After Death

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 ...

In this house, there was an unspoken rule: every time my adopted sister, Sloane, fed her gambling addiction at the casino, I was the one who had to take the punishment.

When Sloane racked up five thousand dollars in gambling debt, I was locked inside a sub-zero freezer overnight.

When Sloane stole and sold the family jewelry, my parents pinned my shoulders down while my husband ruined my f...

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...

For six years, my mother Isolde believed I had committed an unforgivable sin. Under the guise of "reforming my character," she continuously injected me with neurotoxic antibiotics, confining me to a wheelchair to act as a crippled companion to my sister, Alondra.
My entire family silently condoned this punishment, favoring my sister who was merely faking her paralysis. I had long since surrendered...

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," ...