7614 Book(s) Related to the book eating magician ch 1

In my last life, my younger brother made a contract with an S-rank ghost, but it turned out to be completely useless, while I contracted a B-rank ghost, the Starving Ghost, which could not only devour monsters but also consume other awakened humans' ghost servants to evolve.
Under my protection, my family went from scavenging for scraps to living in a luxury mansion inside the government safe zone.
But on the eve of a ghost tide attack, I was prepared to stay behind and defend the base while sending my parents, my sister, and my younger brother away first.
Instead, they killed me, all to take my Starving Ghost so they could have an easier time surviving on the road.
After I died, they didn't even have time to tame the Starving Ghost before it devoured every one of them.
When I opened my eyes again, I had somehow returned to the day we formed our ghost contracts, and this time, my younger brother chose the Starving Ghost.

The day the Gryphon army marched home in victory, my sister's husband came back safe. My husband, Tobias, died on the ice.

Everyone pitied me, and I believed them. I mourned him for years, handed over every resource the Elven Realm had to offer to Crown Prince Nathaniel, and helped him lock down his claim to the throne.

It took me years to find out the man who came back wasn't Nathaniel at all. It was my "dead" husband, Tobias.

He killed his own brother, stole his face with forbidden magic, all so he could marry my sister Sabrina and make her his queen, official and out in the open.

"Sabrina and I are the real thing. Pretending to be my brother, that was for the good of the kingdom."

They framed me for treason and threw me into the Pit of Judgment. As I burned, I watched the two of them hold each other while the kingdom cheered.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day the army came home.

My sister begged me to stop grieving, tears in her eyes. "Nathaniel" swore he'd give me a life of luxury. The old king stood in front of everyone and promised to grant me anything I wanted.

This time, I didn't cry. I chose to remarry without a second thought.

Tobias thought wearing his brother's face was all it took to sit on that throne. What he didn't know was that without me, he never stood a chance of getting there at all.

The apocalyptic deluge came, and I rescued the entire village onto a cruise ship.

The villagers were deeply grateful to us.

But somehow a rumor spread—that I had a warehouse full of food and was refusing to feed them properly.

The villagers turned on me, hurling accusations left and right.

Helpless, I opened the warehouse to show them. There was barely anything left. But they still refused to believe me.

"Yu Lei! You must have hidden the food somewhere else!"

"That's right! He never really wanted to save us!"

They beat me with fists and feet, cursing me with every foul word they knew.

Then a gang of thugs stormed the ship.

Under their brutal rule, the entire village was enslaved. Young women became playthings. The children—their fate was even worse.

I tried to rally the villagers to fight back. But someone sold me out to the thugs, trading that information for a single full meal.

In the end, they beat me to death and tossed my body into the sea for the fish.

When I opened my eyes again, time had rewound to three days before the apocalypse. I immediately started packing, ready to get as far away from these ungrateful bastards as possible.

But the villagers were already crowded at my door, demanding I hand over the keys to the cruise ship.

It turned out I wasn't the only one who'd been reborn. The entire village had come back too.

I handed over the keys without a fuss.

After all, the System told me this time it would be a zombie apocalypse. What good was a ship?

On the eve of the apocalypse, magical beasts appeared in our world.
They possessed extraordinary abilities, and humans could master these powers by forming a contract with them.
In my previous life, my adopted brother chose a top-tier Wolf King pup.
But shortly after, the extreme heat apocalypse descended. The low-tier water snake I had contracted possessed the ability to conjure water and lower temperatures, inadvertently making me the envy of everyone.
Meanwhile, my brother’s Wolf King was universally despised for its excruciatingly slow growth and lack of immediate combat power.

Now, I have been reborn to the very day we chose our contracted beasts.
This time, my brother rushed ahead and snatched the water snake.
I know why.
He has been reborn, too.
But this apocalypse is not nearly as simple as he thinks!

Three weeks after my son's death, I found the blood-stained cloth doll meant to "ward off disaster" with his name stitched on it.

Right there, in the hands of my husband's mistress, who was giggling as she idly toyed with it.
 
"The psychic said my life force was too weak to keep the baby, and that I needed a substitute to take the curse."
 
"I only sewed Leo's name into the doll. I never imagined... he would actually get sick and die."
 
"Declan, do you think Leo traded his life for our baby's?"
 
Through the crack in the door, the same man who had sobbed until he passed out at the funeral was gently stroking his lover's belly. "He was just unlucky. As long as our baby is safe, that's all that matters."
 
I turned away, pulled up the invitation for Chief Medical Examiner from the International Criminal Court in The Hague that I had shelved for a month, and hit accept.

My husband's first love was in trouble.
When the news came, I was lying on the operating table.
Dr. Miller put down his scalpel and said to Dr. Johnson, "I'll leave my wife's surgery to you."

"If I don’t go now, I might regret it for the rest of my life."

With that, he turned and walked away.
Watching my husband's retreating figure, I couldn't hold back—tears fell.
The next second, the cold blade of a scalpel touched my skin.

Dr. Johnson spoke calmly, "Why the tears? With me here, you'll be fine."

My husband's foster sister, Delilah, gets poisoned and ends up paralyzed. My husband, Grayson, the Don of this whole crime family, doesn't even bother checking the security cameras. He just throws me, two months pregnant, into the cistern where they punish traitors.

"Tessa, hand over the antidote, or die."

I kneel in the freezing swamp water and beg him. I didn't poison her.

He answers with a kick to the stomach.

For three straight days, I suffer down there. Leeches tear into my skin. My baby turns into a pool of black blood and dissolves into the filthy water. By the end, my vocal cords tear to shreds, my body goes cold, and I stop breathing.

His men get on their knees and beg him to spare me. He just sneers.

"That woman's always been good at playing the victim. No food, no medicine. Let her keep soaking."

Three days later, he finally walks into the cistern, and it's only to give me an ultimatum.

"Crawl out and apologize to Delilah on your knees. Otherwise I'll strip you of your title and sell you off to a trafficking ring. You'll wish you were dead."

No one answers him.

He has no idea. I already am.

The second the avalanche came down, I called my mate. Karl. Captain of the Pack Guard's First Squad.

He dug me out, carried me onto the helicopter, and told the pilot to take off before the second rescue team even got there.

He didn't know Delilah was buried in the same slide. The girl he'd never gotten over.

By the time they reached her, she'd been under the snow for three hours in twenty below.

Karl stood in the morgue all night.

He came back the next day and just gave me a small smile. "It wasn't your fault. You were carrying our pup. Of course you came first."

For a month after that, he was gentler than he'd ever been. He cleared his schedule to take me to every checkup. Cooked for me himself. Put the crib together, the dresser too. Every single thing in the nursery lined up exactly right.

I thought that avalanche had finally buried Delilah. That it had given him back to me.

Until the day I went into labor.

He sent every doctor and nurse out of the delivery room. There was a silver scalpel in his hand.

The moment he cut me open, I saw the red in his eyes.

Our pup was still crying, small and weak, and he never even looked. He threw us both into the incinerator.

"If it weren't for you, Delilah would still be alive. Your life for hers."

Then I opened my eyes, and I was back at the moment the avalanche hit.

At the scene of the car accident, my parents frantically scooped up my sister—who only had a scraped knee—then kicked me aside as I lay there dying.
"Don't be a burden to your sister. Just wait by the roadside and croak!"
They drove off without a second thought. In that moment, my heart turned to stone.
What they didn't know was that I didn't die. Instead, I got adopted by a top-tier professor and became a math prodigy worth tens of millions.
Two years later, when my birth parents went bankrupt and got on their knees begging me for a handout, I smiled coldly and played the recording of their attempted murder...

My fiancée's father called me a stray dog, worse than trash.
My rival forced me to crawl between his legs and trampled me into the mud.
They all thought I was just a piece of trash to be trampled on at will.
But they didn't know that I endured humiliation and hardship for a shocking secret order.

I was once the daughter of the Alpha of Dawn Pack.
After my parents were killed and I was kicked out of the Pack, I was left with nothing.
I was brought back to William’s Pack and became the one he treasured in the palm of his hand.
When the car accident happened, he shielded me with his body, saying he couldn’t live without me.

But after I was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, all I wanted was to quietly leave and not burden him.
However, after I tried to escape from the wedding, he captured me and imprisoned me.
Refusing to eat and losing weight, it was just the toll of my illness.
But he thought I was intentionally torturing him.

When his "resurrected" ex-wife, Jessica, returned,
At the celebration banquet, I merely gagged once while eating.
He flipped the table, shoved garbage into my mouth, and screamed for me to die.
I hid in the bathroom, wrapped in his clothes, vomiting blood, and no medicine could stop the cold shivers.
For the first time, I called him and begged him to let me go.
But all I received was his scolding and the merciless hang-up.

“I, Riccardo Saviano, future Alpha of the Grey Shadow Moon Pack, reject you, Artemisia Guerrieri, Daughter of Alpha Franco of the Blood Moon Pack, as my mate and future Luna.”

One single sentence.

One stupid single sentence was all it took to disintegrate my life.

And the day of my birthday, on which this sentence was audaciously uttered to me, I lost the love of my life, my future mate, and my wolf, all at once.

As I’m still assembling the pieces of my shattered heart years later, there they come.

Like lightning out of a crystal blue sky.

My Mates.

But wait…

If I am mated to triplets, how come I’m about to be mated to 5 gorgeous men?

*** TW: explicit and foul language; spicy content; explicit sex scenes ***

"I’ve wanted you since the moment I saw you walk into that biology classroom six years ago."

Cedric froze. He thought he was just an anonymous server in a high-end mafia club, wearing a wire for the police to clear his $500,000 debt. But the man sitting in the VIP booth—Gianni Falcone, the most dangerous crime lord in New York—wasn't a stranger. He was Gus Franco, the quiet kid from high school who used to stare at the back of Cedric's neck.

"I watched you waste yourself on people who didn't deserve you," Falcone whispered, his hand cupping Cedric's jaw with terrifying gentleness. "I orchestrated everything. The debt, the job, the desperation. I burned down your world just to clear a path for you to walk into my arms."

Cedric realized too late: He wasn't here to catch a criminal. He was the prize waiting to be claimed.

In the terminal stage of cancer, my only life-saving chemotherapy opportunity was bought out by Patrick for Laura, who only had early-stage cancer.

I gave up the treatment plan that doctors said could save my life and swallowed strong pain-blocking medication. The consequence was organ failure and death within three days.

During these three days, I gave up everything.

When I gave all my hard-earned achievements to Laura, my parents smiled with relief.

When Patrick presented the divorce papers and I signed them readily, he sighed and said I was very sensible.

When I pushed Anna to call Laura "mom," she said excitedly that mommy was the best.

Even when I transferred all my properties and assets to Laura, they didn't notice anything wrong.

They just looked at me with relief and said: "Our sensible Flora has finally come back."

But I'm also curious - after I die, will they ever think of me?

When the full moon rises over the Andes mountains, a portal opens that transports travelers to the realm of musical notes, sirens, and fairies, a promised land known as "No Man's Land.", a fictional world where humans the one who are rich enough to travel and do senderism use to go for holidays, even when everything looks real, they know they will be introduced in a digital world as soon they walk into the portal. Jhon, a sensual and wealthy tourist, arrives in No Man's Land wanting to meet women, experience new adventures, and heal his heart. It is here that he meets Brenda, a beautiful blonde fairy who works as a dancer in Old Eddie's tavern. Brenda has a dream: to become a mother. While she waits for her dream, she teaches dance to fairy girls. Brenda will heal Jhon's heart and take away all his doubts and fears, but a serpent watches over Brenda's heart every night. The cobra queen, for Brenda to give Jhon her heart, they will have to escape from the realm. The cobra queen believes that Jhon's heart is closed and cannot receive Brenda's love, but guided by her feelings, she will ignore the warnings. The cobras will alert the witch known as Medusa the Gorgon, who, upon learning that Brenda has fled with Jhon, will unleash all the snakes after her to prevent her from being with Jhon. For an old prophecy states that from the purest of fairies and a rich outsider, a prince will be born, ready to end and defeat evil forever in No Man's Land. What Medusa does not expect is that Brenda is already pregnant with Jhon, and their baby will bring the lights of good to the realm of No Man's Land.

After being abandoned by my husband one last time and rejected by my own son, I finally hit my breaking point.
Because I was dying.
At the very end, fate sent me back to the world I once knew.
And there, love and glory swept over me like a flood.

My family used me as bait to destroy my sister's happiness.

The plan was simple: fake being poor, watch my sister's construction worker boyfriend run when times got tough, then reveal the truth and break her heart. I was supposed to be the convincing proof of our "poverty."

But I didn't know I was acting. For ten years, I lived their lie for real. Starved while they feasted in hiding. Worked myself to the bone while they watched me suffer.

Then I got my dream job and burst through the door to save everyone—only to find my sister's engagement party in progress.

But she'd dumped the construction worker for a tech mogul. "Maya's suffering was so authentic," she laughed to her guests. "It showed me exactly what I'd become if I stayed with Jake. Thank God I came to my senses."

My pain was her wake-up call.

Amy didn't expect that her husband whom she had loved and trusted earnestly for many years would be cheating on her by having sex with his secretary.
When she confronted him, he and his secretary mocked and ridiculed her, they called her barren to her face, afterall, she had not conceived for the past three years that she had been married to her husband, Callan.
Terribly Heartbroken, she filed for divorce and left to the club, she picked a random gigolo, had a hot one night stand with him, paid him and dissapeared to a small city.
She came back to the country six years later with three identical cute boys and three identical cute girls of the same age. She settled and got a job but soon find out that her CEO was the gigolo she had sex with six years back at the club.
Will she be able to hide her six little cuties from her CEO, who happens to be the most powerful man in NorthHill and beleived to be infertile? Can Amy and the most powerful man in NorthHill get along considering the social gap between them?

They don’t know I’m a girl.

They all look at me and see a boy. A prince.

Their kind purchase humans like me for their lustful desires.

And, when they storm into our kingdom to buy my sister, I intervene to protect her. I make them take me too.

The plan is to escape with my sister whenever we find a chance.

How am I to know our prison will be the most fortified place in their kingdom?

I’m supposed to stay on the sidelines. The one they have no real use for. The one they never mean to buy.

But then, the most important person in their savage land—their ruthless beast king—takes an interest in the “pretty little prince.”

How do we survive in this brutal kingdom, where everyone hates our kind and shows us no mercy?

And how does someone, with a secret like mine, become a lust slave?

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

This is a dark romance—dark, mature content. Highly rated 18+.

Expect triggers, expect hardcore.

If you're a seasoned reader of this genre, looking for something different, prepared to go in blindly not knowing what to expect at every turn, but eager to know more anyway, then dive in!

“Chen Lu Xian,” a brilliant surgeon, meets his end—
only to awaken as “Chen Lu,” a disfigured and worthless noble son.
When fate takes a dramatic turn,
his new goal becomes clear: vengeance
and rising again as a miracle physician of unmatched skill.
Lu Xian uses a restaurant as a front…
while secretly operating a hidden clinic behind the scenes.
He trains handmaidens in the healing arts,
alongside their practice in martial cultivation.
Fate entangles Lu Xian with the Fourth Prince,
a war-torn man bearing wounds from the battlefield.
That one act of healing… alters his life forever—
when he is forced into marriage!
From celestial physician to imperial consort of the Fourth Prince,
how will Chen Lu use his wits to survive the treacherous tides of court intrigue?
A path lined with schemes, love, and fierce battles lies ahead…

The night I asked for a divorce, my husband, who claimed to love someone else, lost control.

His slender fingers gripped my slender waist, his breath hot and ragged as he buried his face in my neck and murmured, "Can we not divorce? Who is that man in the painting?"

I tried to push him away, but his fingers slipped into my underwear, teasing me.

"Can he make you feel this good?"

--

Sloane once believed that three years together could warm Jared's cold heart.

But when his ex-girlfriend returned, she, the "legal wife," instantly became an eyesore in the way.

He thought her vicious and forced her to apologize to her scheming ex, never knowing she carried his child.

"After I sign the divorce papers, I'll disappear completely." She turned and left without looking back.

After the divorce, Jared looked at his successful and beautiful ex wife and was filled with regret.

"Let's remarry." He knelt before Sloane with a diamond ring.

But Sloane turned and embraced her childhood savior instead.

This time, can Jared win back Sloane's heart?

Damian vs Grace: aloof, handsome heir vs brave, soft‑looking girl who makes the first move.
They fall; a bad misunderstanding sends her overseas. He chases, crashes, forgets... Five years later, at a crowded crosswalk, their eyes lock—
"My heartbeat recognized you before I did."

My name is Mira. I am the princess of the Nightwood Pack, yet I live like a slave.

Everyone believes I am the cause of my mother’s death. My father, the Alpha, hates me for it. While my twin sister is loved, cherished, and treated like a princess, I am punished, humiliated, and forced to suffer in my own father’s house.

On the night of our eighteenth birthday, Alphas from different packs arrived to celebrate the Blood Moon Festival. That was the night I found my mate, Ashur, the strongest Alpha ever known. I was finally happy. I believed my suffering was over.

That same night, I gave myself to him, and we shared a one-night bond.

But by morning, everything changed.

After my father filled Asher’s ears with lies, calling me a curse, Asher rejected me publicly before the entire pack. As if that pain wasn’t enough, he chose my twin sister as his Luna and left me shattered.

Weeks later, I discovered I was pregnant with Asher’s child.

Then an old wizard appeared with a terrifying prophecy:
The child growing inside me would one day kill my sister, and to stop the prophecy from coming true, I must be killed.

She came with claws and fire, scent like sin; his wolf didn’t stand a chance. Neither did he.

•••

Brant Paxton has always been the wild one—gorgeous, untamed, and irresistible to everyone. But when Sable Knox returns, everything changes. She’s no longer the sweet girl he remembers. She’s fierce, sexy, and carries a scent that sets his wolf on edge. The heat between them is dangerous. Forbidden. But Brant can’t stay away.

Sable once called the Paxtons her family, but one tragic night tore it all apart. Now she’s back, stronger and smarter, ready to make them pay—especially Brant. But nothing prepares her for the fire that ignites when they’re close. Her wolf wants him. Craves him. And Sable doesn’t know if she’s falling into his arms or into a trap.
As old wounds reopen and passion burns hotter, Brant and Sable must choose: follow the rules or give in to the sin that could ruin them both.

Content Warning: This book contains sexual content and mature themes. Reader discretion is advised.

In a world where love is a dangerous game, Leila Castor finds herself charmed by the devil himself. Ben Maloney, with his alluring facade and sweet promises, hides an evil truth that threatens Leila's life. When he betrays her, leaving her to choke on her blood, Leila's thirst for revenge knows no bounds.

And luckily fate grants her a second chance, And discovers she has been taken back in time two months before her death! Will she rewrite the wrongs done to her or set out on a path of retribution against those who wronged her?

Twenty-one-year-old Adrian Blood had nothing — no parents, no money, he was just a scholarship and a girlfriend he thought was worth saving for. Valentine's night stripped even that away. Teresa chose his bully. Ricardo's men put him in the garbage, literally.

Then a voice activated in his head.

The Chosen Heir System doesn't do sympathy — it does missions. Its first order: save the sister of the man who just destroyed him. Adrian ran through the rain, bleeding, and did it anyway.

One mission. One million dollars.

Ricardo Rodriguez has no idea what he just created. And the system is only getting started.

He made one mistake—he chose revenge instead of mercy.

Luna’s sharp tongue and careless drunken words should have been harmless. Instead, they mark her as a target for Daimen Blackwell, a billionaire who doesn’t forgive and never forgets.

What begins as punishment turns into possession when he forces her into a contract that binds her to him as his mistress—his rules, his house, his bed.

Luna is naïve in love but not in spirit, and her defiance slowly becomes the one thing Daimen can’t control. Somewhere between power plays and stolen moments, he wins her heart—only to destroy it.

When Daimen betrays her, Luna leaves with nothing but shattered trust. And that’s when he discovers the truth: she is the woman he has been searching for all his life.

This time, the billionaire has nothing left to bargain with.
Only regret. Only groveling. And the hope that love might survive the damage he caused.

In my past life, I built an ironclad sanctuary in the zombie-infested wasteland, bleeding to keep four thousand people alive.
Yet the very people I risked everything to protect were brainwashed into overthrowing me.
When I opened my eyes again, I was back—right on the eve of that fatal rebellion.
Right now in the control room, my enemy has his arm around my wife. Fourteen rebels have their assault rifles pressed against my skull, laughing mockingly, convinced they've completely crushed this washed-up "Doomsday Tyrant."
What they don't know is that two days ago, I already emptied the bunker's entire stockpile of weapons and food.
You want "freedom" without rules? It's all yours.

I spent three years in the squad — three years carrying them to the top of the S-rank hero league. And their reward? They decided my B-rank rating wasn't good enough, and brought in an A-rank support to replace me. Fine. I'm done pretending. The truth is, I'm S-rank.

In this era of universal awakening, I've drawn the most tragic "BOSS" route.

For the sake of my fiancée Celine's guild, I signed an exclusive binding agreement. For four whole years, I was treated like an ATM for loot drops, and was mercilessly killed 2173 times.

When Celine led 137 elite members of her guild, armed with a permanent kill item, to stab me in the heart, preparing to dig out my core to pave the way for her new love, she thought she was about to usher in the supreme glory of being the first to kill me on the entire server.

But what she didn't know was that the hidden max-level reward for the BOSS route was "system administrator privileges".

The sword tip stopped at my chest, freezing time across the entire server. I looked at the greedy traitor before me, smiled, and pressed the "Level Reset" button.
"Sorry, this game is now in my hands."

Strip away god-tier equipment and wipe out max-level accounts. This time, I will bring down the reigning number one in the entire server, making him start from level 1 in the newbie village and personally pay the price for those two thousand bloody battles!

When my own father pinned me against the reef and ripped my scales off one by one, my sister buried herself in my fiancé's arms and cried. "Don't blame my sister. She was born worthless."
Right there in front of everyone, they decided to offer me to the Sea God as a sacrifice. They couldn't even be bothered to send anyone to see me off.
But when I was dragged, half-dead, into the black prison, what came for me wasn't death.
It was the Sea God himself.
He wiped the blood from my tail and said, "Good. Let them keep piling on their sins. I'll make them drop to their knees and beg for your forgiveness."

In the previous life, the game descended into reality, the laws of the virtual world tore the sky apart, and top players became gods of the new world.
The day before the game's release, I helped Julian acquire the top-tier item, the Absolute Defense Ring, only to have his account stolen and all his equipment taken away by him and my fiancée .
After the game started, they threw me into the horde of rotting corpses like trash , stepped on my bones to become emperors, and lived happily ever after, while I was devoured to death by the rotting corpses .
In this life, I am reborn three days before my arrival . I will use Julian's money to clear the dungeon, steal his top-tier items, and then, in the apocalypse of the game where monsters and skills materialize , at his most inflated coronation ceremony, I will personally tear apart his ridiculous absolute defense and take the lives of all the traitors.

As the eldest daughter of North America’s most feared Mafia family, the Romanos, I married Matteo purely for love. For five years, everyone constantly envied me, thinking I was the luckiest woman alive.

Until I opened that video file.

The screen flickered to life, and my world violently collapsed.

The woman he had completely pinned against the wall, thrusting into her with feral desperation, was Valentina. His sweet, innocent adopted sister. The girl we had both carefully grown up with.

And the hands gripping her waist so tightly they bruised? They bore the exact wedding band I had lovingly slipped onto Matteo’s finger.

"Oh God, brother… you're so hard. If your perfect wife knew you were deep inside me right now, she’d lose her mind."

"Good girl, then stop talking about that boring piece of wood."

My refined, elegant husband was groaning, his voice filthy and depraved between loud, wet slaps of skin. "Squeeze tighter, fuck... You drive me insane, baby. The moment I successfully drain all her family’s stock, you’ll be the true mistress of this whole estate."

Every sweet nothing he had ever whispered to me was a calculated lie, designed to completely destroy me.

Those two despicable cheaters believe they have successfully won. They think my marriage was built on submission.

Well, since this rising Mafia star completely forgot that I am a Romano first and a wife second, it’s severely past time I gave him a taste of my own wicked performance.

Playtime is over. Matteo thinks he can steal my empire while burying his face in his sister’s bed?

I am going to carefully tear down his "perfect husband" facade piece by bleeding piece, and aggressively send them both straight to hell.

I was once the adopted son of Eric Miller, the Don of the Miller Family.
My future was supposed to be simple—loyal to the Don, respected by the Family, destined to inherit power.
But I carried a secret that turned me into a freak in his eyes.
A forbidden love.
When Eric found the diary where I had hidden my feelings for him, I cried and apologized again and again.
It didn’t matter. The disgust in his eyes never changed.
He sent me away—exiled to a remote country under the watch of his men.
From there, I heard the news of his wedding.
I saw the way he looked at Julia—soft, full of love. And in a moment of madness, I spent every last dollar I had and flew to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery.
Nights after the surgery were filled with pain from the silicone implants pressing against my skin.
But even after becoming a woman, I still couldn't win Eric’s love.
Just when I finally let him go, he suddenly bought me a ticket back to America.
He said he wanted me to attend his fifth wedding anniversary with Julia.
And when he saw Lily in my arms, he froze.
“Your daughter?”

I'm two months pregnant with Tristan's baby when Brielle, the woman he'd do anything for, shoves me down the stairs.

She calls it an accident. I lose the baby.

I beg my husband to do something about it. Instead, he shields her and turns it around on me.

"Brielle saved my life in that fire. The whole Merrick family owes her. So drop it."

That debt. Always that debt.

Three years. No matter how many times Brielle humiliates me, degrades me, Tristan only ever has one answer: "I owe her my life."

But the truth about that fire? I'm the only one in the world who knows it.

I tried to tell him once. He laughed in my face. "Adeline, you're so desperate for attention you'd make up something like that?"

So I shut my mouth. Buried the truth. Buried whatever was left of my heart along with it.

The man I trusted with my life just handed my child to the woman who killed them, and called it loyalty.

I'm done.

I pull up the number I blocked three years ago and hit call.

"Dad. I'll take over the company. I'll go through with the engagement to Everett. But I have one condition. I want Tristan and Brielle ruined beyond recovery. Nothing and no one left."

After losing the baby, I finally gave Silas the one thing he had always craved: a trouble-free marriage.

No more interrogations when he stayed out all night. No more hysterical fits over the presence of his first love.

Even when I was discharged from the hospital, and the nurse asked for my husband's signature, I simply replied with chilling calm, "I don't have a husband."

My love for Silas died right alongside our unborn child.

By the time he finally realized the truth and begged me to come back, it would be far too late.

I fought for the Empire for eighteen years. My body bore the marks of glory, and I was its strongest shield—until an enemy ambush caught me off guard and plunged me into a coma.

When I finally opened my eyes again, I discovered that my daughter had been stripped naked by her classmates, a dog leash fastened around her neck as they paraded her down the street.

My wife—the woman I had once cherished like a treasure, held gently in the palm of my hand—had been forced to her knees before another man, mouth pried open.

My aged mother had been driven to the ground, kneeling and begging for mercy.

The family of an Imperial general, reduced to this.

Three years. I had only been unconscious for three years.

Hatred spread through me like wildfire. I, Leon, have returned. From this day forward, every last soul who tormented my family will answer for what they've done. Not a single one will be spared.

Beau and I have been together for three years. I paid for the entire yacht charter out of my own pocket, and he shows up with his childhood best friend Sadie in tow, then goes around telling everyone it was his idea, his grand gesture.

Out on the water, Sadie spots a small octopus drifting near the surface and decides she has to have it. The thing pulses with glowing blue rings.

I'm a certified expert diver. I know exactly what it is the second I see it. I try to stop her.

She bursts into tears and tells Beau I'm going after her.

So Beau, ever the hero where Sadie's concerned, jumps in himself and fishes the thing out.

Sadie plays with it. It bites her. She's on the deck before she even knows what hit her.

Beau grabs me, screaming at me to suck out the venom. I refuse. He calls me a cold, heartless bitch, and in the chaos, shoves me overboard into shark-infested water.

I die out there. Nothing left of me.

They use my phone to fake a suicide note. Depression, they say. Jumped on her own. Then they take my company, my assets, everything.

They post online hinting I tried to push Sadie in and slipped.

My parents, worn down by the online harassment and the grief of losing me, both die of heart attacks.

Then I open my eyes. And I'm back. The morning of the trip.