After Death

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 ...

The day I died in a foreign country, my boyfriend was in the spotlight with another woman.

He's the man I built from nothing. Five years ago, I saved a broke orphan fresh out of college from the gutter. He said he wanted to be famous, wanted to make it to the top of the hockey world. In exchange, he became my boyfriend for five years.

I gave him the best coaching staff money could buy. Bought an...

The moment I saw my name on that wedding invitation, I was already dead.

On Highway 23, a steel rebar had pierced straight through my chest. I was two months pregnant.

I called my fiancé Michael seventeen times. The first sixteen, he hung up without a word. On the seventeenth, his voice dripped with impatience: "Marrying Sophia is just for show. Stop making a scene."

The man who once kn...

One hundred years married to Everett, and I've learned one thing: whenever he wants to push me into a corner, he throws the mate bond dissolution agreement in my face. Whenever my parents want me to cave, they hold the family name over my head.

They've always wanted the same thing — for me to hand over everything I have to my twin sister Rosalie, who's been sick her whole life.

I've fought it. I...

Caspian kept me locked in the basement as a living blood bank.
This mafia don was also my husband. Ever since he discovered I could heal instantly, I became nothing more than a consumable—kept alive to sustain another woman.
That woman in the hospital bed was his stepmother in name, his forbidden obsession in reality—the desire he could never speak aloud.
Unable to claim her, he went mad. He tried...

When my younger brother got into a top university, the whole family celebrated for him.
I, suffering from a terminal illness, clutched my chest and desperately cried for help, only to be met with a disgusted slap from my mother and the words, "You just can't stand to see your brother doing well!"
She thought I was a spoilsport, so she roughly dragged me back to the room and locked the door from t...

I was his most obedient blood slave. When he needed strength, I offered my blood; when he was irritable, I endured his temper. Even when he held his new lover and prepared for their wedding, I stayed silent at his feet. He thought I was born to bow, never realizing the poison hidden deep in my veins—the poison meant to end him. And when he bit into my skin for the final time, what he drank wasn’t ...

The floodwaters rushed into the basement, trapping my sister Isabella and me in the surging currents.

My brother, a former Navy SEAL, smashed through the window. Without a second of hesitation, he secured the rescue rope around Isabella.

"You're a good swimmer, figure your own way up! Isabella can't take the cold, I have to get her out first!"

He abandoned me and turned to hoist the ro...

I was the unluckiest kid in my family—always the one pulling the black-tipped stick from that pretty little "Fairness Jar."
In our house, red meant new dresses, Disneyland, and a goodnight kiss from Mom. Black meant endless chores, lockup in the attic, and the kind of hunger that ate you from the inside out.
Mom loved to stroke my hair in front of the neighbors. "God gives everyone a fair shake," ...

When my husband pushed the divorce papers in front of me for the hundredth time, demanding I sacrifice myself for my sister, I didn't cry or make a scene. I simply signed my name, willingly giving up the man I'd loved for eight years to Ivy.

A few days later, Ivy got drunk and drove into a state senator's only son during a street race, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Once again, I st...

To please his mistress, Callum ordered me—pregnant—to dance barefoot in the black salt ice cellar.

When I stumbled back to the doorway to warm myself, the mistress covered her mouth and retched.

"I'm pregnant. I can't stand this death-stench of winter."

Only because I was a princess of the Winter Realm, born carrying frost in my veins.

Callum flew into a rage and had me locked inside a...

When the Manhattan morgue finally managed to reach my husband, Victor Hawthorne, he was in the penthouse suite, fucking another woman.
"Mr. Hawthorne, this is the city morgue. We need you to come down and identify your wife's remains."
"Identify what?" he snapped, his thrusts not missing a beat.
"Burn her," he ordered. "Don't bother me with her pathetic ploys."
He tossed the phone onto the nightst...

At the auction, when Anna’s painting was sold for the highest price of the night, I died in a dim underground studio.

No one knew that the painting had stolen my inspiration.

I was the most talented painter in the Hale family, yet I lived forever in my sister’s shadow — only because our paintings always ended up strangely similar.

At first, people said it was the bond between sisters.
Later, af...

I died on my birthday.

While kidnappers shattered my limbs and violated me to death, my family was throwing a grand party for my sister Chloe—yes, we shared the same birthday, but only hers was worth celebrating.

I called my father for help. He sneered and hung up: "Stop using this pathetic kidnapping stunt to ruin Chloe's birthday."

I called my fiancé Mark. He said with disgust: "If you're goi...

The loan sharks who kidnapped us wanted payment for my twin sister's gambling debts—in blood.

When my FBI negotiator father showed up with his tactical team, he found Lily with a paper cut, crying her heart out. I was dying from a gunshot wound in a basement below.

I called him with my dying breath: "Dad, please send help. I'm bleeding out."

"Are you kidding me right now, Emily? Your sister jus...

In this world, there exists a place called the Life Pawnshop.

As long as you possess enough Love Value—the genuine affection held for you by your family or spouse—you can trade it there for any miracle.

My biological brother, Noah, died in a car crash. My parents, my husband—everyone was forcing me to go to the pawnshop and use my Love Value to bring him back.

The pawnshop's laws were a...

My husband, the terrifying Mafia Don, dropped fifteen million dollars on a luxury yacht just to throw a lavish, high-profile birthday celebration for his precious first love.

And today marks exactly seven days since I died of an infection in a Detroit slum, simply because I couldn't scrape together a few cents for antibiotics.

At the banquet, an oblivious guest tactlessly brought up my name....

My adopted sister, Cordelia, conspired with her biological mother to harvest my organs alive, yet she had the audacity to claim I paid thugs to rape her.
My biological parents didn't bother to ask for the truth. They cursed me, calling me a vicious bastard, and threatened to break my legs.
My fiancé, Caspian, coldly announced the cancellation of our engagement, declaring he would marry the very mu...

My daughter was choked until her face turned purple by the mistress's son, then nearly died after my ex-husband forced her to give blood.
She was beaten, cursed at, and abandoned on a bench outside the hospital.
And I could do nothing to help her.
Because I had already died eight years ago.
It wasn't until my daughter collapsed crying at my grave—and the story made the news—that my ex-husband fina...

While I bled to death locked in a storage room, my fiancé Adrian was holding my sister's hand, comforting her.

He hung up on my final call for help, leaving only a voicemail: "If anything happens to Lena, the engagement is off."

My sister once said her birthday wish had always been for me to disappear.

That night, her wish came true early.

But my soul never left.

I watched everyone gather aro...