Mystery/Crime

I got off work two hours early, hoping to surprise my boyfriend whom I had just bailed out for $30,000.
I pushed the bedroom door open. The surprise was on me—my stepsister Chloe was straddling Dorian. The same man who, just three days ago, sat crying on the police station floor swearing "I only have you," now slowly lit a cigarette and asked if I wanted to join them.
I thought that was the worst ...

In my first life, blinded by greed, I claimed to be that mysterious woman. Silas glanced at my left shoulder and said coldly, "No butterfly tattoo." His bodyguards dragged me to the backyard and shattered my ribs with a baseball bat.
In my second life, Cleo learned from my mistake. She got the butterfly tattoo at an underground parlor. But Silas lifted her skirt and sneered, "No birthmark on her i...

Not long ago, my pregnant daughter was murdered, and the killer remained at large.
Until that day, as I stood before her grave, her husband Oliver asked me,
"Mom, do you know who Robin is?"
"Stella came back from her prenatal checkup one day and said she bumped into Robin," he choked out. "She even said she wanted to take the baby to visit him."
My hand, reaching out to comfort him, froze in mid-...

The club is dragging everyone out to a tomb Blair Whitmore's family dug up in Egypt, and nobody asked if this was a good idea.

She even brings some so-called expert along. Everyone crowds around the dark opening, practically shaking with excitement.

I'm the only one who tries to stop it.

"There's a mechanism in there. It's dangerous. We shouldn't go in. We need to report it to the antiquities a...

I was kidnapped at five. Found at sixteen. Dead at nineteen.
My parents are top transplant surgeons. The night I was murdered, they were saving my sister's life with a "legally sourced" donor heart. They signed the paperwork themselves.
That heart was mine. Cut from my chest while I was still breathing.
The sister they saved? She's the one who handed me to the killer.
For three years I lived under...

"You sure dispatch called this... natural causes?" I gripped the steering wheel, staring at the perfect suburban house.
"That's what they said," Gates muttered. The victim's father, Arthur, stood at the door in pressed khakis, weeping.
He swore his daughter, Grace, died in her sleep last night after eating vanilla pudding.
But the moment we stepped inside, a suffocating cocktail of cheap lavender...

Everyone thought the disfigured obsessive fan was stalking actress Sophia Brown.

No one believed I was the real Sophia.

My twin sister, Lily, slept beside my husband, Don Jason. She used my face to star in my movies. She even took over my social media accounts and posted under my name.

I wanted an explanation. But Jason only looked at my scarred face with cold disgust and said he had always tho...

To end two years of a long-distance marriage with my husband, Sutton Brennan, I quit my job and moved halfway across the state to join his top-tier medical center.
But from the moment I clocked in on day one, a nightmare awaited me.
IV pain pumps violently popped open in my hands, medication cabinets rejected my fingerprints, coffee machines sprayed me with boiling water, microwaves exploded in pu...

My daughter was murdered on her eleventh birthday during a brutal snuff livestream on the dark web.

The chat was flooded with the sick revelry and obscene tips of twisted buyers.

"Break her legs a little more."
"I want to hear her cry out."

Lying in a pool of blood, my daughter cried out in sheer despair: "Mom... save me... it hurts so much..."

Watching my daughter take her last breath ami...

I grew up alongside my next-door neighbor, ice hockey prodigy Lachlan, silently paving the way for his future. In my past life, he planned to quit his crucial scout game for his girlfriend Tamsin.
Fearing he would ruin his career, I tipped off his parents to stop him. After graduation, I joined his sports agency and spent three years cleaning up his messes, clinging to the hope that my devotion w...

My brother Miles blames me for our parents' deaths.
So he chose to adopt the deaf Vivian instead of keeping me.
Later, I met Sullivan.
He gave me a grand confession. He chose me, resolutely.
He also said I hired someone to assault Vivian—that I didn't deserve sympathy.
Five years after being cast out of my family, a dismembered female body was found inside a carnival mascot costume.
Miles, now a p...

On our wedding night, my husband confessed that he had been unfaithful with my sister.

In response, I revealed that I had murdered my stepfather.

He laughed and said, "My dear, your story is so convincingly crafted."

It was only when he discovered—

Every detail within the narrative was, indeed, a stark reality.

Including the poison that was now coursing through his veins.

Did you slaughter your roommates?" the detective sneered. "No!" I screamed. The polygraph technician stared at the flawless readouts confirming I told the absolute truth. I was innocent. But if a human didn't tear those girls apart in our locked dorm... then what exactly is hunting me now?

I don't realize how badly I've been wronged until they're strapping me to the gurney.

My name is Camille Brooks. I'm one of the best cardiothoracic surgeons in the city, and I have never lost a patient on my table.

My fiancé, Adrian Vance, is the golden boy of the entire hospital. We're supposed to get married next month.

It's a stormy night when he calls, telling me to get to the hospital righ...

"Someone is right behind you."
It's the most common comment I get in the chat during my late-night streams.
But when that exact phrase abruptly hijacked my screen, spammed in bold, blood-red letters, my blood ran completely cold.
Because deep down, I knew. This time, they weren't joking.
It was real.

They say the dead go where they belong.

But I didn't.

I drift through the cold winds, watching my husband—the detective who once swore to protect me with his life—diligently investigating a dismemberment case.

He doesn't know that the broken body lying in the morgue is his wife.

He doesn't know that the gentle, caring "psychologist" who brings him lunch every day is the one who killed me.

He ...

My best friend Tiffany was obsessed with those novels where a mafia don spoils his woman rotten.

She was convinced she was the type of girl who could make a ruthless boss go soft, so she went after Vincent, the heir of a crime family, and got him.

His bodyguards, his dirty money, even the way he told her not to ask questions and just sit tight. She read all of it as devotion. And of course she h...

On the day I gave birth to my daughter, Iris, my husband Hollis pushed open the hospital room door, dragging a four-year-old boy by the arm. Eyes red and welling with tears, he said, "Look who I brought home."
My mother-in-law wept tears of joy. My son, Felix—who supposedly died in the winery fire five months ago—had returned "from the dead."
The whole room was crying over this miracle, but my blo...

I've run a pet rescue shop for five years. I've lost count of the animals I've saved. Around the neighborhood, people call me the good Samaritan of Main Street. My husband, Adam Carter, and I have been married five years, and he's always been gentle and attentive.

It's a rainy night in late fall, and I come across an injured starling in the alley on my way home, its wing broken.

The second I sco...

Someone posted a positive pregnancy stick next to my student ID on the school's anonymous forum.
By first period, eight hundred people thought I was the campus slut. By lunch, the lacrosse captain stood up in the cafeteria and told everyone he was the father. By Friday, my full-ride scholarship was frozen and the dean told me to "keep a low profile."
I've never even kissed anyone.
Margaux Aldridge...