond dissolution potion, I'll be able to take Cayden to a land far, far away from this place. In my previous life, Theron had neglected Cayden and me forever because of Lyana and Dexter. He even passed his assets to them after his death. Now that we get a second chance in the same lifetime, both Cayden and I don't want to have anything to do with Theron anymore.

"Stop we can't do this, Levi, it's wrong" I panicked, we were out in the open, and anyone who see us, children of the newlyweds like this would raise an alarm, he towered over me ignoring my protest as he cupped my chin forcing me to look into his alluring green eyes. "You know you want to" His voice was gruff and smoky. He was right. I didn't say anything when he leaned in and claimed my lips, somewhere at the back of my mind I imagined us at the altar just like our parents were earlier. Till death do us part? ~~~~~~ I have always hated how my life was with Mom getting married almost every year, I didn't think this would be any different from the rest. We will be out of here before winter, I would add the Sinclair to the list of families I owe an apology to in the future that's if I don't forget them. Or at least that's what I thought until I met him. Levi Sinclair. He is the one I shouldn't want yet I keep gravitating towards him and the more I tried hating him the more I wanted him. And I wasn't the only one with these feelings. Levi wanted me just as much as I wanted him, even more than I wanted him. But he is my stepbrother and I can't go down that path. Ll// So why can't my body refuse to listen to my brain when I'm alone with him?