303 Book(s) Related to angelos jupiter

My dad made me a smoothie every morning for six months. I thought it was love.
It was a muscle relaxant.
He'd been slipping just enough into my drink to make my fingers tremble at full draw — just enough to cost me first place at every major competition. Not enough to kill me. Just enough to let Laurel beat me.
Laurel. His mistress's daughter. The girl he bought custom diamond jewelry while giving me clearance-rack gear for my birthday. The girl he wanted to drop into my family, my home, and my spot on the podium.
I found the proof. Stopped drinking his smoothies. Clawed my way back to number one.
Then, two days before the National Youth Archery Trials — the one competition that decides everything — he picked up a steel rod and swung it at my right arm.
My drawing arm.
The bone cracked. Doctors said three months minimum. My coach couldn't look me in the eye. Every scout, every scholarship, every dream I'd bled for over three years — gone in one swing from the man who was supposed to protect me.
Trials start tomorrow morning. And I can't hold a bow.

I was the only top-tier Healer in the entire pack.
The blind witch in the Black Forest told me that if I hid my true bloodline and used my Healer gift to save one hundred dying wolves — no payment, no recognition — my mother's spirit would break free of the curse and find peace with the Moon Goddess.
For twenty years, I'd kept my bloodline a secret, saving ninety-nine wolves on the brink of death. Just one more, and it would all be over.
Then the call came. A six-year-old boy. The Alpha's only son. Dying from bloodline backlash. I was the only one who could save him.
I said no.
The whole pack turned on me. My fiancé called me a cold-blooded monster. The Alpha threatened me with treason. They offered gold, titles, everything — even got on their knees.
None of them knew why I refused. None of them knew what that Alpha took from me twenty years ago.
Save his precious heir? He should've thought about that before he destroyed everything I loved.

I was four months pregnant when the truck hit my car.
I woke up on a gurney outside the OR, bleeding, half-conscious, thinking my husband was saving my life. Then I heard him through the door.
"The baby's gone. Her right hand is finished—her career's over either way. Just take her kidney now and put it in Mia."
My mother agreed. My father told him to switch my architectural draft to Mia's name before Friday.
Mia. The sister they'd raised for twenty years while I was missing. The sister whose body was failing. The sister my husband had apparently been in love with the whole time I was married to him.
I was supposed to die on that table. I wasn't supposed to hear anything.
But my phone was in my coat pocket, and the voice memo app had never stopped recording.
And now I had a choice to make.

I spent three hundred years winning Varen Ashworth's war. Bled for him. Handed him my army, my secrets, the healing blood from my own chest. He'd be nothing without me.
On his coronation day, he announced his queen—and it wasn't me. It was Elara. Some trembling, doe-eyed girl he'd pulled out of a Demon camp. He told me I could stay on as her handmaid.
I laughed, voided the contract, and walked out.
Because I've lived this life before. Last time, I exposed Elara. Saved his throne. He thanked me—then slaughtered my entire bloodline.
This time, I'm not saving anyone.
This time, I'll watch him figure out exactly what kind of woman he picked over me. And when his whole world comes apart—he'll be on his knees, begging the one person who could've stopped it.
I won't be listening.

My cousin stole thirty thousand dollars from our dying grandmother.
Not for an emergency. Not for bills.
For liposuction.
Then she told everyone I did it. Said I was jealous of her figure — that I'd drained Grandma's cardiac surgery fund because I wanted to look different. And the terrible part is, everyone believed her. My boyfriend. My uncle and aunt. Every single person who'd watched me grow up in that house — eating their leftovers standing at the kitchen counter, wearing my aunt's old coat with the broken zipper through every winter — turned around and decided I was the thief.
I couldn't prove otherwise. I couldn't get anyone to listen.
Last time this happened, I didn't survive it.
Then I opened my eyes. I was back in the hospital corridor. My aunt's hand raised, ready to swing.

Terminal. One month, maybe less.
I folded the report and put it in my bag. The doctor asked if there was family I could call. I told him there wasn't.
My husband rang while I was crouched against the hospital wall, waiting for the pain to pass. I could hear waves behind his voice. He didn't ask what the doctor said. He wanted to know why his money hadn't come through yet. His first love needed it for her art show.
So I sent him all of it. My savings, and the last of what my mother left me. Ten years, settled in one transfer.
Then my legs went, and a pair of freezing hands caught me before I hit the ground.
The pain stopped the second he touched me.
"Your kind calls us reapers. Give me your soul, and I'll keep the pain off you until the end."
Weston took one look at him and decided I'd hired an actor to make him jealous.
He thinks I'm trying to win him back.

The last thing I did before I died was lick dew off a rusted pipe.
Ninety days earlier, my fiancé Bastien promised he'd come back for me. He said three months in the Sahara would teach me not to be jealous of Posey—the girl I'd pulled from a refugee camp and raised as my own sister.
He didn't know the water ran out in the first week. He didn't know bandits broke my bones. He didn't care enough to find out.
While I lay dying on a rotting bed with a shattered leg, he was in Manhattan, sliding a pink diamond onto Posey's finger.
I died alone. But I didn't stay gone.
My soul followed a stolen necklace across the ocean, right back to his penthouse—just in time for the engagement party, the champagne toast, and the moment my body arrived at the door.

Ambushed by a rival syndicate. My mafia husband had to choose — save me, or save his childhood sweetheart.
I was five months pregnant with his heir. She was the love of his life.
He chose me. She died.
He said it was fine. Took time off work. Bought out every baby store in the city. Made me warm milk every night.
I thought I'd finally won his heart.
Until the day our son was born. He carried our baby to her grave.
My son never came back.
"You thought you won? The day she died, you were already dead to me. I just needed the heir first."
Then he had me beaten to death beside her tombstone.
When I opened my eyes again, I was back in that ambush.
This time, I let go of his sleeve.
Go save your sweetheart. I'm done begging.

Married to the head of the Valenti family for five years. Kidnapped on our anniversary. Pregnant a month later.
Five paternity tests said the baby wasn't his. My husband got a vasectomy and swore he'd raise the child as his own.
I believed him.
Then came the therapy. The drugs. Nightmares where I was pinned down by multiple men, so real I could feel their hands hours after waking. I scrubbed my skin raw. Tried to end it six times.
He saved me every time. Held my hand. Told me no one would ever hurt me again.
Until the night I heard him laughing about it in his study.
The kidnapping was staged. The nightmares were chemicals. The DNA reports were forged. All of it — designed by my own husband to protect another woman.
Now I have a recording, a divorce agreement, and a very small box of ashes.
He's marrying her next week. I'll make sure he gets my wedding gift on time.

The Alpha of Blood Moon Pack needed an heir his chosen mate couldn't give him. So he found me — a rogue Omega with a destroyed pack and a little brother who needed protection — and offered a deal: carry his child, hand it over, walk away.
He never touched me. A physician, a syringe, a sterile room. When it was done, he said: "Thank you for your cooperation."
His mate Serena moved into the main house the week my pregnancy was confirmed. She picked the nursery colors. She chose the baby's name. She told the pack I was just "a relative visiting."
Then I overheard them planning to erase my scent from my baby within forty-eight hours of birth — so it would never know I existed.
I left that night. Six months pregnant, alone, into the snow.

Five years ago, I stepped in front of a crossbow bolt for Lucian Vael, and he turned me into a vampire before I had the chance to say no.
He told me I was the first person he'd loved in six hundred years. He bought a castle and named it after me. He reserved a spot for me in his family's crypt so we'd lie there together when the time came—right beside his parents, in the inner ring where only blood and the most beloved go.
While I spent four years bleeding myself dry over ancient rites, trying to carry his child, he was across the city watching another woman do it on her first try. Using my research to get there.
He named one of the twins Soren. That was the name I'd chosen.
The night I found out, I was seven weeks pregnant.
I didn't tell him.
I called Mira and said: I need him to think I'm dead.

My husband was a vampire lord, bound by a blood oath to the Elders. Forbidden from ever completing a mate bond.
But he bonded with me anyway. Every time he felt something for me, the oath punished him — ten minutes of agony. He endured it ninety-nine times and told me it was worth it.
To prove it, he carved a mark into my collarbone with his own blood. A promise: if I was ever in danger, he'd come for me. No matter what.
Then the Crimson Blight came — an ancient death curse, meant for another woman. His precious, fragile Elowen. And instead of letting it take her, he transferred it onto me.
I woke up chained in the sealed chamber beneath our own manor, blood core burning from the inside out. When I couldn't take any more, I activated his mark and reached through the bond for help.
I heard his voice. But he wasn't talking to me.
"She's a Blood Hunter. She can take it. She should bear this for me."
He didn't know I was three months pregnant with his child.

Seven years. Seven bonding ceremonies. Seven times a pack of feral strays charged through the territory on the full moon and tore into me before the marking could take.
I thought the Moon Goddess had cursed us.
Then I woke up in the pack hospital and heard my Alpha whispering to her — the delicate white wolf he called his "sister."
"Next time you let them in, could you tell them to go easier? I'm scared she might actually die."
Seven years of attacks. Every single one orchestrated by the man I loved, designed to break me down until I gave up the Luna title and made room for her.
So I played the recording in front of his grandmother, looked him in the eye, and ended the engagement myself.
He thought that was the worst I could do.
He had no idea what those seven years had already cost me — what was already shutting down inside my body while he stood there worrying about her.
By the time he found out, it was far too late.

My influencer roommate paid a small fortune to grow a tub of "all-natural" beauty mud in our bathroom.
Ten days later, the thing crawled out of her face — in front of three hundred people at a party.
And I'd known it was coming from the day I first saw what she was growing.

I got paid to test-sleep an heiress's fiancé.
One problem: he's my boss.
Bigger problem: I've been catfishing him online for six months—as his fiancée.
Now I'm pregnant. And he just called my real name.

I was Elara, a wingless half-sprite. The lowest of the low in the Obsidian Court. My job was to clean up the mess left by the dragons.
But right now, the biggest mess was inside my own stomach.
I was pregnant. With the Dragon King's child.
He didn't remember that night. He only remembered waking alone — and swearing to crush whoever had touched him into dust.
So I said nothing. I served him. I hid. And the three little voices only I could hear kept whispering the one thing I couldn't believe: that scary dragon is soft on you, girl.
Then my belly began to leak his golden aura, and his jealous betrothed smelled it first.
When the King learned the truth, he didn't rage. He looked at my stomach and said the child could not stay.
He never told me why.
So while he was away at war, I climbed onto the Sky Bridge over the endless Void — and I jumped. Better to fall than to let them take my baby.
I never expected something down there to catch me.

I got paid to test-sleep an heiress's fiancé.
One problem: he's my boss.
Bigger problem: I've been catfishing him online for six months—as his fiancée.
Now I'm pregnant. And he just called my real name.

I was marrying Boone Ashcroft on a Saturday morning. Before I could step out of the truck, his mother walked up with a rope and pointed at the cattle chute behind the barn.
Her terms: hands and knees through six inches of mud and manure. A metal headgate clamped around my neck at the end. That was the price of walking through her front door.
I said no.
Then forty Ashcrofts surrounded the truck. My phone had zero signal. My family was blocked behind a hay baler a quarter mile back. And the man I'd spent three years with looked me in the eye and said: "You're going through that chute today. Crawling or walking — pick one."
They cornered my best friend. Threw hog blood on the windshield. Thought nobody was coming for me.
They didn't know about the CB radio under the console — or the ten cousins listening on the other end.

I'm sixty years old. My husband Marcus just whipped me with his belt — for burning an egg. My face is bruised, my hair is gray, and I gave up a full ride to Stanford for this man over forty years ago.
Then the phone rings.
The voice on the other end is mine — my eighteen-year-old self, calling on her birthday, gushing about how Marcus is out buying her a cake, how they're running away to Nashville together tomorrow.
She asks if I'm happy.
I tell her the truth: her boyfriend is in a cheap motel right now, in bed with her best friend. And those pretty promises about Nashville? He's planning to use her up and throw her away.
She doesn't believe me. Of course she doesn't.
But I know the motel. I know the room number. And I know what's behind that door.
If she walks away from him tonight, everything changes — for both of us.

I'm just a stay-at-home mom. Old T-shirt, secondhand car, nobody ever looks at me twice.
At the school fundraiser, my husband's mistress put a peanut in my seven-year-old's mouth. He's severely allergic. As he choked on the grass, she crushed my hand under her heel and kicked his EpiPen straight into the lake.
"One worthless little life," she said. "So what if it's gone."
She's wearing my clothes. My jewelry. Spending my money. She calls me trash in front of the whole school and threatens to have my legs broken.
She thinks she's untouchable, because she's the wife of a Wall Street golden boy.
What she doesn't know is that every dollar he has, every thread she's wearing, even the air she's breathing — all of it belongs to me.
I walked away from that world to raise my son in peace.
She just gave me a reason to come back.

Three years ago, my fiance Marco Ferrante walked out on our engagement for his mistress Vivienne Salas — and now they're both back, kicking in my door and screaming that my baby isn't his.
He's right. It's not his.
It belongs to the most dangerous man in Verrano.
And Marco just put his boot through the Devil's only heir.

My sister climbed out her window the night before her wedding. So my family pinned her veil over my face and sent me in her place.
I'd been her stand-in my whole life — same face, same hair, the daughter they could afford to lose. Nobody looks twice at a bride behind a veil.
The Falcones figured out I was a fake before the vows. They broke my hand for the insult. And the don himself — the man this whole city only says quietly — took one look at the mess they'd made of me and told them to throw me out with the trash.
Then his eyes dropped to the locket my dead mother left me, lying on his marble floor.
And the most feared man in the city went very, very still.
He had no business knowing my mother's name. So why did he say it like a prayer?

I'm a siren. Every fifty years, I need to eat a heart. Not just any heart—it has to be rotten to the core. The more evil, the better it feeds.
So when Arthur Pendleton, billionaire marine philanthropist and secret trafficking kingpin, spotted a helpless blind girl sitting alone at his charity gala, he thought he'd hit the jackpot.
He took me to his cliffside villa. Cooked me dinner. Drugged my milk.
Cute.
The drugs broke down the second they hit my stomach. His guard found out about the restraints the hard way—right before I snapped his neck.
Now Arthur is steering his yacht into open water, chasing a sunken treasure that doesn't exist, too drunk on greed to notice the strange singing in the fog, or that the blind girl in his passenger seat can see him perfectly fine.
He has no idea what's waiting in the deep.

I loved Callum Crane for five years. He said I didn't fit. Then he proposed — to my sister.
The same night, his brother called me with the most insane idea I've ever heard: marry him instead. Same day. Same venue. Right across the hall from my ex and my sister's ceremony.
I said yes. Not because I loved Emrys Crane. Because I'd rather set the whole thing on fire than sit in a pew and watch.
Here's the thing about revenge marriages, though. They're supposed to be fake.
Nobody told Emrys.
The man had a wrench set in his truck that only fit my grandmother's machine — bought years before I ever spoke to him. He'd been sneaking looks through my workshop window so often the stone wore down. He fixed my motorcycle three times and never mentioned it. He remembered that I stared at a piece of almond brittle for ten seconds once, and bought it for me weeks later.
Seven years. He'd been in love with me for seven years. Said nothing. Did everything.
And Callum? The man who told me I didn't fit?
He showed up at my orchard with an apology and a folder full of evidence against my sister, begging for a second chance.
I looked him in the eye and said: "Too late. Wrong harvest."
He tried five more times. It only got worse for him.

Nine and a half million followers. Penthouse in LA. More money than I ever dreamed possible.
I built my empire teaching people to transform themselves, to become beautiful despite their scars. What I never told them was why I needed to learn that skill in the first place.
Then she slides into my DMs: "OMG ScarlettGlow! We went to high school together! Your biggest fan here!"
Madison Blackwell. The golden girl who made my teenage years hell.
She has no clue that ScarlettGlow is actually Scarlett Murphy—the "nobody" she tortured until I disappeared senior year. Now she's broke, desperate, and literally begging me for attention.
I'm staring at her across this overpriced Beverly Hills restaurant, watching her panic over an eight-hundred-dollar guest fee while I casually pull out my black Amex.
The girl who once said I'd never amount to anything is now desperately trying to impress me.
Should I tell her who I really am?

I spent ten years following Ashton around like it was my job. He said jump, I jumped. He said he was hungry, I went and made him a sandwich. His homework, his fights, his messes — I handled all of it. I thought that's what being close to someone meant.
Then at the fall pep rally, in front of two thousand people, he strapped me to a platform, blasted me with paint, and let his girlfriend laugh at me through a megaphone.
I was the punchline. I threw up on camera. The video went viral before I even hit the ground.
So I did the one thing nobody expected — I vanished. New school, new city, new number. Every trace of him, gone.
I thought that was the end of it.
But Ashton doesn't let go of what he thinks is his. And what he's willing to do to drag me back? I wasn't even close to ready for that.

At 2:17 AM, six weeks postpartum, new mom Harper thought she was just responding to her baby's crying. Instead, she discovered her husband Kieran and their live-in nanny Anya in the most intimate embrace—right beside her daughter's crib.
In her most vulnerable moment, in what should have been the safest space in her home, the two people she trusted most were betraying everything sacred about motherhood and marriage. Worse yet, they thought she was just another "baby-brained" mom who would never catch on.

They seriously underestimated what a mother is capable of.

When Harper finds that mysterious $300 Victoria's Secret charge on their shared account, when she discovers Kieran's handwritten love notes hidden in Anya's room, when she overhears them mocking her "annoying" middle-of-the-night feedings—she realizes it's time to show them what a real "burning sensation" feels like.

So the next time they tried to sneak around, Harper secretly swapped out their lube for her own special blend.

If you want to play with fire, let me show you what burning really feels like.

Thirteen years. That's how long I loved Reid Holloway.
When he said he was being bullied, I believed him. When he kissed me on that rooftop, I thought he felt the same. When he asked me to transfer schools with him, I said yes without hesitation.
Then I heard him bragging to his friends: "She'd save her first time for me. Hell, she'd still be thinking of me on her wedding night."
The bullying was staged. The kiss meant nothing. He just wanted me gone—so his new girl could feel more comfortable.
He thought I'd beg. He thought I'd cry. He thought I'd never actually leave.
I left the country.
And ran straight into his stepbrother.

My husband, Roman, has a bad heart. Five years ago they cut his chest open, and after that I quit my job and stayed home to keep him alive.
That day I got to his office ten minutes early with his lunch.
Through the glass door I watched Brielle Nash, his assistant, pick up his pill box. Twenty-eight compartments. I fill it every Sunday night.
She flipped open Wednesday evening, tipped the pills into her palm, and dropped them in the trash.
"That's the one that makes you feel eighty."
Roman laughed. He didn't stop her.
Then she handed him the can she'd been drinking from, and he took a sip out of her hand.
"That's living," she said. "Don't tell the boss lady, though. She'd have me fired."
He reached over and ruffled her hair. "I'll lock it in my drawer."
My lunchbox was sitting by his elbow. He hadn't opened it.
Later I found the flask in that drawer. Supplement bottles. A keycard for a boxing gym.
And a key I hadn't seen in five years.
I didn't do anything.
I went home and opened the safe and went through fifteen years of marriage one thing at a time.
Then I started working out what would be mine when he died.

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 their roof. They slapped me for things she did. They called me ungrateful when I couldn't donate a kidney I'd already lost. They forgot my birthday to throw her a party.
And when I went missing, they didn't look for me. Dad said, "Even if she dies out there, she has no one to blame but herself."
He was right. I did die out there. And he's the one who signed off on what happened next.

When my Alpha told me a rogue faction was going to destroy our Pack, I volunteered as a hostage to keep him safe.
Three years in a cage. Branded with silver. Broken like a feral. Every rogue in that compound had me. The only thing that kept me alive was a toxic root that numbed the pain — and was slowly killing me from the inside.
Then my Alpha showed up and told me the truth.
There was never any threat. He'd staged the whole thing — hired the rogues, built the compound. Because I'd embarrassed his precious Cora in front of the Pack, and he needed me to "learn my place."
Now he wanted me back. Wanted to make me his Luna again.
But I wasn't the same woman who walked into that cage. And the truth about what happened to me there?
He didn't believe a word of it.
Not until I was already dead.

I spent two years quietly building something I thought was worth building.
Full recovery support after birth, someone checking in on meals, leave approved the moment you asked for it. I worked out a deal with the best facility in the city and covered the difference myself, out of my own account. Not a cent of company money.
I did it because I'd watched a good employee disappear from the company the year she got pregnant. No announcement. Her desk just cleared out one day.
Then one of them posted about it.
She called it surveillance. A golden cage. The comment section called me a predator. By morning it was trending.
Here's what none of them knew: not a single dollar of that program belonged to the company.
So I listened to what they wanted and gave them exactly that.
I shut the whole thing down.

On a full moon, every wolf has to be inside a registered shelter before moonrise. That's pack law.
So when my husband's leave finally lined up with a moon, I spent six months and eighty thousand dollars booking his whole family into a top-tier sanctuary on Silverspine Ridge. Then his first love decided she wanted to come.
Instead of telling her no, he gave her my registered bed — and sent me a queue number for the state shelter, a thirty-six-hour line for a bunk in an open ward full of rogues. I looked at his parents, his sister, waiting for one of them to object. Every single one of them took his side.
So fine. I drove the other way, and spent the next three full moons enjoying myself — alone. That's when the whole family started to panic...

I had been Lucan Ferretti's wife for five years. I had also been the woman who took a bullet meant for him.
Four years of fertility treatments. Four years of empty rooms where a nursery should have been. Then, the day I finally get a positive test, I find something else: two secret sons, funded by my husband's money, waiting in a house I was never supposed to find.
Their names? The ones Lucan and I picked out together, years ago, in a hospital parking lot.
That night, I sat alone with the positive test still in my hand, memorizing the names he'd already given to someone else's sons.
I could have confronted him. I could have screamed, thrown things, demanded a divorce.
Instead, I find a text message. His mistress has already ordered a hit — on me, timed for our anniversary, dressed up to look like enemy retaliation.
She wants me dead before I can tell anyone I'm carrying his child.
Fine.
She can have exactly what she asked for.

Our ceremony was ambushed underground. One exit. Corvin was the only one who could move fast enough to carry someone out.
In my last life, he chose me — and left Niamh behind. She didn't make it. He spent five years after that making sure I understood what that meant. Every day I woke up was a day she couldn't. When I finally ran out of ways to leave quietly, I chose a window that faced east and walked into it.
Now I'm back. Same corridor, same chaos, same choice.
This time, I said: "Take Niamh."
The way his shoulders came down — like something he'd been holding for years, finally put down — told me everything five years together never did.
He promised to come back. He was already moving when he said it.
I knew I had to get out myself. But the ferals who'd killed Niamh last time found my corridor before I made it to the stairs.

Our plane went down on a deserted island. The boat fit two. My fiancé Callum was the only one who could drive it.
In my last life, he chose me — and left his childhood sweetheart Vesper behind. She didn't survive. He spent five years making sure I knew it was my fault. Every day I breathed was a day she couldn't. When I held a knife to my throat to get a divorce, he drove us both into the sea.
Now I'm back. Same island, same wreckage, same choice.
This life, I said: "Take Vesper."
The relief on his face — the way his whole body unclenched — told me everything five years of marriage never did.
He promised he'd come back for me. He didn't look back once.
I knew I had to save myself. But the bear — the same one that ate Vesper in my last life — reached the crash site before I could move.

My best friend could charm any man alive. I just didn't know how — not until it was too late.
Every boyfriend I ever had, she'd get close, turn on that pull of hers, and wait. They always fell. Then she'd send me the proof with the same sweet line: "Babe, you should be thanking me. I just saved you from another cheater."
Five boyfriends. Five "loyalty tests." Five relationships she destroyed and called it a favor.
I ran. Started over in a new pack. Found my fated mate — Callum Drake, the Alpha of Silver Ridge. For the first time in years, I felt safe.
On our mating ceremony day, she walked into my dressing room wearing an attendant's uniform.
She drugged my wine. Put on my robes. Crawled into my mate's bed.
I caught her. Threw her out. Thought it was over.
Months later, I was bleeding out in labor — and my mate stood over me, refusing to save me, because he'd been in love with her the whole time.
I died on that table.
When I opened my eyes, I was back. Same day. Same ceremony. Same best friend, same smile.
This time, I didn't scream.

Six weeks after his girlfriend had twins, my husband got himself fixed. He billed it to my insurance.
Then he spent nine years driving me to fertility clinics. Two surgeries. Four rounds of shots. He held my hand every time and told me next time.
The whole town said it was my fault. His mother asked me every Sunday if there was any news.
I died at forty-four. Three days before the end I couldn't open my eyes, but I could hear them over my bed. The girl I bought a purple bicycle for called him Dad.
Then I opened my eyes and I was thirty-four again, on a gurney, waiting for them to open me up one more time.
Last time I lay back down and let them do it. I did it three more times after that.
This time he's paying me back for all nine years, one line at a time.
The nurse asked me to confirm my date of birth. I did. Then I told her I wasn't doing it.

The winter I was eight, I found my own face in a trash can.
It was on a missing-child flyer. The girl on it had been gone five years. She had a birthmark on the back of her neck.
So did I.
There was a reward. A number with a long row of zeros. I didn't want it.
I was cold. I hadn't eaten since yesterday.
I just wanted a mom.
So that night, with a stranger's coins, I called the number at the bottom.
A woman answered on the first ring and screamed a name at me like it was mine.
She got to say it three times.
Then a hand came out of the dark behind me and hung up the phone for me.

Our team lost four games in a row. And somehow, that became my fault.
Team captain Reid stood in the locker room and told everyone I'd been giving performance enhancers to my ex on the rival team — that I had a problem with athletes, that I couldn't control myself. The guys laughed. Nobody stopped him.
I went to my supervisor Paige for help. She told me Reid noticing me at all was something I should be grateful for. That the way I dressed was basically asking for it.
Then the university president called me in and made things very clear: push this any further, and my academic future disappears.
Every single person with authority had already chosen a side.
So I climbed the stairs to Paige's office, hand raised to knock —
And stopped.
Because I could hear her through the door, clearly touching herself — whispering Reid's name.

Someone posted a love confession to me on the campus board the same week I got nominated for the Outstanding Thesis Award. By that evening, my roommate's boyfriend had already commented—claiming I'd slept with our professor and faked my entire thesis.
My roommate swore she'd handle it.
She didn't.
A used condom appeared at my lab bench. Photos of a woman leaving my advisor's building at 2 a.m. went viral. The university pulled my thesis. My professor told me to disappear quietly. My parents drove six hours to slap me and tell me my sister would never.
I lost my degree, my family, and my name. Then I lost my life.
The night I died, I finally saw what I'd missed in those photos—a detail that proved it was never me.
I woke up three weeks before my thesis defense.
I remember everything. And this time, I'm not keeping quiet.

My bestie Isolde and I were lured to a resort in another country.
Crescent Bay, a place that turned She-wolves into property.
Any wolf with enough money could have us for the night. That was the arrangement. That was what we were worth, once we were in.
When my husband Cael broke through the gates with a unit of Hargrove Pack warriors, I was in the back room counting the night's take. Top earner three months running.
Isolde was in the basement. Brain-dead. Pregnant. The machines were the only reason her heart was still beating.
Hargrove Pack put up half a million dollars for the name of whoever had trafficked us.
I was the only one who knew. I said nothing.
Vivienne — Cael's mother, Isolde's Luna — got down on her knees in front of me and begged. I closed my eyes.
Pack enforcers questioned me three times. I gave them the same answer every time, which was no answer at all.
Then Cael ran out of patience. He called for a witch to extract my memories and put them in front of everyone who had ever known me.

I have a condition that multiplies pain by ten thousand. A paper cut can put me on the floor. Chasing a cure is how I ended up owing money to a loan shark.
He came to collect in person. I was on the floor of a basement in the South End, mid attack, with him standing over me, when Sevrin Voss kicked the door in. He broke both of the man's arms, crouched down on the filthy concrete, and pulled me against his chest.
And the pain stopped. Just stopped.
By morning he had paid off my debt. By the end of the day he owned me. Three hundred thousand, plus a private medical team, plus a penthouse I never asked for. Then he put a contract in front of me. Absolute obedience. No leaving.
He says the white pills will keep me alive, and I've been taking them.
So why does he still come to my room every night and hold me until morning?

I've been engaged to the same man seven times.
Every time his first love Dove flies back, my engagement gets cancelled. And I get shipped off to another country.
But that's not the worst part.
Before I leave, I have to erase every trace of myself from our home. Take down the photos. Pack away my clothes. Remove my toothbrush so she won't feel "uncomfortable."
Seven years. Seven countries. Seven rings gathering dust in a drawer.
Zero marriage certificates.
He always promises we'll get married once she leaves. And like a fool, I believed him. Every single time.
Until now.
This time, I'm not coming back.

In my last life, my brother broke my legs and my adopted sister pushed me into the ocean. My father just stood there watching, mad about the blood on his shoes.
They gave her everything that was mine. My territory, my mother's necklace, even my bedroom. I was the real daughter, the real bloodline, and I still wasn't worth half of the stray my father dragged home.
I took it all. Every insult, every slap, every scrap of love that went to her instead of me. Because I thought maybe one day they'd see me.
They never did. They killed me instead.
Now I'm back. Same night, same banquet, same girl sitting across from me with fake tears, begging for my port.
This time I didn't hand it over. I smashed a wine bottle, slapped her face open, and told my father we're done.
He called his guards. My brother pulled a gun.
What they forgot is that my grandfather is the real power in this family. And I already sent him a message.

I hid in my best friend's closet to catch my fiancé cheating.
Through the gap in the door, I saw them on the bed. Tessa was blindfolded, wrists tied to the headboard with silk scarves. Callum's hands wrapped around her throat—some kind of breath play, I guessed.
Then her moaning turned to choking.
Her body convulsed. Her bound hands clawed at nothing. Her legs kicked against the mattress.
Then stopped.
Callum released her throat. Checked her pulse. Sighed.
And lit a cigarette.
He sat there scrolling his phone next to her body. No panic. No CPR. No 911.
Like this wasn't his first time watching someone die.
I bit my hand to keep from screaming. Blood seeped across the floor toward my bare feet.
Then he walked toward the closet.
I escaped that night. Barely. Ran three floors up to my neighbor's apartment—Dr. Neve Ashton, a trauma therapist. Beautiful. Warm. The kind of woman who made you feel safe just by existing.
She pulled me inside, locked the door, handed me tea.
"I called the police," she said. "They're on their way."
An hour passed. No sirens.
I looked at her. She smiled.

Five years. That's what I gave Vaelor, Crown Prince of the Dark Elves.
I was already dressed for the betrothal ceremony when I caught his voice through the gap in the council hall door.
"You're really going through with it? The human?"
"Of course. The Alliance has kept a blade at our throats for years. Their leader's apprentice, given to us in marriage—that puts it away."
"But if she suspects—"
"She won't."
"And Lyseth—"
"Lyseth is who matters. The human is manageable."
I didn't make it out of the courtyard. A blade came from the darkness before I could summon a defense.
When I woke up, I remembered everything. Aldric. Isara. The Alliance. Five years of roads, every step.
Just not his face.
Aldric's messenger stone was on the nightstand. Short, direct: Return to the Alliance. Political marriage. Orc Royal House.
I wrote back: Seven days.

I waited twenty years for my wolf.
She never came. No first shift at sixteen. No stirring at eighteen. Nothing. My parents crossed the continent chasing rare awakening herbs—moonpetal, silverroot, anything with a rumor attached.
None of it worked.
I died without ever hearing her voice. Throat torn open in my own bed by Brennan Falk, the son of my live-in caretaker.
That's when I finally learned why she never woke.
The "awakening blend" Dorene brewed me every night was laced with wolfsbane. Enough to keep my wolf buried forever. Enough to keep me weak, wolfless, and easy to kill.
And the awakening chamber my parents built for me—the one I was too heartbroken to ever set foot in—had been housing her entire family. Five rogues, living under my floor for over a year, eating my food, selling my herbs, waiting for the right moment.
After I died, they forged my exile papers. My parents flew home from an herb auction in Ashmoor to an empty house and a letter. They believed their daughter had given up and left the pack.
Then I opened my eyes. Three days before Brennan's fangs.
The first thing I did was text a witch about the awakening chamber.

My daughter's wolf has never woken. Until her first shift, one dose a season is all that keeps it alive. And I brew that dose myself and send it to the supply hall under the healers' guild seal.
This season, my husband's mistress took it from us at the supply hall and fed it to her own daughter in front of forty wolves. Then she pressed my girl's palm onto a silver bar, to prove we were the thieves.
"Save your tears for my man," she said. "Captain Roark Fenn."
That's my husband's name.
Neither of them knows what I did in the war. By moonrise, the whole pack will.

I thought I was driving into my mating ceremony. Instead, Calder's mother met the car with a tray — a silver collar lined with spikes, and a rusty pincer for pulling out my sharpest fang. Blackbriar rules, she said. Every Luna wears one. And Calder, the man who never once raised his voice at me back in the city, just stood there like all of this was perfectly reasonable. So I told the driver to turn around. That's when the logs came down across the road. My phone had no signal. Willa was bleeding. And Calder was crouched on the hood of my car, telling me I could walk into that pack hall on my own, or be carried in. He'd done his homework on me — my money, my bloodline, my dowry. All of it, except one thing. The bone whistle around my neck. And what happens when I blow it.