After Death

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 ...

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...

"Mrs. Cole, your bone cancer has reached the terminal stage. The tumor has caused irreversible damage to your left leg. We advise immediate amputation, followed by aggressive treatment."
The doctor slid the medical report across the desk, his expression grim.
"And if I don't?" I asked, my eyes glued to the report.
"If you don't, your condition will deteriorate rapidly." The doctor paused. "You sti...

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...

As I collapsed in a pool of my own blood, the mate-link deep in my mind flared with the thoughts of my Alpha husband, Cullen:
 
'I only had my men give Ayla ten lashes to let Selena vent her frustration. How is she bleeding this much?'
 
'She must be using fake blood again, trying to guilt-trip me into coaxing her.'
 
What he didn't know was that those ten lashes had claimed the life of our two-mo...

On the birthday I shared with my twin sister, my family threw her a party—and called my absence a tantrum.
None of them knew I was lying in the cellar beneath their feet.
With broken fingers, I'd sent my husband the one word he swore would bring him running from anywhere: Lighthouse. He called it a guilt trip and told me to be at the party by seven.
So they toasted my sister. They tossed my place ...

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 ...