2784 Book(s) Related to lyrics to drops of jupiter

At the Morello family’s Christmas dinner, I stood beside Vincent, waiting for him to announce our engagement.
Instead, in the very next second, he walked in holding a little boy and claimed him as his son.
And the woman he said he was going to marry? Scarlett Morello. The one he had always introduced as his “sister.”
The whole room erupted in applause. I stood there frozen, like a nail hammered into the floor.
Later, in his study, he took my hand and said, “Scarlett is dying. Late-stage breast cancer. She only has six months left. After she’s gone, I’ll marry you.”
But there was no guilt in his eyes. No love, either.
Then he told me to go to his villa that afternoon, to take care of the woman who was supposedly “dying.”
I opened the photo he sent me. Scarlett was lying in a hospital bed, pale-faced, an IV in the back of her hand.
A professional tennis player who had been playing in an exhibition match three weeks ago, and who had dropped three grand at Louis Vuitton on Fifth Avenue just five days ago.
But sure. She was “dying.”
At three in the morning, I was curled up by the front door of my apartment, crying so long I lost track of time.
Then my phone lit up. A text from an unknown number:
[Elena, I’m downstairs. When we were kids, you told me that once I controlled the docks on the East Coast, you’d marry me. The docks are mine now. Does that promise still stand?]
I pulled back the curtain and there he was. Ethan Vitale, my first love, leaning against the door of a black Cadillac, lifting a hand in a lazy wave.
Three years ago, when he left New York, he was only a Capo.
Now, he was the Don of the Vitale family.
He didn’t rush me. Didn’t pressure me to come downstairs.
He came for one reason only, to let me know he was back.
I wiped away my tears and texted back:
[It still stands.]
Because I wanted to see for myself just how long that woman could keep up her act.

Rye: I'm out for revenge. I just saw Lauren Blakewell on national TV. Twelve years after she and her con woman mother scammed my father and ruined our lives, there she was. Looking like a goddess. Engaged to the son of a U.S. senator. She and her evil mother never paid for what they did. But I’ve never forgotten. Now I’m going to DC and I’m out for justice. I’m Rye McAllister, heir to the former McAllister fortune, and I’m going to stand up for my family. Lauren will pay. One way or another, I’ll get her back. Lauren: I’m so close to freedom. So close. One more job, and Bliss will let me go. That’s why the sight of Rye McAllister is such a shock. Not because he was the subject of all my childhood fantasies. Not because he looks like a tough and sexy cowboy now. But because he can ruin everything for me. I have to stop him. Whatever it takes. I have to make him an offer he can’t refuse. A proposition he can’t resist. If I enjoy it too…that’ll be my secret. And I have more secrets than Rye can ever imagine.

I've married sixteen dead men for a living. My seventeenth husband just opened his eyes.
I was born knowing one thing: the dead can speak one last time — but only to a spouse.
So I marry dead men. Rich families pay me to wed their fresh corpses, carry the last words sealed inside me, and read the testament out before the heirs. Then I burn the marriage certificate, and the marriage ends at the grave. Starting price: six hundred thousand dollars.
This morning, the Crane heir drowned in his own pool. Twenty-eight, obscenely rich, not one word left behind. The family offered five million and a private jet. By my count — my seventeenth husband. By a wide margin, the handsomest.
I said "I do" to a corpse for the seventeenth time. Then I called for his last words.
Silence. Sixteen weddings, sixteen voices. Husband number seventeen had nothing to say.
Because my seventeenth husband just opened his eyes.

"Baby, lend me Stella for the movie."
When my fiancé Damon said this, I thought it was the most romantic thing ever. My guide dog starring in his Oscar-worthy film—what a perfect love story.
I'm Aria Sinclair, 26-year-old blind film producer with perfect pitch and endless money, but no eyes. So when he said "The press will go crazy for our story," I stupidly agreed.
Three weeks later, in the editing room:
01:47:23—Dull impact.
01:47:31—Familiar whimper.
01:47:35—Silence.
My perfect pitch never lies. That wasn't CGI—that was real impact. Worse, I knew that whimper. That was Stella, my guide dog, my eyes, my most loyal companion.
They killed her. For a goddamn trophy.
On premiere night, when Damon walked the red carpet with a strange German Shepherd, when I touched her paw and found no white star-shaped mark—
"This is not my dog!"
I broke down in front of hundreds of reporters.
"Honey, you're under too much stress," Damon said gently. "Maybe you need rest."
Whispers from the audience: "Poor blind girl..." "She really needs help..."
Just like that, I became the crazy one.
Abandoned by the world.
Betrayed by the man I loved most.
But they made one fatal mistake—they thought stealing my eyes would silence me.
Now it's time to let them hear what despair sounds like...
[Click to watch me destroy them both...]

To stop the merfolk from being slaughtered, I went ashore to seduce the boy I grew up with — Lucian Voss, now one of the world's top scientists.
He still had feelings for me. He kept me in his bed for seven days and seven nights, refusing to let go.
I woke from the haze of pleasure to a pair of pliers prying the scales off my back.
Lucian watched me arch in agony, his expression ice-cold.
"Mermaid scales can repair genetic defects. You don't mind sharing a few, do you?"
"After all, what your kind owes me is worth far more than a handful of scales."
Two years. For two years I watched him marry another woman.
He held my kind's lives over my head and forbade me to leave. Every few days, he'd pry the scales from my spine, grind them into powder, and feed them to his new wife Vivienne to strengthen her body.
He shackled my ankles and ordered me to stay up all night washing his bedsheets. I had to kneel outside their bedroom door, motionless, listening to them together until dawn.
When Vivienne got pregnant, she started complaining about the color of the scale powder.
"Honey, these last few have been so dull. Is she running out?"
Lucian glanced at me.
The look on his face — he was counting. Calculating how many scales I had left.
He hated me to the bone, yet every time I nearly passed out from the pain, he was the one who pulled me off the floor. Forced medicine down my throat, fingers clamped around my jaw until I swallowed.
"You're counting on the fact that I still care about you. So tell me — where are my parents?"
I stayed silent and let the contradiction hang there.
It wouldn't matter soon. I wouldn't have to keep that secret much longer.
A mermaid who stays on land for three years without returning to the sea will die. No exceptions.
And I had three days left.

I woke up the morning the contract was due, picked up the pen, and crossed out my own name.
Wrote my sister's instead.
Last time, I packed away every leather jacket I owned and let Stefano Mastroianni's stylist dress me in things that needed dry cleaning. I sat straight at his family dinners and smiled until my face hurt. I let him correct my posture in front of his mother like I was something he hadn't finished training.
I did all of it, and I still ended up in the ground.
So this time I gave him Chiara. Took Pier Nine from my father as the price, and got out.
He thought he was getting his perfect bride.
On the wedding day, he reached for her hands—and felt it immediately. Smooth palms. Not a mark on them. Not the hands of a woman who'd been gripping a steering wheel since she was sixteen.
He pulled the veil up.
Chiara looked back at him, flushed with triumph.
Stefano stripped the Mastroianni ring off her finger in front of every powerful family in the city, kicked over the altar, and put one question through the cathedral walls:
"Where is Tessa."

The night Declan Ashford announces his chosen mate, everyone in the pack expects me to show up and fall apart.
I don't go.
What I do instead: I'm sitting on the floor of Cael Voss's dorm room in a training jacket that isn't mine, asking whether his mattress is filled with rocks. Cael is Declan's packmate at the academy. His equal in rank. His roommate. The last person I had any reason to call tonight.
I called him anyway.
Here's what he doesn't know: I'm not actually Beta. My real rank was sold before I was old enough to understand what that meant. I've been suppressing it for years.
Here's what I don't know: he's had something of mine under his pillow for two years. Something small. Something I spent three days looking for before I gave up.
Neither of us has said anything about it yet.

My roommate put a Blood Binding Curse on me — my own bloodline power, along with every resource I receive, gets automatically rerouted straight to her.
My ex helped her set it up. For six months she lived off my bloodline playing noble princess, him always on her arm, while I walked around hollow. The harder I fought to prove myself, the more I fed her.
Then I died. Came back knowing everything.
Here's what I figured out: the curse reroutes everything I receive.
Including debt.
I went to a guild and borrowed a batch of elixirs. Opened the contract.
The debtor on the line wasn't me.

For six years, I wore Pack silver. I sold my blood. I scrubbed silver out of Pack den floors. I slept on a basement floor — all to pay off my mate's Pack debt and buy my brother's wolfsbane antidote.
Today, with the receipt finally signed, my brother looked at me and said:
"Seren, I was never poisoned. Our parents aren't dead either. The Rogue raid six years ago — I arranged it. The only wolf hurt that night was you."
My mate stepped up behind him: "I never lost my Pack rank either. I've been at the estate the whole time."
Then my parents — the ones I'd buried seven years ago — walked through the door.
The Pack physician had given me forty-eight hours left to live.
They were going to remember every single one.

I just got out of prison after three years, and my family wants me to go back in.
"It's only three days," they said. "You survived three years—what's three more days?"
What they don't know: I'm dying. The only thing keeping me alive is my mate bond. Three days away from Everett means death.
For three years in prison, someone sent me food every week. No note, no name. I thought it meant my family still loved me.
I was so grateful.
I didn't know it was my twin sister. I didn't know what was inside.

I spent five years loving Beckett Calloway.
When his ex-girlfriend died saving his life, I held him through every nightmare. When he said he "wasn't ready" for marriage, I waited. When he whispered "soon," I believed him.
Then her sister showed up. Crying about some terminal illness. Begging him to take care of her.
He let her move onto our private island—the one he promised would only ever belong to us.
He introduced her at the gala where he was supposed to announce our engagement.
He got her pregnant.
And when I told him she was lying about everything, he looked at me like I was the monster.
Then came our wedding rehearsal. She walked down the aisle in my dress. He slid his ring onto her finger. The chapel caught fire. I collapsed, bleeding.
He scooped her up and ran. Didn't even glance back.
So I burned my vows, deleted every trace of myself, and vanished.
This time, I wasn't coming back.

A hundred years ago, that curse was meant for him. I'm the one who threw myself in front of it.
It cost me my elven heart, shattered on the spot—and a name I could never wash off. Traitor.
I never argued. Because the moment I speak the truth, the curse goes straight back to him.
So I stayed. I became his blood servant and let him drain me, one bottle at a time, to feed the woman he'd waited a century for. I told myself that if I endured long enough, someday he'd see my heart for what it was.
Then the healer told me my heart had thirty days left.
And he walked in, knife in hand, to say his beloved needed more of my blood.
This time, I'm not enduring anything.
I'm going to give him back this heart—at the exact moment he's most sure he's won.

There are no unmated males in our pack.
Every she-wolf in Hollowfen is promised to someone when she turns eighteen. We just don't get to know who until we walk into the Choosing Hall.
Girls go in wearing white. They come out flushed, shaking, barely able to stand. Some laugh. Some cry. None of them talk about what happens inside.
My sister Thessaly turned eighteen this spring. Gran told her she couldn't attend the Choosing.
She went anyway. She came back on shaking legs, with blood between her thighs and a smile she couldn't wipe off her face.

The ultrasound photo caught fire slowly, curling at the edges before the flame swallowed it whole.
I watched it burn in front of my mother's grave.
Eight weeks. That was how far along I had been.
Three days ago, on the anniversary of her death, I came here to talk to her. To tell her she was going to be a grandmother.
Instead, I found my husband fucking his ex-girlfriend against the oak tree twenty feet from her headstone.
I lost the baby that night.

My husband never wore condoms with me. Said they ruined it for him. So I swallowed birth control pills for four years until they made me sick.
Then I found a half-empty box in his glove compartment. And a thong under his backseat.
That wasn't even the worst part.
The necklace I'd made from my mother's ashes—the one I'd been grieving over losing for a year—was dangling between his twenty-three-year-old trainee's tits. He stole it from our bedroom and gave it to her.
She caught me staring. She smiled.
When I confronted him, he slapped me. Then drove off with her crying in his passenger seat.
Her friends came to my hospital with a livestream, demanding I apologize for "bullying" her.
I led them straight to the parking garage.
They found her on a stretcher. Legs wrapped around my husband. No condom.
The whole internet watched.

After the wedding, my husband moved his dead fiancée's mother into our guest room. The whole town called it the kindest thing they'd ever seen.
Every morning, Dione made me a green smoothie. Her grandmother's recipe, she said. Good for the nerves.
I never drank a single one. I poured them all into the chicken feed.
In my last life, I drank them. One a day, for thirty days.
Then I started losing time. I would blink at breakfast and come back at dinner. I found notes in my own handwriting that I never wrote.
I begged Julian to take me to a doctor. He held my shoulders and smiled. "You're just tired, baby. Drink your smoothie."
On the thirtieth night, I fell asleep in my own bed, in my own body.
I never woke up. Someone else did.
This time, every glass went to Nugget, the smallest of my backyard hens.
And one night, a hen crowed in my backyard.
Hens don't crow. And we don't have a rooster.

In my last life, my boyfriend's childhood best friend handed out jars of homemade sunscreen on the boat ride to the island. I'm a marine bio major — one sniff and I knew the mix had something in it that could drive the island's feral hogs into a frenzy. I told everyone to throw them out.
They did. But Brynn didn't look at the group. She looked at me. Eyes red, jaw tight. "You just can't stand seeing people appreciate anything I do, can you?" She turned and ran into the woods alone.
We searched for her all night in a storm. By morning we found her body at the bottom of the cliffs.
A week later, at her memorial bonfire on the beach, every person who'd gotten hurt during the search turned on me. My boyfriend ripped off his bandage and showed his stitches. "If you hadn't humiliated Brynn in front of everyone, she'd still be alive."
Someone said I should burn for what I did to her.
Then hands on my back. The fire. I burned alive on the sand while seventeen people watched.
I opened my eyes. Salt air. Engine noise. I was back on the boat — the morning of the trip.

My brother Soren is a figure skating prodigy. Every dollar in our house, every hour, every scrap of attention — all his.
Me? I'm the kid who doesn't need to be seen.
The night before Nationals, I told my mom my stomach hurt so bad I could barely stand. She said I was making trouble. Dad told me to take a painkiller and tough it out. Then they loaded up the car and drove two hundred miles to watch Soren skate.
They didn't come home until Sunday night. By then, I'd been dead for over a day.
I called her. Again and again. She had her phone on airplane mode.
Now I'm a ghost, drifting behind their car on the highway home. They're laughing, complaining I didn't even text Soren a congratulations.
I wonder what their faces will look like when they walk through that door.

My husband told me our daughter was brain-dead. He put a pen in my hand and told me to sign the organ donation form. He said it was the merciful thing to do.
I signed.
Then I watched her heart get cut out and transplanted into another child — his mistress's son.
He'd been planning it for months. The fake diagnosis, the doctor who happened to be his college girlfriend, the night his mother lured me away from the hospital so they could drug my little girl.
When I found out the truth, he killed me for it.
But somehow, I woke up back at that desk. Same pen. Same form. Same lying face waiting for my signature.
This time, I'm not signing. This time, they pay.

I was a scholarship student with thirty extra pounds. Del Ashford had two hundred thousand followers and her family's supplement brand on every wall of the athletic center. First week of school, she decided we were going to be best friends.
She said she wanted to help me get in shape. What that actually looked like: I carried her product shipments up three flights of stairs, drafted her emails, and picked up her lunch from the place across campus that didn't deliver.
My roommates started calling me her errand girl behind my back. I let them.
She also introduced me to Beckett Hale. After that, things went the way they went.
She knocked my protein shake over and said I'd burned her. She planted her limited-edition earphones in my bag and told everyone I'd stolen them. The school opened a conduct review. My roommates stopped talking to me.

Beckett said I was the kind of girl who got a little attention and started thinking she deserved more of it.
I couldn't prove any of it. By spring, I was gone.
Some people just aren't built for this, Wren. You know that, right?
Del hadn't even been looking at me when she said it.
Then I opened my eyes and I was back at the party. The night she introduced me to Beckett.

The idea came from Cora.
She ran into the kitchen while I was making dinner, wrapped both arms around my waist, and looked up at me.
"Mommy, can we go to Grandma Ellen's? Just us two? Just us girls?"
"Why?" I asked.
She thought about it, very serious. "Because every time I wake up and you're not home, I miss you. Even when Daddy's there, it's different." A pause. "Grandma Ellen probably misses you just as much as I do."
Reid was leaning in the doorway. He smiled at me—that easy, certain smile—and said, "She's not wrong. You've been running on empty for months. Take the trip. I've got everything covered."
The flights were booked before I finished washing the dishes.
I should have noticed how fast that was.
The call I made the night before we flew home changed everything. I thought I'd hung up.
I hadn't.

In my last life, I fell for every word out of Ryan's mouth.
To save his shot at attending physician, I volunteered to take the fall for his medical malpractice case.
My license was revoked. I went from being a surgeon to being a housewife trapped in his family's home, wasting ten years of my life chained to a kitchen stove.
I thought my sacrifice would earn me his gratitude for the rest of our lives.
Turns out, he'd been sleeping with that doe-eyed little nurse, Lily, for God knows how long.
When years of exhaustion finally caught up with me and my heart gave out, I collapsed on the freezing basement floor.
My husband Ryan was upstairs, arms wrapped around Lily, sleeping in the master bedroom we'd bought with my dowry.
"That bitch is finally kicking the bucket. Once she croaks, this house is ours."

My mate died in a border skirmish with an enemy pack.
The woman he loved, Wren, died with him. She came from the pack we'd hated for a hundred years.
They left me two sons who weren't mine by blood.
Eighteen years passed.
I raised those boys like they were my own. I even got them into the Alpha King's Guard — the kind only a handful of pups make in a whole generation.
But the day they were chosen, my mate, dead all these years, walked back through the door with his forbidden lover.
She smiled at me like we were old friends.
"Thank you for turning our sons into the pride of the Guard."
"We couldn't have stayed hidden all these years without you."
Then my mate said he wanted the bond broken. He wanted her as his mate instead. He wanted his sons back.
I didn't cry. I didn't argue.
I just smiled.
"Okay."

Five years, I bled for Dario. Took a bullet for him. Cleaned up his dirtiest books. Drank myself into the ER just to keep his bosses sweet.
Then he slid divorce papers across the table and told me to sign. His mistress was pregnant; the family needed a "proper" heir, and I was in the way. So I signed—and let him strip me of everything I'd built.
Three hours later, a rival crew ran his car off the bridge. He survived. But he will never father a child again.
Now he's pouring a fortune he can't spare into his mistress's baby, showing off his "heir" to every boss in New York. He thinks his bloodline is finally safe.
He has no idea whose child he's really raising. And I'm the only one who does.

For two years I was Easton's secret girlfriend. I paid his tuition. I took a beating from the guys who came for him. I gave up my MIT interview so he could chase what he wanted.
Then I heard him behind a half-open door, kissing my best friend.
"Last life she clung to me like a lunatic. This life I'm not making that mistake again."
Last life. They'd both been reborn—come back with every memory of a life I don't even remember living—and somewhere in it, they'd decided I was the desperate girl who ruined everything.
Fine.
I went back to my desk, pulled the MIT acceptance I'd been about to turn down, and signed it.
Easton, I'll let you have her.
He spent two lifetimes sure he was the smart one. He's about to find out which of us was holding back.

My boss and I had one night. A mistake—or so I told myself, right up until I found a file in his office with my photo labeled "Potential Breeder," tucked inside a folder marked Pack Hierarchy. Same night the pregnancy test came back positive.
His eyes were glowing gold when he walked in.
I ran before sunrise. New name, new city, a life built from nothing.
Five years later, my son stops aggressive dogs in midair with his bare hands. He wakes up at 3 AM telling me someone is coming before the car even turns onto our street. His eyes flash gold when he's angry, and his voice makes grown men step back without knowing why.
The most powerful werewolf in the western territories has been looking for us for five years.
He just found our street.

My neighbor Beck Morrow was the best high school point guard this state had seen in years.
The night before the state championship—three college scouts in the stands—he decided to stay home with his girlfriend instead. She wasn't feeling well.
I called his coach.
He played. He got the scholarship. He built a company worth eight figures before he turned thirty, and I spent five years writing every algorithm that company ran on.
He repaid me by throwing a ball at my head during a training session. Then his lawyers sent a letter explaining that I had no legal claim to any intellectual property developed under my employment contract, effective immediately, and that my position was being terminated.
Then I woke up. It was the first week of senior year again.

On our wedding night, my husband wanted to play a game.
Trade secrets. The kind that could destroy you if they ever got out.
He went first.
"I hurt a girl once. At a ski lodge. She shouldn't have been in that room. But she was."
He said it like a parking ticket. Then he took a sip of whiskey and moved on.
My turn.
"I killed someone," I said. "Do you believe me?"
He laughed. He thought I was joking.
He really shouldn't have kissed me after that.

At last season's Grand Olfactory Gala, Vivienne Harrow presented my formula before I could reach the stage.
I confronted her. She asked where my proof was.
I had nothing. The formula had never left my head — no notes, no records, nothing. I didn't know how she'd gotten it.
I died not knowing.
Then I opened my eyes, and she was already reaching for me.
"Not this time."
I stepped back.

Ethan Calloway and I had been together for eight years. Married for three—or so everyone thought.
We had the ceremony. The hospital chapel, the white dress, his boss giving a toast. But we never made it to City Hall to sign the papers. He promised we would. Eighteen times.
Every time, something came up. Or rather, someone came up—his young protégée, Chloe. She needed him at the hospital. She needed him at the conference. She needed him at dinner.
I drank on his behalf at every work function. I wrote the surgical plans he presented as his own. I waited in an empty apartment while he drove her home.
The nineteenth time he tried to reschedule, I didn't argue. I didn't cry. I just booked a one-way ticket to the one city he'd never follow me to.
He made eighteen promises. I only needed to break one.

At four, they shattered both my legs. At six, they ruptured my left eardrum. At seven, they took my right eye—said I'd earn more sympathy begging blind.
After twelve years in hell, my billionaire parents finally found me.
The girl who stole my life grabbed my wrist, nails digging into my skin. "Dare take what's mine, and I'll break whatever's left of your legs."
I smiled, unclipping both prosthetics to show empty pant legs. "I don't have legs left."
She was terrified.

Ten years ago, my mate faked his death in the war and ran off with his childhood sweetheart.
No goodbye. No contact since.
All he left me were two things — a debt of six hundred and eighty thousand, and a notice declaring him lost, stamped four years later by people who'd never met him.
The bank took our den. I moved into a shared burrow-flat at the edge of the settlement.
Three jobs after hours. Sold blood. Scrubbed latrines. Tested tonics for the healers until my nose stopped working right.
Ten years to pay off the debt. A desk at the Missing and Fallen Registry Office, once the ceasefire finally came.
My first case file was a man the law had already declared dead.
He said he'd been young and reckless. Walked out. Never looked back.
Now his family's land was due a war reparations payout, and he needed his name restored to collect it.
I stared at the name on the form. Recognized it instantly.
Smiled.
"Insufficient documentation. Application denied."

My two best friends killed me over a girl who'd been dead six months.
Lila Bishop never got a single offer. So she cried and clung until Cole and Wes were ready to throw away their full rides and follow her to nowhere. I tried to stop them — they called me jealous and cut me off. So I went over their heads. I called their moms. I fixed their signing papers myself, the night before the deadline.
Six months later Lila was gone, and they blamed me. They dragged me to the roof of our gym and threw me off.
Then I opened my eyes — three months back, the day it all started.
Last time, I broke myself trying to save them.
This time, I'd let them jump.

On his deathbed, my husband Marcus confessed he'd swapped our baby with his mistress Chloe's seventeen years ago. Staring at his tearful, repentant face, I barely held back a laugh—I'd uncovered this secret sixteen years prior. I'd quietly swapped my real daughter back, sending his bastard to her cruel biological mother. Seventeen years of patience wasn't weakness, but waiting for the perfect moment. Now he's dying, Chloe's panicking, and my half-lifetime revenge? It's only just starting…

That December night, his first love and I were both rushed to the ER.
Two pregnant women. One operating room.
My doctor husband took three seconds to decide.
"She's an athlete. She can handle it," he told the nurse, then wheeled Sienna into surgery.
Leaving me—eight months pregnant with his baby—bleeding alone in the hallway.
When the nurse called begging him to come back, he said: "I'm at the pharmacy getting supplies for Sienna. Twenty minutes."
Twenty minutes later, I'm still alive.
He wishes I wasn't.

After being reborn, my cousin and I swapped mates.
Last life, she married Kaelen Thornfield — the coldest Alpha in the West. Fifty years together and he never marked her. Not once. His childhood "friend," an Omega with a PhD in crying on command, made sure of that. My cousin faded into nothing. Unmarked. Unloved. Invisible.
Me? I married a man who couldn't stand the sound of my voice. Eleven months. Done.
This time, I took the western contract. Drove three days across the country in a beat-up truck, blew a radiator in the middle of nowhere, and rolled into his pack's territory covered in engine grease and smelling like a gas station.
His little Omega took one look at me and wrinkled her nose.
She has no idea what's coming.
I don't do tears. I don't do subtle. And when some girl sobbed at my mating ceremony about how jealous she was of me — I grabbed my Alpha by the collar and sank my teeth into his neck.
In front of the entire pack.
Without asking.

I was kidnapped at five. Found at sixteen. Dead at nineteen.
My father is the Alpha of Duskmere. My mother is the best healer in the pack. The night I was murdered, they were at my adopted sister's awakening ceremony—the miracle they'd prayed for. After a lifetime born wolfless, a wolf finally woke in her chest.
That wolf was mine. Torn out of me while I was still breathing.
For three years I lived under their roof with no pack bond and no one saying my name. They slapped me for things she did. They called me selfish for refusing to give her a kidney I'd already lost. And when I went missing, nobody looked. Dad said if I died out there, I had no one to blame but myself.
Then the enforcers found a body with no pack scent, and called in the Alpha and his Luna to examine it.
They stood right over me.
They still don't know.

The Blood Moon Festival ended the night Caelan Voss stood up in front of every faction in Aurevael and announced he only wanted one person.
Her name wasn't mine.
The other consorts took their gold and went home. The Ironpact warriors headed back to their barracks. The Sylvari delegation slipped out before the second toast. The Covenant scholars packed their notes. Reunions. Celebrations. The kind of night the holiday was made for.
I had nowhere to go.
The mark on my inner wrist had always been warm. Just a low, steady pulse—easy to ignore after a few years, like a clock you stop hearing. I pressed my fingers over it out of habit.
Cold.
The contract was over. Twenty-one years, four failed routes, and now this. The ancient binding that had pulled me into this world had made its verdict.
I went to find a rope.

My pack's golden girl—my adopted sister—vanished. On my eighteenth birthday—the day my wolf should have awakened—my parents dragged me to a witch.
"Show us what you did to her."
Fine. Let them look.
Let them see who drugged me the day I came home. Who stole credit while I bled. Who smiled while planning my destruction.
They chose their precious Rosalie over me for three years.
They wanted the truth?
They were about to choke on it.

The new member posted a yacht contract to the club group chat on her first day in. The caption read: Thanks for the birthday present, Dad 🥂
Ten seconds later she deleted it. Breezy apology. Oops, wrong group.
I looked at the photo one more time before it disappeared. I didn't check the numbers. I looked at the name painted across the bow.
It was my mother's name.
The boat was mine. My father had told me about it a week ago.
The chat didn't care. Which family is she from? Ninety-six feet of custom teak. Sienna, you dark horse.
I asked, quietly, if she'd share the registration number. I wanted to hear what she'd say.
My own husband stood up from two desks over and tore into me in front of every member in the room. Told me I was jealous. Told me I was an embarrassment. Told me to know my place.
Later that week, he broke into my safe. Took the diamond my father had given me for my mother — and put it around her neck.
That night my father's encrypted voice memo came in from somewhere at sea. One minute long. The last line was this:
"Find your mother's necklace. I can't wear her myself. I need you to wear her for me."

My betrothed, Theron, gave me a unicorn — the highest honor our court could grant a lady.
I had it hitched to a dung cart and sent through the lower city.
Only because I had lived this life before.
Last time, I was proud of that creature. I rode it to every hunt, every procession, and people said no beast so pure had ever chosen a rider. My light was the brightest among the elves. Then, season by season, it went out. I withered, I burned away in my own bed, and everyone wept over how strangely the great Lady Eldraine had aged.
I thought it was some illness. I begged every healer in the realm. None of them found a thing.
I only learned the truth after I died.
My spirit watched a girl climb out of that unicorn's body. Elowen. The pale, dying little thing the whole court called a saint — and the woman Theron had wanted all along. She was wearing my light now — my glow, my color, my stolen years. She was radiant. She was alive. And she was in Theron's arms, where I used to stand.
"The binding held," she whispered to him. "Every time she rode me, I drank a little more. Her light. Her magic. Her life. It's all mine now."
Theron didn't even glance at my body. "She gave you her life," he said. "She should be glad."
So I laughed, when I woke again on the morning he led that unicorn into the hall.

I waited five years for a heart transplant.
My mother—the Luna of our Pack, the healer everyone worships—gave it to someone else.
An orphan girl she took in. A girl who now calls her "Mom."
Ivy got my heart. She got a wolf. She got a mate and a wedding so grand the whole Pack attended.
Me? I watched from the corner, still dying, while my mother smiled for the cameras and accepted praise for her "selfless sacrifice."
When I finally snapped at the ceremony, she slapped me. Told me to apologize. Said I was embarrassing the family.
I'm her actual daughter. I'm the one who can't shift, can't feel a mate bond, can't survive another six months.
But sure. I'm the problem.
They wanted me to stay quiet and die gracefully.
I chose to make sure everyone sees who their perfect Luna really is.

My husband used my cottage to cheat on me. Fine. I found out, I drove three hours, and I walked into my own house to find his mistress wearing my dead grandmother's sweater.
She told me to leave.
He showed up, kissed her in front of me, then grabbed my arm and shoved me into the door frame.
That's when I had the asthma attack. He's known about my asthma for five years.
My inhaler rolled across the porch floor. His mistress picked it up, held it out, and told me to sign a statement saying I'd caused all of this. Then she'd give it back.
He looked at me on the ground and said: She's performing.
I'm sitting on the floor of my own grandmother's house, gasping, and my husband is telling the neighbors I'm acting.
Nobody thought to ask whose family manages every property on this coastline.

My foster brother Caelan swore he'd only ever marry me. Even though I'm the only human in a pack of wolves, for eighteen years he and his brother Ronan made me feel like I belonged.
Then Mira showed up—and suddenly she was his "fated mate."
I watched him bond with her while I choked on poisoned incense and collapsed. No one caught me. They were too busy wiping her tears.
Within a week, she had my room. My job. Eighteen years of memories—trashed.
They said I could never leave them.
They forgot about the vampire prince who's been waiting at the border for three months.
He never forgot me.

My downstairs neighbor tagged me in the building group chat at ten p.m.
His wife just had a pup, he said. Pups need moonlight, he said. So starting tonight, my private moon terrace belongs to his family.
He'd even pay me rent. Ten dollars a month.
For the terrace of a three-million-dollar penthouse.
When I said no, he reminded me he wasn't just my neighbor. He's my supervisor at the Calloway Group, and my probation review sits in his hands. Hand over the door code, or I'd never survive at that company.
He kept saying it. I can crush you at the Calloway Group.
Funny.
My mother owns the Calloway Group.
I was going to let him dig his own grave quietly. Then his family broke into my home, walked up to the one thing on that terrace worth half a million dollars—
And smashed it.

I'm Nora. Size 18. Transferred to my fourth school in four years. And on my very first day, the hottest guy in class leaned over and told me my seat had a weight limit.
That was Ethan Cross. Lacrosse captain, sharp jaw, zero empathy. He made it his personal mission to remind me I was fat — in the hallway, at lunch, in gym class, wherever he could get a laugh.
Then I found his sketchbook.
He'd left it open in the art room. I should've walked away. I didn't. I turned the page, and there I was — my body, my face, my hands — drawn over and over like he couldn't stop.
None of it was a joke. None of it was ugly.
So what the hell am I supposed to do with that?

My ex-husband found me selling hair clips at a flea market. Rosie was asleep in her stroller.
"Come home. She's too young for this."
I said yes.
After that, I stopped checking his phone.
Rosie stopped crying when the other girl took her toys.
He spent the night at Simone's—we didn't call.
We ran into them at the mall—we walked the other way.
We finally became what he always wanted. Easy. Quiet. No drama.
So why is he the one who can't sleep now?
"Why don't you get mad anymore?"
"Rosie, why won't you ask me to stay?"

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.