After Death

"Is lying the only skill you have left? Don't play dead until you actually land in a coffin!"
That was what my billionaire brother roared as he crumpled my stage-four cancer diagnosis and threw it at my face.
To him, I was a spoiled brat who needed a brutal reality check.
He engineered a fake DNA test, gave my identity to a manipulative orphan girl, and watched me get dragged to a disciplinary ...

I was married to Daniel for eight years. I thought we were happy.

Then I found a receipt in his car — a private OB-GYN clinic, Upper East Side. The name on it was Lydia's. My best friend's.

I drove straight to my brother Joel's apartment. Joel, the boy I raised. The only family I had left. I needed someone to tell me I was wrong.

I heard them laughing before I knocked.

I looked through the gap...

I died the night I refused to postpone the engagement party.

The morning after my death, my parents were still having breakfast with my sister Blair, excitedly planning her award ceremony.

Before I died, the only person who answered my desperate call was my mother. I was being chased by kidnappers at the time, and I begged her to save me, telling her I was dying. But she said, "Stop being so dra...

My husband and parents wanted me dead. All because my sister was "dying."

They shoved a divorce agreement and an experimental surgery consent form at me.

I was supposed to be her donor.

But they didn't know I was the one actually dying.

Three days ago, they told me I had terminal bone cancer.

One month to live.

So when they threatened me into some back-alley surgery, I smiled.

I was already...

My name is Balen. Father once said every lion cub is born to run wild across the vast grasslands.

At seven years old, I only mimicked my elder brother’s limp to make him laugh. That innocent jest was regarded as an unforgivable sin by Mother. She forced bitter medicine down my throat and condemned me to a wheelchair, hoping that by enduring pain myself, I would learn empathy and pity.

During tho...

The night I was kidnapped, my family was gathered around the long table, raising their glasses to Valentina's birthday.
The kidnappers demand a ransom. I knew it was useless, but with him forcing me, I made the call anyway.
The first call, no one picked up. The second, it was declined.
The third, it finally went through.
"Elena, you've been struck off the Castellano family. Hear me clearly: even i...

Born beneath Pluto’s ill omen, I was marked a blood curse for the Constantine mafia clan, my twin Cataleya blessed with a fortune chart my parents clung to blindly.
They starved me of warmth, forced me to bear every blade, bullet and crime in her stead, and my husband Rafael, whom I once loved with all I had, sacrificed me without hesitation to soothe her feigned sickness.
I was locked in an under...

I had been dead for several days, and Silverclaw Pack,the biggest pack’s Alpha, Holden Carter still didn’t know.
He hadn’t come home once.
After all, I was just the "the daughter least favored by her father"
from the Blackfang Pack’s Alpha .
He never care since we met at my coming-of-age ball, I fell for him at first sight — like a lovesick fool.
Until Joe, his Beta, casually scrolling through Fa...

My Husband Died to Join Me I begged him to see me. He didn't. He believed her. Every word. I died in my bedroom. When I woke up, no one could see me anymore. She stole my husband. My home. My son. Then she painted me as insane. Everyone believed I was the monster. But there was a hidden camera. When he finally saw the footage, he broke. He avenged me. Then he made one last promise. This time, he c...

Whenever my husband, a Mafia don, needs me to back down, out come the divorce papers. When my parents, practically Mafia royalty, want the same thing, they threaten to cut me out of the family.

The demand never changes. Whatever I have, my twin sister should get it.

There was a time when I argued. When I cried and asked why I was always the one who had to give something up.

Then a doctor pushes...

Love wasn't free in our family. It was literal currency.
My sister, Stella Belle, and I both had a Kinship Savings Jar. 
It held the love and care we received from our families, which could be traded for anything in the Life Exchange Shop.

When I was six, I bought my mom’s life back from cancer by selling away the pain of her carrying me for nine months.
When I was thirteen, I bought my brother a...

It was supposed to be a celebration. Our third anniversary. But instead, I came home drenched from the rain, heart in my throat, hoping—praying—that he remembered.
Through the window, I saw candlelight flickering, roses blooming on the table. For a second, I let myself believe. Maybe he did remember. Maybe there was still something left to save.
I opened the door with trembling hands. "Do you know...

Three years ago, I severed our bond with my own claws—and buried the pup we’d prayed for beneath the cold, unforgiving earth.

The moment Caelen became Alpha; I did the unthinkable. I ripped apart our mate bond without mercy. I destroyed the future we dreamed of—the child we longed for.

In return, he cursed me with an Alpha command no wolf could defy: Be alone forever. Mate with no one. Find no p...

When they shoved me into the flames, I fought through the blinding pain to call my brother, Ethan Bennett. Fire licked at my skin, twisting my vision, but the call finally went through.

"What is it now?" He sounded distracted, like he was checking off a guest list.

"Ethan, please, help—" My voice was shattered, choked by the searing heat.

"Can't you just give it a rest for one single day?...

The Vane family has carried the vampire's curse for generations. Of every pair of twin sisters born into our bloodline, one will not live to see twenty-five.

Everyone assumed it was my sister — the one always coughing up blood.

Nobody knew that for twenty years, every full moon, the one gritting her teeth through the pain, never making a sound, was me.

The Divine took pity on me and gave me thr...

I died on the operating table. Down the hall, my husband was waiting for news that the woman he'd loved before me had received my kidney.
He'd made that day happen. He'd forced me to end my six-month pregnancy, then give what was left of me to a woman who was supposedly dying.
Just before I stopped breathing, he was holding her hand in another room, telling her, "It's over. We can finally be toget...

I am Natalie, the trueborn daughter of an ancient werewolf bloodline.
But overnight, I lost everything—because of my foster sister Sherry’s carefully crafted lies and vicious schemes.
My parents turned against me.
Even Antony, the mate fated to walk beside me for life, shattered our bond with his own hands and cast me out into the frozen wastelands.
Banished, stripped of home and honor, I wandered...

My mother studied wolf decay for a living.

For three years, I'd been dying of it—and she thought I was faking.

When I begged her to sign the form for my body donation, she laughed. "You'd better actually be dying this time."

I was.

Days later, my heart sat in a glass case at the front of her lecture hall, and she taught a room full of students how to spot my disease.

She had no idea it was mi...

The last thing Kael remembered was the knife in his back.
Not a metaphorical knife—an actual blade, six inches of obsidian steel, buried between his shoulder blades by the woman he was supposed to marry. Princess Elara of the Celestial Court. The Golden Rose of the Nine Heavens. The most beautiful woman in the realm, and the most treacherous.
He'd died on the steps of the Temple of Eternal Light, ...

I was an orphan, and a rare heart condition ate away at me for twenty years. The night I died in that cold hospital room, a reaper in a black robe came for me.

He told me if I crossed into a world of werewolves, into the Moonheart Pack, and made Estelle's family genuinely love me — Estelle being the real daughter who'd died a horrible death there — and if I rewrote the ending where they all went ...