4537 Book(s) Related to ruby bridges goes to school: my true story

For three years, everyone at Spire Academy believed Liam loved me. Until I uncovered his secret plan: steal my academy recommendation to save Anna, and keep me waiting on the sidelines. He handed my future to another girl and threw me to a mad duke to be dissected. I escaped death by leaping into the Rift of Silence, only to be pulled from the abyss by Arnold, an ancient night lord. When Liam finally realized his sin, he begged for a second chance. But the girl who waited for him in the dark died in the rift. I have a new life, and I will never look back.

I died on the second Sunday of May.
Mother’s Day.
My biological mother, the top neurologist in the United States, was standing in front of my corpse.
She looked at the bedsores all over my body, at the ribs that had been stomped broken, and explained coldly to hundreds of cameras:
“Trash from the bottom of society, covered in needle marks like this, doesn’t deserve to dirty my dissection table.”
She didn’t know that the “social garbage” she called a pill-seeking self-harmer was the son she had abandoned ten years ago.
When the cold scalpel cut open my chest, an old photograph stained with black blood slipped out.
The moment she saw it, the woman who had stood above everyone else—
went completely insane…

Two hours before the apocalypse, my fiancée stole my gray wolf and giant bear and gave them to a rich second-generation, leaving me only a dying ornamental fish.
"Go and wait to die in the apocalypse with your worthless fish!" she laughed triumphantly, thinking she had seized an invincible trump card.
I almost burst out laughing on the spot.
In their past lives, they died too young and had no idea that without absolute power, mutated beasts would only tear their masters apart first! They also didn't know that the golden dragonfish she had discarded as trash was the true ruler of the late apocalypse!
As the crimson rain of radiation fell, I coldly fed the "Sea God" that had begun to emit an eerie glow. Since you're all eager to pave the way with your lives, then I'll gladly accept the ultimate evolutionary law of the apocalypse!

I’m Wren, hidden sole heir of Ravenwood Pack, living as a regular lone wolf at wolf academy. My roommate Brielle steals my exclusive pine pheromone, copies my relics, steals my elite quota and tricks my betrothed Alpha Kane with a fake royal identity. I challenge her to present the unforgeable Lunar Pearl at the ball. When my father, the pack Alpha, exposes her family’s theft, I reject the misled Kane and reclaim everything the imposter stole from me.

For three years, I paid so my sister could rebuild her life — her rent, her lawyers, her hospital bills, the shop she now runs in my name. Lucas, my fiance, always told me it was the right thing to do. I believed him, because believing him was easier than admitting how tired I was. I flew home two days early to surprise him. Instead, I opened my own front door and found my sister in his lap, wearing my robe, laughing in a voice I'd paid to keep happy for years. Ninety-nine empty perfume bottles stood along the wall — quiet witnesses to nights I never knew existed. Lucas didn't apologize. He asked me to be more understanding. My sister cried and called me cruel. I stood in the apartment I bought, surrounded by the people I built a home for, and realized I had never once been the one who got to be loved first.

A madman attacked the concert hall. I threw myself over my son, taking every blow meant for him. My spine shattered in three places.

My husband Arthur subdued the attacker and rushed us to the hospital—the picture of a devoted, loving spouse.

It was only after hearing his conversation with the doctor that I finally saw his true colors.

My crippling injury was merely collateral damage. My son Ethan? Nothing but a living cornea donor for Mia—the cherished daughter he had with his first love.

He treated my child like spare parts, never knowing Mia isn't even his blood.

After my mother remarried, my stepbrother Logan bullied me nonstop every day. I lived in constant agony, isolated and helpless, forced to endure all the abuse alone.
When I was close to giving up, Logan’s best friend Noah reached out to me. He was sweet and caring, bringing me much-needed warmth. I latched onto him blindly, believing he was my only savior and my last ray of hope.
Yet his kindness was all a lie, a cruel trap planned by him and Logan. He gained my trust just to betray and hurt me. My last hope crumbled completely. Broken and devastated by their deception, I cut off all ties and left this painful place for good.

For fifty years, I bathed in blood for my world, only to return home to find my wife dead and my daughter about to be sacrificed.
The High Priest stepped on my daughter’s head, branding me a traitor, and declared he would burn her to ashes. Scarred, broken, and with my magic depleted, I was bound to the pyre alongside her. Tens of thousands cursed us from below as the flames engulfed the stage.
Weeping, my daughter asked me, "Daddy, are you really a hero?"
I crushed the pendant on my chest.
Dragons, Dwarves, Berserkers—the million-strong allied army I had united over those fifty years descended across dimensions.
The High Priest slumped to the ground, trembling uncontrollably. "Who... who exactly are you?"
Staring into his eyes, I said only one thing:
"Dragons have reverse scales; touch them, and you die. You crossed the line!"

Selene thought she'd found true love with Alexander Morrison. She was WRONG—she was just a stand-in for Jessa, the woman he really wanted.

When Alexander and his twin brother Adrian's yacht exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, Alexander came home with Adrian's ashes, claiming to BE Adrian. His goal? To steal Adrian's wife Jessa—the woman he'd always loved.

Selene knew instantly he was lying, but when she told everyone, no one believed her. Alexander called her "crazy from trauma" and locked her away in a mental facility. She was PREGNANT.

They drugged her daily. After she gave birth, Alexander told her the baby died. She broke completely.

Three years later, dying in that white hell, Selene heard Alexander's final confession:

"I always loved Jessa. Adrian just got to her first. YOU? You were just her replacement."

"The kid's alive. I gave him to Jessa. He calls her Mom now."

Selene died full of rage—then woke up reborn, back to the moment Alexander walked in with that urn.

This time, she'd expose his lies and make him PAY.

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.

Ten years ago, my parents worked for the Bellamys. He was their driver. She ran the house.

Then came the crash. I watched them shove Nash Bellamy out of the wreck, and it killed them both.

That's where the claustrophobia came from.

He knew. He knew all of it.

Then at homecoming, I showed up in a dress that matched Camilla's. She was the girl he'd always wanted. So he shoved me into the abandoned supply closet backstage.

The lock turned. On the other side of the door, he and Camilla were laughing like it was nothing.

"I'm pretty sure she's claustrophobic."

"Two hours in there. She'll learn."

I clawed at my own hands until they bled, couldn't get any air, and ended up wetting myself in a closet a dog wouldn't sleep in.

When the door finally opened, he pinched his nose and laughed and said I was disgusting.

I pushed myself up the wall, inch by inch, and looked at the face I'd been looking at for ten years. And I didn't want to cry anymore. Not even a little.

"Nash. I'm done chasing you."

In my last life, my mother-in-law locked me in the attic, and my wife openly cheated on me with the neighbor. Even when I was dying of terminal cancer, they bled me dry until my very last breath! Now that I've been reborn, the extreme-heat apocalypse is just around the corner. In this life, I'm living for myself. I spend every last cent of my savings stockpiling three years' worth of supplies and building a heat-proof survival villa! Now I can sit back and watch my mother-in-law's family struggle to survive in the deadly heat. Beg on their knees for my forgiveness? No! I will never forgive them!

All I wanted was a quiet place to live. I drained my savings and paid eighty thousand extra for the one unit on the row with a private backyard.
On my very first day, I found my neighbor's son beating my new hydrangeas with a stick while his mother stood there filming him and laughing.
Bianca says the yard belongs to everybody. Her husband is vice president of the HOA board, so around here, whatever he says is the law.
I showed them my deed. I called the police. I sent a certified letter. Every single time the answer came back the same. This is a civil matter, ma'am. Maybe try being a better neighbor.
Then her son put a rock through my living room window, and the HOA fined me two hundred and fifty dollars for putting a lock on my own gate.
Fine. They want that gate open? It stays open.
I just made one phone call. A truck is already on its way.

I was forced by my father to fulfill an arranged engagement I'd never met face-to-face.

Pushing open the private room door, I found my fiancé Tristan celebrating his secretary Clara's birthday.

"Security! Get this beggar out of here!" Clara screamed, pointing at me.

When I revealed my identity, Tristan sneered coldly: "What bullshit engagement? I would never marry a woman like you."

Clara poured red wine over my head: "Kneel down and lick it clean!"

When I fought back, Tristan exploded in rage: "How dare you touch my woman? Hold her down!"

Four bodyguards pinned me down as Clara started a live stream: "Let everyone see this delusional bitch who doesn't know her place!"

They tore at my clothes while Tristan watched coldly, even urging them on: "Hurry up, let everyone see her true face."

Just as I was about to be completely humiliated, the door suddenly burst open—

"Do you have any idea whose daughter you're humiliating?

As the only mute player in this horror game, I thought I was screwed.

Turns out the boss knows sign language.

Thank God! Perfect!

Then he gets everything completely wrong.

I sign "help me," he reads it as "you're hot."

I sign "danger," he thinks I'm saying "I like you."

I sign "get lost," and he goes, "You want me to come closer? Okay."

The worst part? I curse him out in sign language, calling him a psycho pervert.

He just smiles and says, "Baby, you're so good at flirting. I can't even bring myself to kill you now."

Me: ...

My teammate whispers to me, "Please stop signing. Every time you do, he stares at you even more like a psycho."

My mom runs a laundromat, and that afternoon she had to step out for something urgent.
Before leaving, she made sure to remind me: don't forget to finish the load in machine number seven.
I found the old clunker tucked away in the back room and bent down to reach inside the drum, trying to straighten out the tangled clothes.
That's when my upper body suddenly wedged itself in tight—I couldn't pull back out no matter how hard I tried.
I was stuck there, ass in the air, frozen in the most humiliating position imaginable.
And that's when Matthew Bennett walked in—the college professor who always comes by to pick up his dry cleaning.
To my shock, he mistook me for a sex doll. His hot, thick dick pressed against my thighs...

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

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

His bodyguards, his dirty money, even the way he told her not to ask questions and just sit tight. She read all of it as devotion. And of course she had to drag me into it too, always with the same excuse: it was for my own good.

Last time around, her mess got me killed. Vincent's enemies mistook me for one of his people, and I died in a shootout that had nothing to do with me.

The second the blade opened my throat, all I could think about was her holding up a bloody knife, grinning, showing it off to me like a trophy.

"Margot, look. He gave me this. It means we're official now."

I remember feeling disgusted. I never thought that same knife would end up slitting my throat.

Blood pooled across the street while she hid in Vincent's arms, screaming, hands over her eyes. Later I heard her crying to someone, saying it wasn't her fault, that I just had bad luck.

I died inside her little romance fantasy. A nobody side character, wiped off the page without a second thought.

Then I opened my eyes, and I was back. Back to the afternoon it all started.

Five years in hell, my beloved and best friend joined hands to push me into the abyss. The savior I trusted was actually a deadly fraud. Reborn from despair, Vito came through the light. I tore apart the scumbag and the evil woman, settled all debts, broke free from the shadow, stepped into the light, and lived the rest of my life only for myself.

My husband's mistress sent me a video to rub it in, claiming she had just beaten my "pathetic, begging mother" bloody and kicked her down the stairs.
I froze, glancing up at my actual mother sitting right across from me, quietly sipping her coffee.
Bewildered, I zoomed in on the video.
When I made out the scar on the wrist of the woman lying in the pool of blood, a cold sweat broke out over my body. I frantically called my husband.
But he interrupted my plea with extreme impatience: "Shut up! Roxy was right to teach her a lesson. She was just taking out the trash for me!"
Since he insisted on indulging his precious mistress's death wish...
I wonder if he'll still be able to say she was right to teach her a lesson when he sees his own grandmother's corpse.

The day my all-powerful wife personally handed me over to the mob's basement, she was shielding my identical twin brother, furiously accusing me of destroying his ability to carry on the family line.
To compensate for my brother's "trauma," my parents stood by and did nothing. Using her influence, my wife pressured me to take his place at a black-market clinic, testing a lethal drug.
They thought I was just going to suffer some physical hardship, that after enduring these two weeks, everything would be happily resolved.
But they didn't know I had already been poisoned by my brother. I was dying.
I died in agony on the cold operating table. As my body was being gnawed and rotted by rats, they were happily vacationing by the sea.
Only when the lies were exposed did my wife kick down the hidden door. Holding my maggot-infested, decaying flesh, she wept until she vomited blood, then went mad and swallowed a bullet. My parents watched their family shattered and wept on their knees.

One of my employees went online and dragged me, claiming I'm making them sacrifice their health for a paycheck and forcing everyone to work over Thanksgiving.

Here's what actually happened. My company gives nine days off for Thanksgiving. Volunteer to work overtime, get triple pay, with a $500 daily meal stipend and a $5,000 bonus. No one gets penalized for not working.

The whole internet's tearing into me for making employees sell their lives for cash. So I give her exactly what she wants and send out a company-wide notice:

To protect employee mental health, the building gets locked and the power gets cut over Thanksgiving. No one is allowed to work for any reason. Anyone who does gets fired.

The minute that email goes out, the employees who were counting on overtime to pay their mortgages lose it. Now they're all crowded outside the building, begging me to open the doors.

"Happy anniversary, darling. Look what I brought you." My husband's snow-white python once felt like proof of his love—until I remembered dying with it wrapped around my throat. In my past life, I doted on that "gift" for an entire year, never once suspecting its true nature, while my husband and daughter quietly counted down the days until I stopped breathing. Reborn on the very night he presents that same box again, I swear this time will be different.

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.

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.

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.

My stepmother married my father because she mistakenly believed he was an Alpha, and that was the beginning of my tragedy.
In my past life, I was falsely accused by my stepmother, betrayed by my mate, and abandoned by my father, who refused to believe me and sold me to an elderly Omega. In the end, I died with injustice in my heart.
But heaven has granted me a second chance. I have returned to the very day my stepmother framed me for her miscarriage.
This time, I won’t let them have their way.
I have gathered my entire pack to make meatballs together, waiting to put on a spectacular show—exposing the scandal of my stepmother, Odessa, and my mate, Beta Peregrine.

My Alpha was the one who started the fire—he lit it with his own hands, ready to burn his own children alive, just so his little mistress Beta Sasha could become Luna without a hitch.

I ran into the flames, carrying two unconscious pups on my back, and jumped from the fifth floor. My palms were scorched, skin torn, flesh charred.

I thought saving his “future heirs” with my own life might earn me a word of gratitude.

But when I woke up, the tribe’s medic looked at me coldly and said, “The Alpha is with Beta Sasha. She was... frightened.”

That was the moment I finally understood—I wasn’t his fated mate, not their mother, not even part of the pack.

I was just a vessel on their path to power. A body—if it didn’t burn, it could still be used.

I went for a prenatal check-up, only to catch my beloved Alpha husband gently holding Omega Rosa’s hand through the crack in the door, whispering,
“Our pup looks perfect.”

He’s my husband.
She’s his childhood sweetheart.
And me? I’m the one they decided was expendable.

Later, he stood in the hallway and murmured,
“For the good of the family, I have to claim her pup—not yours.”

Rosa leaned in with a smile:
“Don’t be mad, Isabella. Once you give birth, we can raise your baby… as our adopted son.”

That was the moment I realized—being Luna meant nothing.
To them, I was just a pawn in a game of betrayal.

And the pup in my belly?
He was never meant to survive in a world this cruel.

"Our marriage is nothing but a deal," he said looking at the girl, her green eyes met his cold silver eye, and both of them glared at each other.
"For any rules you break, I will claim any part of your body," his gaze grew dangerously darker at his word.


Ashley Harlow was at the top of the world, living the perfect and luxurious lifestyle as the legitimate daughter of the well-known Daniel Harlow. But sadly, a one-night stand put an end to that and brought her life upside down and that of her family's name to the ground. To restore his family's reputation, she was forced into marrying Damien Albrecht, a young, ruthless, obnoxious, brutal billionaire and the head of a mafia gang in exchange for her father's company.
This book contains a trigger warning. Please read with caution.

“You seem to have forgotten that you’re not marrying a commoner, Alina. You’re marrying the prince of all vampires, so look alive and get me some coffee.”
Alina Deluca lives a normal life up in the Californian north. At least that’s what she makes the world believe. Locked within her hypnotizing emerald eyes are horrors she could never speak of, even if it killed her.
Erick Stayton, the vampire prince, is her nightmare. To her, he was no more than a cold, savage predator that lusted for her blood and took away everything she had during that one traumatizing night four years ago. Problem is, she is bound to be his bride.
Mustering every strength to set things right in her awry life, she gets embroiled in an ages-old feud and a struggle for power of mind-boggling proportions. Strangely enough, she finds herself connecting with Erick in ways she never knew she could. Suddenly, everything is not what it seems.
Is Erick the heartless monster Alina makes him out to be? Will a vampire law made eons ago be the undoing of the whole vampire race? Will heated passion bloom in these bloodiest of times?

When Annika is taken from her city and her parents and brother by a minion of the King of all Vampires, she expects that death awaits her and stills her mind in preparation.

So when she's chosen as the Vampire king's new human bride, Annika is given no time to prepare before she has to marry the King of all Vampires.

And just when she thinks that's all she will have to deal with, Annika realizes that she has to give an heir to the throne of Noctharys in two years. Her husband is supposed to be the most cruel king who murders humans and drinks their blood without regard, so why did he respect her wish to not consummate their marriage on the wedding night?

As Annika is thrust into the thick of Vampire court politics, she has to navigate the treacherous waters but she is not without friends or allies, and Annika is sassy, smart and just intelligent enough to always conquer her foes and every tribulation thrust in her path.

More so, her husband is starting to pay attention to her, and before she knows it, Noctharys changes from a placed she's trapped in to her home.

The King of all Vampires and His Bride is a fantasy, slice of life book full of friendship, intrigue and a slow budding love between a man who has only known darkness for centuries, and the woman who brings light into his heart.

My name is Charlotte. I'm the daughter of the senator of Seaside. I have grown up around the ocean my whole life. I have maids and servants who help me dress, and who cook for me. Im trying to escape an arranged marriage to an old, ugly senator. Mr Waterford. I tried to go to a witch in the woods, and somehow someone found out about it. They hanged her. I knew that the King of Pirates would visit her often, and some believed that he was a witch as well. I did not know. I have never meant the king of pirates. I had heard that he had died, and now his son was the king. On the night of my arranged wedding, I decided to run away. I ran to the nearest pub, where I met a mysterious stranger.
" What is a girl like you doing here?"
" Shhh, please don't say anything."
I try to get by him, and he stops and grabs me by the hand and drags me toward the docks. I recognize the pirate ship. I try to pull away from him, and he won't let me go.
" What are you doing?"
" Im taking you with me."
Little did I know that would seal my destiny. My view on what is wrong and right would change. I would be thrust into the world of witches ,pirates and mermaids.

Three years. He worshipped me by day and bedded her by night.
I saw everything. I felt everything—she made sure of that.
So on the night of his coronation, I severed our bond and walked away.
He bled. He knelt. He begged.
Too late.
When I wore white again, it wasn't for him.

In a suburban election season lit by police strobes and viral outrage, assistant district attorney Karen Hale is cast as the perfect villain when a little girl is found dead beside a swing set. As edited videos, staged grief, and buried secrets close in, Karen uncovers a chilling web of paternity, manipulation, and murder—where playgrounds, rain-slick streets, surveillance logs, and a child’s empty swing become the battleground of a dark domestic thriller.

In a modern city of flights, glass hotels, and surveillance footage, Nora—an artist still recovering from surgery—watches her marriage rot behind polished excuses. As she traces her husband’s affair through airport selfies, joint-account charges, voice recordings, and a staged fall on the stairs, humiliation hardens into precision. Cold, sharp, and deeply satisfying, this is a divorce reckoning lit by rain, evidence files, airport confrontations, and the moment a woman stops begging to be chosen.

In a decaying city apartment building, law-clerk Maya Carter is drawn to the sealed door of 5B—an address that should not exist, yet keeps receiving late-night deliveries and whispering back from the dark. Behind the rumors of a haunted unit lies a battered woman in hiding, and a chilling hunt led by men who weaponize authority, gaslight women living alone, and turn silence into a trap. Tense, claustrophobic, and razor-sharp, the story moves through dim hallways, yellow light under a door, bruised wrists, broken locks, and the fierce urgency of survival.

"I want to break off this engagement!" I stormed into his office, slamming the letter on his desk, my heart pounding with fury after being humiliated by his family's staff. Little did I know, the devastatingly handsome man staring back at me wasn't my fiancé at all—he was his uncle, Rex Sterling, who'd lied about being my betrothed to win me over.

What started as a forced arrangement exploded into a whirlwind of passion: lavish gifts, stolen kisses, and a secret wedding that made me Mrs. Sterling. But when the truth shattered our fairy tale at a family gathering—complete with a punch-throwing nephew and scandalized elite—I had to confront the beautiful lie that built our love.

I tricked my billionaire husband into signing divorce papers—he had no idea.

"Exam documents," I lied.

His ex-wife laughed. "Boring paperwork. Don't bother reading it."

He signed without even looking.

Three years of marriage. I thought he'd learn to love me. Ever since she came back, my dinners grew cold while I reheated them alone. I waited in our bed, night after night. I watched him drop everything and run to her with every phone call.

Then I found out I was pregnant.

That same day, I saw him at the hospital—holding her hand, asking about her baby.

I finally stopped waiting.

I left the estate at dawn. Left behind the jewelry, the designer clothes, the empty promises.

Then he showed up at my door.

"I know about the baby," his voice was raw. "I know about the accident. I know everything."

He looked at me like I was his entire world.

Three years too late? Or just in time?

The day he proposed, Atticus knelt before me, holding the Hale family's heirloom necklace.
I thought I had finally survived the ordeal.
After eight years of unrequited love, being humiliated by his sister, nitpicked by his mother, and mocked by the city's socialites for being unworthy of the Hales... Until this very moment, when he personally fastened the heirloom around my neck. Everyone saw it. I, Clara, was finally accepted by the Hale family.
Tears in my eyes, I said yes, thinking it was the happiest moment of my life.
But just days after putting on that necklace, bizarre red rashes crawled up my neck. My pale skin rotted away piece by piece, and my internal organs went into irreversible failure.
The most absurd part? The exact same day I started rotting, his dying mother miraculously cured her terminal illness, and his sister's half-destroyed face was restored to flawless perfection.
Disfigured and barely looking human, I threw myself off the Harbour Bridge—
I opened my eyes, and I was back on the day of the proposal.

That night, I was dragged into a parking lot and beaten until my hands could never hold a scalpel again.

I thought it was random. Until I heard my own brother and fiancé talking—

"Those thugs went too far, but the result works out, doesn't it? This time, the award will go to Charlotte."

Charlotte. The "poor orphan" my family adopted.

For twelve years, she stole my papers, my opportunities, my glory. And the two men I trusted most handed her everything on a silver platter.

They called me spoiled. Selfish. Difficult.

They even believed I started the fire that killed our parents twelve years ago.

But here's the truth: Charlotte started that fire. I was the one who dragged them out.

They thanked the wrong sister. For twelve years.

Now they want me dead.

Fine. Let Penelope Ashworth die.

I died on the day I was supposed to marry Grayson.
Because my sister Delilah had her heart "broken," my family decided to bring her to our farm in Ashwood to heal through horseback riding. The wedding was postponed.
I lay in the stable at the Clarke family farm, dialing my mother's number with blood-covered fingers.
All she said was: "What kind of game are you playing now? You think if you act pitiful we'll come running? Vivienne, enough!"
My fiancé Grayson was even more brutal: "It's just a postponement, not a cancellation. If you can't handle that, then let's just call the whole thing off—I'll marry Delilah instead."
This was the last time they would disappoint me.
And the last time I would call for help.
I lay in my own pool of blood, already without breath. They thought I was just throwing a tantrum, hiding somewhere to sulk. They thought if they ignored me long enough, I'd come crawling back to apologize.
But they didn't know.
I was already dead.

They pulled my husband Beckett’s car out of the Avery River at four in the morning.
I was sitting in the reception area of the Ardenvale police station, having waited all night. Everyone thought I was just the pathetic wife—the one who had been humiliated at her mother-in-law’s birthday banquet, went home early, and panicked when her husband never returned.
No one knew that from the moment I dialed 911, this was exactly the news I had been waiting for.
He was dead. And I was the one who made it happen.

My adopted sister, Cordelia, conspired with her biological mother to harvest my organs alive, yet she had the audacity to claim I paid thugs to rape her.
My biological parents didn't bother to ask for the truth. They cursed me, calling me a vicious bastard, and threatened to break my legs.
My fiancé, Caspian, coldly announced the cancellation of our engagement, declaring he would marry the very murderer who killed me.
I had been dead for exactly three days. No one cared. My body was rotting back in a moldy storage room.
Through it all, my soul was trapped in the manor, forced to witness this absurd farce.
But what they didn't expect was that when they finally learned of my death—
Everyone went completely insane.

My five-year-old son, Emrys, was poisoned by the deadly "Silver Eclipse." The only cure, Moonbloom Serum, had been seized entirely by my husband, Corvin, to save it for his nine-month-pregnant mistress, Melisande.
He froze all my bank accounts, forcing me to pawn the ring that symbolized my status as Luna and brave the dangerous black market just to secure the antidote.
But by the time I rushed back to the hospital, covered in blood, my child’s organs had already failed. He was gone.
When I threw the death certificate and divorce papers in Corvin’s face in despair, he just looked at me with mockery, accusing me of using our own flesh and blood to put on an act for his attention.
At that moment, all my love for him died completely. I took my son’s ashes, left the Ashmere pack, and decisively severed a mate bond that had tied us together for years...

My mother had no medical license, yet wealthy socialites lined up to hand her fat checks.
I often saw her lead those women into the treatment room, where agonizing screams would pierce through the locked door.
But strangely, those same women emerged radiant, as if they'd shed twenty or thirty years overnight, pressing stacks of cash into her hands with tearful gratitude.
What baffled me more was how she doted on the hired girls like her own daughters.
Yet toward me, her actual daughter, she was nothing but cold—always quick to criticize or strike.
Finally one day, curiosity won. I mustered the courage to peek through that door crack and saw what really happened inside...

I was murdered. My body was dumped on the riverbank.
The detective leading the case is Brennan Carter — my husband. He has sworn to find the killer of this "unidentified female." He doesn't know the victim is me.
I've been missing for seven days. My colleagues and supervisors keep calling Brennan to ask where I am. Dismissing it as a tantrum, he's spent the week doing one thing: celebrating his mistress Tessa's birthday.
It wasn't until my phone turned up at the crime scene that it finally hit him — the wife he'd wished would disappear might actually be gone.

The night I collapsed at my desk from acute appendicitis, my husband’s phone rang thirty-seven times. He didn't answer a single one.
When he finally strolled into my hospital room the next day, his excuse was that he had been entertaining clients all night and his phone was on silent.
"A multi-million dollar contract versus a minor surgery—which do you think is more important?" Nathan asked, adjusting his cuffs. "As the CEO's wife, I’d expect you to have some sense of the bigger picture."
I didn't say a word. I just nodded.
Not because I agreed with him, but because the first thing I saw when I woke up from anesthesia was his secretary's latest social media post: a sky ablaze with green aurora, and Nathan with his arm around her shoulders, his back to the camera.
Thinking I had finally learned my place, my husband looked thoroughly satisfied. He casually mentioned that once things settled down, he would officially hand over my position as Project Director to her, "so you can relax a bit."
But he didn't know.
He didn't need to wait for things to settle down.
I didn't want the position anymore. I didn't want his company. And him? I didn't want him, either.