Best Already Late Stories & Novels Collection

"Thanksgiving's at Garrett's new place this year!"

My sister Paisley dropped a location pin in the family group chat, followed by a string of party emojis. My fiancé, Garrett, ran a real estate company, and the pin pointed to a model home they'd just finished building.

That evening, I grabbed a pumpkin pie fresh out of the oven and caught a rideshare to the address. When we got there, the driver...

He made me wait ten minutes. My mother died in those ten minutes.
For eight years, I gave Damien Cross everything. My career. My paycheck. Every deal I ever closed, signed in his favor. I chased him through college and followed him to Chicago. In thirty days, I was supposed to become Mrs. Cross.
That same day, he left me waiting at my desk to drive his best friend’s little sister to the doctor. Al...

In the ten years I was with Chase Holloway, I got used to him "forgetting" things.

The night he proposed, he showed up empty-handed and said the ring was still at the jeweler's. The day we went to City Hall for our marriage license, he dug through every pocket of his coat and said he'd left his paperwork at home. On our wedding day, he didn't show up at all.

I found out later he'd been in the ba...

After five years of mopping floors at Harrington Tower, I finally had enough saved for my son Theo's heart surgery.

I got off work early that day, folded my new paycheck in half twice, and tucked it into my inside pocket. I practically ran the whole way to the hospital. I wanted my husband, Beckett Reid, to be the first to know.

The door to the family lounge wasn't shut all the way, and I could ...

Love wasn't free in our family. It was literal currency.
My sister, Stella Belle, and I both had a Kinship Savings Jar. 
It held the love and care we received from our families, which could be traded for anything in the Life Exchange Shop.

When I was six, I bought my mom’s life back from cancer by selling away the pain of her carrying me for nine months.
When I was thirteen, I bought my brother a...

I was the orphan Hayes Holt pulled from the foster system, the girl he raised for eight years.
In my past life, I drowned in his suffocating tenderness, mistaking his guardianship for love. When he brought Josie Rowe home and announced their engagement, I snapped.
I threw a hysterical fit, screaming my unrequited love until the scandal bled into every gossip rag in New York.
My reward was his col...

On the day Carter and I remarried, our son Finn had been in the hospital for forty days.

The line at City Hall was long. Carter spent the whole time with his head down, texting, wearing a smile I hadn't seen on him in years.

The person on the other end was Wren Dalton, an art student getting by on a scholarship and part-time jobs. She'd turned Carter down three times. When he sent her a full set...

Ten years into my marriage, I'd traded my paintbrush for a spatula and turned into Mrs. Holloway.

Ever since my sister Brooke moved in, my husband Bennett and my daughter Lucy had picked up a habit. Anytime Brooke and I disagreed, they put it to a vote.

On my birthday I wanted steak. Two hands went up for the salad bar Brooke liked. When I hadn't slept in weeks and wanted to see a therapist, the...

Typically, brides swap bouquets for good luck when wedding motorcades cross paths.
But in Liam’s Southern hometown, they had a twisted tradition: they swapped brides.

When our limousines met bumper-to-bumper, Kinsley leaned right past me. She pressed a lingering kiss to my fiancé’s cheek.
"Hope you don't mind, Rachel," she purred with innocent malice. "I’m stealing your groom."
The groomsmen ho...

My ex-boyfriend wrote a hit song about me. He told the whole world I dumped him for being poor, painting me as the heartless ex who took nothing but his dog when I left.
I let him believe it. It was easier for him to hate me than to watch me decay.
A year later, he was on national television, his arm wrapped around a beautiful new starlet. When the host brought up our sudden breakup, Evan laughe...

I killed myself because I couldn't survive another day inside Adrian Vale's hatred.

At the funeral home, he took my urn, smiled and said I didn't deserve a grave, or a headstone, or a single person standing over me pretending I'd been worth something.

Then he opened his hand and let me fall. He walked through my ashes without looking back.

Less than a week later, the same man would return to...

My family ignored my calls while I was dying in our basement. They thought I was trying to ruin my younger sister's graduation.
That night, my brother finally came looking for me. My sister wanted the cookies I used to bake for her.
I was right beside him when he demanded that I come home.
He couldn't hear me. My body was still downstairs.

To escape the absurd arranged marriage with the Duke of Hawthorne—a ruthless billionaire who demanded absolute physical perfection around him and was rumored to fire servants just for being plain—I spent years painting on hideous freckles and a sickly yellow complexion.
I hid my true face beneath outdated tweed suits until Earl Julian Sutton knelt in my rose garden.
"Georgina, I don't care about y...

In my last life, I needed five million dollars to pay for my mother’s treatment. So I signed a three-year marriage contract with Everett and became the Mrs. Thorne everyone envied.

But throughout those three years, his heart belonged to Celeste, the woman he had never gotten over after she left for Europe.

She came back the day we buried my mother.

The day I was diagnosed with terminal cancer, ...

I was born the true heiress of the powerful Voss family, but after being swapped at birth and failing to awaken my wolf, I was branded as worthless trash.
For six years, I worked as a "Scavenger" in the underground slums. I hauled mutant corpses, endured silver poisoning, and swallowed cheap suppressants—all to pay off my husband’s massive debts and buy the cure for my brother’s fatal blood diseas...

For the Adventure Club’s fall break camping trip, I was in charge of organizing all the food for three days and two nights.

Pine Hollow was deep in the mountains, three hours from the nearest town, with no place nearby to buy supplies.

I contacted Prime Harvest, a supplier my family owned. The menu included wagyu beef, antibiotic-free chicken breast, and organic salad, all at cost. I quoted ever...

My husband doesn't love me, and he certainly doesn't love our son.
On the day Toby was born, Graham didn't even look at him before tossing him into my arms.
For seven years, he kept our marriage a secret and strictly forbade our boy from calling him "Dad."
Then, his first love returned.
The usually cold and distant billionaire came to our rundown cabin dead drunk, a rare, tender smile on his face...

After giving birth to my son Finn, crippling postpartum depression and searing nerve pain left by my difficult labor reduced me to nothing more than a walking corpse.
My husband Preston had once sworn to stay by my side “in sickness and in health”, yet every bit of his patience had long since burned away.
At the Thanksgiving feast, my hands shook and spasmed. I knocked over the scalding gravy, dr...

Rhett and I hated each other for ten years.

He hated me because my father drugged his drink and arranged for me to end up in his bed.

He was forced to marry me. Kendall, the stepsister he cherished, couldn’t handle the shock and ran away. She was later kidnapped and murdered outside the city.

I hated him for blaming everything on me. He never touched me, never looked at me, and never spoke a si...

I spent ten years keeping our severely allergic son alive and gave up my award-winning career to support my husband.
My reward? My son killed my unborn baby, and my husband labeled me "mentally ill."
Dr. Steve Harrington, the brilliant psychiatrist, thought he was a genius.
He secretly used me as a lab rat for his experimental detachment therapy, trying to wipe away my "paranoid jealousy" so he ...

I built my husband Evan's Hollywood acting empire alongside him, and we kept our marriage hidden from the public. I once believed our bond was unbreakable. Until I checked his car's navigation history.
For an entire year, every Wednesday night, my movie-star husband lied about working overnight film shoots. When I followed the GPS route to its destination, I found the apartment of his rival actres...

On the third day after my death, Massimo got the call.
His arm was around another woman. He didn't even flinch.
"Dead is dead," he said. "Burn her, then call me."
He came to the crematorium two hours late. He took my ashes, dropped them on the floor, and stepped on them like they were dirt.
"Tell Tess," he said, "if she's still alive, she can crawl back and beg. If she's really dead, I'll dig her ...

For three years, Ivy Green was Gabriel Black’s quiet omega wife.

She loved him, healed him, and built a home around a man who never truly saw her.

To Gabriel, their marriage was convenient. Controlled. Temporary.

Then his fated mate returned.

After one final night of passion, Gabriel asked Ivy for a divorce and thanked her for the past three years—as if her love had been nothing more than a se...

On the first day of college, most freshmen worry about making new friends. I had to figure out how to pay my own parents for a plate of lunch.
With every penny of my tuition and living expenses strictly controlled by them, I stood empty-handed in front of their campus Gospel food truck. But my mother didn't want cash.
She wanted a public spectacle to cure my "sinful depression."
My younger sist...

I died on the fourth night after Thanksgiving.
A blizzard had swallowed the entire town, and I was locked in an unheated attic.
My broken leg had turned black with infection. Every breath felt like swallowing broken glass. I tore four fingernails from their beds, but I still couldn’t claw my way through the door.
With the last of my strength, I held my old iPad against the frost-covered window.
O...

Elara, the younger twin. Every time my sister falls ill and screams in agony, my Alpha father and mother, obsessed with their twisted idea of fairness, force me to feel every bit of that same searing pain.
Once, they cast me out into the wilds. On the brink of death, I stumbled across a fey altar. It promised anything could be traded. Without thinking, I bargained away my wolf spirit and my health...

“I only married you because Tara was gone but now that she's back, I want to divorce you!” Lucas told Elena. She couldn't believe her ears, this was the same man she loved that she risked her career for him.

Elena Rhodes married Lucas because he was her first love but their marriage was nothing to write home about and that worsen when Lucas first love came back.

Elena was carrying Lucas child...

My name is Evelyn. I grew up in the slums. Now, I'm the wife of Victor De Luca, head of New York's most feared mafia family.
Outsiders say I left him for money when he had nothing, then shamelessly came crawling back once he rose to power.
Only Victor and I know the truth. He paid five million dollars to drag me back, chain me here like a dog, and lock me away.
He married me, trapped me in this es...

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 abandon...

We'd agreed to spend summer break in the Hamptons. Right before break started, my boyfriend suggested we hit the water park out in the suburbs first, just to blow off some steam.

I thought it was a date. Just the two of us. But when I get to the gate, my best friend Sienna is standing there in a string bikini.

I tell her that's not safe to swim in. Her face goes cold and she tells me to mind my ...

The Solarien family had two daughters.
Aurelia, the younger, was their pride and joy, soon to marry Duke Lysander beneath a reputation she had never earned: the so-called genius enchantress.
I, Vespera, was nothing more than the family's hidden workhorse, locked in a basement and valued only for what I could produce.
For years, I churned out enchanted gear to fund their lavish life while they used...

When the bridal bouquet landed directly in my arms, the entire reception erupted.
All eyes shifted to Elias, the man I had loved for seven years.
"Propose! Put a ring on it!" the crowd chanted, pushing him toward me.
My heart raced. I thought my endless waiting was finally over.
Instead, Elias stepped up, smiled... and pulled the flowers right out of my hands.
He turned around and shoved them ...

Everyone says I'm the woman Jasper loves most.

But only I know that in his heart, I've always come second to Sadie.

Seven years ago, I shoved him out from under a collapsing rig and shattered my right ankle. I never skated competitively again.

He held me and swore that the day he won the Grand Slam, he'd marry me in front of the whole world.

I believed him. So I learned to be his support crew....

The night my childhood fiancé humiliated me in front of our entire senior class, I didn't cry.
I just went home and made two decisions.

Lose the 60 pounds.
Secretly reject my Princeton acceptance.
I erased his number, packed my bags, and vanished from his toxic orbit. Nathan thinks he won.
He thinks he finally shook off the "burden" his parents forced on him.
But what happens when the ...

For ten years, I drew only black stones from the moon-bone box.
My parents called it the Moon Goddess's will, while every white-stone reward—from the choicest meat to new cloaks, even a single word of praise—went straight to my white-furred, cherished younger sister Luna.
On my twelfth birthday, I tried to cheat during the Hearth Vow Night. My mother caught me red-handed, locked me in my bedroom, ...

A mouth after my best friend Laura jumped to her death following a rape, I was dragged onto a makeshift stage in St. John's High auditorium by a mob of vengeful students.
They accused me of protecting the real rapist—of being complicit in driving Laura to suicide.
My boyfriend Zayne Spencer, also Laura's childhood friend, was coldly pressing the sensors of a "memory extractor" against my temples.
...

I gave up my Harvard Ph.D. and lived in the slums for five years as a corpse restorer, all to save my dying boyfriend.
But when I brought the $72,000 I literally bled for to his VIP ward, I found him drinking champagne.
"Thanks for faking the medical records, Doc," Ethan smirked. "Her sob-story money is paying for my Senate run nicely."
His glamorous campaign manager, Sloane, chimed in: "Just be ...

My best friend Lily was brutally assaulted and tragically took her own life.
But I fiercely protected the monster who did it.
Lily’s mom knelt down and begged me, but I just closed the door coldly.
When the villagers came with torches to smash my home, I didn't hesitate to unleash my dog to drive them away.
"Ivy, you cold-blooded monster! We treated you like family, and you protected the beast who...

In my past life, I went into labor and they wheeled me into surgery. When I woke up, my stomach was flat. My baby was gone.

My husband held my hand, his eyes rimmed red, and told me I'd never been pregnant at all. He said the thing growing in me was a ten-pound tumor.

My own mother held me and cried, saying I'd wanted a baby so badly that I'd started imagining things.

The doctor pulled out my e...

My name is Balen. Father once said every lion cub is born to run wild across the vast grasslands.

At seven years old, I only mimicked my elder brother’s limp to make him laugh. That innocent jest was regarded as an unforgivable sin by Mother. She forced bitter medicine down my throat and condemned me to a wheelchair, hoping that by enduring pain myself, I would learn empathy and pity.

During tho...

For three years, she was nobody.

No name worth remembering. No money worth counting. She was just Jason Sterling’s quiet, invisible wife—the woman his world walked past without a second glance.

That was exactly how Jasmine Vance wanted it.

On their third anniversary, she found him where he shouldn’t have been—with the woman he’d sworn was “just family.” She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She ju...

Eighty-eight times.
That was how many times I had put on a white dress, or packed my ID, heading to the registry office to marry Harrison Churchill. And eighty-eight times, I ended up in an ambulance.
The first time, it was a street drive-by. A bullet tore through my shoulder just two blocks from City Hall.
The fifteenth time, a car bomb shattered three of my ribs.
The forty-second time, a stee...

Caspian kept me locked in the basement as a living blood bank.
This mafia don was also my husband. Ever since he discovered I could heal instantly, I became nothing more than a consumable—kept alive to sustain another woman.
That woman in the hospital bed was his stepmother in name, his forbidden obsession in reality—the desire he could never speak aloud.
Unable to claim her, he went mad. He tried...

In her past life, Arabella Oberon was the lowest-ranking member of the Oberon family.

She genuinely took in Regina, the butler's daughter, only to be constantly manipulated by this cunning and manipulative woman.

Regina gradually stole the love from her three brothers.

Arabella was forced to give Regina blood transfusions time and again, her weight plummeting to a mere eighty-eight pounds.
...

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

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

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

He answers with a k...

Nina Ellington has spent nineteen years being invisible. To her parents. To the ballet world. To the boyfriend who says he loves her but keeps choosing everything else.

On the night she finally walks away, she crashes into a man with a broken unicorn in his hands and a dead best friend in his heart. Kane Black is everything Jessie isn't: angry, honest, and brutally real.

But he is also Jessie's ...

Three years ago, I took a bullet for Damon Kingsley. It came within half an inch of my heart.

He looked me in the eyes, his own red, and swore he'd love me for the rest of his life. So I married into this century-old Italian-American Mafia dynasty.

But on our wedding night, the moment he touched me, he convulsed, coughed up blood, and collapsed.

The second time, an old condition flared up and k...

They chose her. They always chose her.
For eighteen years, I was the ghost in my own family while my adopted sister was the star. So when the ransom call came and they had to choose which daughter to save, I knew the answer before they spoke.
"Save her," they told the kidnappers, nodding at my sister. Then they turned to me. "She's strong. She can survive."
They were right. I was strong enough to ...

I loved Damien for ten years. Ten years, right up until the moment he took the heart that was supposed to save our daughter and gave it to someone else's child.

Lily was only seven. She was terrified of the dark, terrified of pain. She never got that heart. She just faded, right there in that hospital bed.

And Damien was down the hall, celebrating someone else's miracle.

He had no idea what I w...

She died with her bones crushed under her sister's heel. She came back with one goal: make them all pay.

Her brothers toasted her murder over champagne. Her fiancé texted "job done" as she fell from the 22nd floor. They took her name, her work, and her life.

But death gave her a gift: a second chance.

Now, she's walking away from the family that betrayed her. No tears. No begging. Just a cold, ...