
Introduction
“You should probably go, Kassie.”
“Why?” I asked, voice barely above a whisper.
“Because I don’t know how much more of you touching me I’ll be able to handle without doing something that we’ll both regret.”
The tug from the Bond was so strong I didn’t care.
“Kassie,” he warned, voice changing to something graveled. Rougher than I’d ever heard it. That roughness was a lash of heat through my body. I couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to stop. That single word was the only warning I got before he pushed me back into the mattress below him, his hard body hovering over me, wrists held above my head in a single one of his hands.
When her neighbor becomes the victim of a gruesome murder, 18-year-old Kassie gets pulled into a secret world of monsters and magic. Accidentally bound in a long-forgotten marriage-binding curse with an aggravating stranger, Kassie will do anything to break the curse and get her life back on track. But with their thoughts and emotions bound together, solving the string of murders and breaking the life-binding curse get more complicated by the day. Especially as their connection makes it feel impossible to stay away from each other. A humorous urban fantasy filled with friendship, slow-burn romance, mystery, and magic.
Chapter 1
There was a dead person outside my house. And finding a body in real life isn't the quietly organized event I was used to seeing in movies. The noises from the street are what woke me. There was a high-pitched gut-wrenching scream from my neighbor followed by the sound of doors slamming and shouts.
Those unusual sounds from my typically quiet street had me wrenching upright in my bed. I rubbed a hand over my face, blinking away the exhausted blur from my eyes, my heart already thumping a wild rhythm against my ribcage. Leaning across my bed, I lifted up the blinds to peek through the glare of early morning sun to where a crowd was gathering on my tiny cul-de-sac. A cold sweat shivered along my skin. A few of my neighbors had crowded into a clump on the edge of the street near my house, sporting bathrobes and slippers, chattering loudly. Through it all, someone was wailing.
Wrenching back my sheet, I lurched out of bed. My sore feet protested at suddenly bearing my weight, and I winced as I pulled on the first thing I could find on my bedroom floor; the crumpled work uniform I'd stripped off last night before dropping into bed. The fabric still smelled like grease and coffee from the cafe, with stains visible in the black fabric. Ignoring the grubbiness of it, I shoved it over my head and stumbled my way out of my bedroom.
I don't remember the trip down the stairs, the next thing I was conscious of was standing barefoot in my driveway. It was already a scorching hot morning, the sun baring down in a bright haze, the soles of my feet burning on the searing pavement. The heat was like a wall bearing down on me the second I stepped out the door.
By the time I made it to the end of my driveway, a few police cruisers had already parked along the street. Officers had begun cordoning off the area and pushing onlookers off to the sidewalk and away from the body. I recognized a few of the gawkers—one of my neighbors, Lucille, was taking up the frontlines, chatting wildly with another older woman.
My neighborhood has always been an older one—most houses on my street were filled with elderly couples who left for the summer and came back in the winter when the weather was nice. There were a few like Lucille who was here year-round like me, so I knew her a little better. This morning, she was wearing a purple bathrobe, a pair of binoculars looped around her neck.
She and the woman she was talking to had to be approaching eighty—though they hadn't changed much over the years. Ancient wrinkles lined their faces, deep creases around their sharp eyes.
"Kassie," Lucille said when she caught sight of me as I stood next to her to peer into the street. A grim look passed over her face, "You might not want to be down here right now, dear. Nasty business afoot this morning."
One peak around her shoulder lent me a view of the street where the body was. Seeing a body in real life is vastly different than seeing it in a movie or on TV. There's an eeriness to it that doesn't translate to real life—something empty and unnatural that leaves you feeling raw and shakes you from the inside out. And this one appeared somewhat worse than what I even saw in movies.
My gut clenched, throat going dry as I viewed the carnage up close. It was much worse from the street than it had been through my second-story window. The body barely looked like a body. Barely looked human for that matter. The figure was mangled, limbs going in unnatural directions. And the blood—so much blood. The skin had been carved into with something—a knife maybe— blood pooling thickly onto the concrete beneath it.
I tried to take a steadying breath to calm the nausea bubbling inside me. But the thick, acrid smell of iron and rot didn't do much to soothe the rising horror. Through it all, the blood and clumping dirt, a glint of gold drew my eye away from the macabre scene. A few feet away from the body, lying unceremoniously next to the curb near my bare feet, was a flat circle of metal.
A familiar gold watch. A watch smeared in rust-colored blood. The sight had my stomach rolling, "Is that...?"
Lucille gave a grim nod, "It's George Morelli."
George—my neighbor. George, with his kind smiles and an understanding light in his eye when I lied about where my uncle was. Who made sure I got in okay after a late shift at the cafe. Who invited me over for holiday dinners even though I usually gave an excuse.
I didn't have many constants in my life, but George was one of them. And now...
The truth was too horrible for me to come to terms with. A stinging started up behind my eyes that I hurried to blink away. It was getting hard to swallow around the growing lump in my throat. I forced myself to take a few steadying breaths. I would not—I would not—lose it here in the middle of the sidewalk. Another dry swallow.
Despite my attempts at hiding the horror growing and the emotions roiling inside of me like a creature trying to escape, Lucille noticed. She lifted a wrinkled hand and reached over to pat me kindly on the shoulder. I had to make a concerted effort not to cringe at the contact—I wasn't good with physical affection even on a good day. And now, with my emotions high, it was even worse.
I forced myself to look back to where the body—George—lay in the street, "Who would do something like this?" The words slipped out, almost without thought.
"George didn't have any money. Whatever little bit he did have, he usually gambled it away at bingo night. And he didn't have any enemies that I've ever known of. Not even any family," Lucille said, conspiratorially. A thick wrinkle formed between her graying eyebrows. "But it seems too gruesome to be random. They took one of his hands—"
A narrowed look through the growing crowd of police officers confirmed what she said. There was only a stump where his hand used to be. Now that the shock was fading I saw a few other things I hadn't noticed at first glance. The knife marks on his skin didn't appear random after all—they looked precise. Like macabre symbols had been carved into his skin. Symbols that were swooping and jagged.
Despite the blistering morning heat, my skin turned cold, and a clammy sweat broke out on the back of my neck. I had to look away again as nausea bubbled back up in my stomach and I had to breathe deeply through my nose to keep myself from throwing up all over the sidewalk. The thick scent of blood didn't help. Or the other smell...something sickly and sweet.
Don't throw up. Please don't throw up. My jaw clenched as I forced myself to keep breathing.
I don't know how long I'd been standing there, forcing myself to breathe, when a police officer approached us. He asked each of us a few questions, getting our information down. I don't even remember what he said, what he asked. My mind was a hazy fog of shock and horror. I mumbled out answers to his questions until I heard what time it was and that pulled me out of the fog that had overtaken me.
"I need to get to work," I said offhandedly to Lucille as the officer turned his back to us. He was moving on to the group of other neighbors grouped nearby, "Will you tell me if they find anything?"
"Of course, dear," she lifted her binoculars back to her wrinkled face, "they couldn't rip me away from here if they tried." I believed her. I wouldn't want to get between Lucille and anything she was after.
She peered at the scene through the lenses for a moment before bringing her gaze back to me. A grandmotherly worry overtook her features, "Are you sure certain you should be working today? Can't you call in sick?"
I forced a smile I didn't feel, already stepping back up my driveway, barely feeling the burn from the pavement, "I'll be okay. Thank you, though." I didn't know if that were true or not. The sick feeling crawling through me and the familiar stiffness in my body from waitressing too many shifts in a row had me wondering how I was going to make it through the day. But there was no way I could afford to take a day off.
I waved to her numbly as I went back into my house in a haze. I threw up once in the sink. With shaking hands, I smoothed my hair back into a quick bun. I double-checked all of the locks on the doors, a worried uncomfortable feeling—a feeling that felt a lot like fear gnawed its way through me. I was already feeling like it was going to be a long day.
At that point, I didn't realize how much worse it would actually get.
Last Chapters
#64 *CHAPTER 64*
Last Updated: 5/13/2025#63 *CHAPTER 63*
Last Updated: 5/13/2025#62 *CHAPTER 62*
Last Updated: 5/13/2025#61 *CHAPTER 61*
Last Updated: 5/13/2025#60 *CHAPTER 60*
Last Updated: 5/13/2025#59 *CHAPTER 59 *
Last Updated: 5/13/2025#58 *CHAPTER 58*
Last Updated: 5/13/2025#57 *CHAPTER 57*
Last Updated: 5/13/2025#56 *CHAPTER 56*
Last Updated: 5/13/2025#55 *CHAPTER 55*
Last Updated: 5/13/2025
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The safe dorm.
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What he got instead was Maverick Hale campus menace, underground street fighter, walking bruise factory, and the last person he ever wanted anywhere near his neat piles of textbooks.
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Or one wrong move away from getting kicked out.
He’ll graduate out of sheer spite—he refuses to give his estranged, homophobic father the satisfaction of calling him a failure.
He definitely doesn’t care about the determined, overachieving half-Indian nursing major he’s stuck sharing a room with…
Until Bodhi becomes the only thing keeping him in school.
His tutor.
His healer.
His undoing.
And when Maverick stumbles into their dorm one night with a knife wound and Bodhi stitches him up with shaking hands and a breaking heart…
no longer can that be denied.
Opposites weren’t supposed to collide this way.
But they did.
Hard.
Glimmerdrop: The Crownwake Series
"This is your last chance to push me away."
At the fiercely hierarchical Haldorian Academy, magic-less commoner Hettie just wants to remain invisible. But Zadok, the academy's most untouchable elite, backs her into a corner she can't escape.
His fatal obsession sparks ruthless revenge: Dana, a high-tier wind mystic, turns paper into deadly blades during combat class, nearly blinding and disfiguring Hettie in a bloody attack .
The massive class divide and brutal bullying force Hettie to draw a line, demanding their romance be kept strictly underground .
That forever unattainable golden boy pinned her against the tree trunk, his scalding and aggressive kiss accompanied by a hopeless surrender: "You're going to be my doom ."
Worse still, Hettie discovers her parents’ dark secrets are dragging her into a deadly conspiracy of betrayal . Survival clashes with forbidden desire. In this deadly, cross-class temptation, whoever gives in first is doomed!
Omega Bound
Thane Knight is the alpha of the Midnight Pack of the La Plata Mountain Range, the largest wolf shifter pack in the world. He is an alpha by day and hunts the shifter trafficking ring with his group of mercenaries by night. His hunt for vengeance leads to one raid that changes his life.
Tropes:
Touch her and die/Slow burn romance/Fated Mates/Found family twist/Close circle betrayal/Cinnamon roll for only her/Traumatized heroine/Rare wolf/Hidden powers/Knotting/Nesting/Heats/Luna/Attempted assassination
The Vampire Prince's Hybrid Bride
How Not To Fall For A Dragon
Which is why it was more than a little confusing when a letter arrived with my name already printed on a schedule, a dorm waiting, and classes picked out as if someone knew me better than I knew myself. Everyone knows the Academy, it’s where witches sharpen their spells, shifters master their forms, and every kind of magical creature learns to control their gifts.
Everyone except me.
I don’t even know what I am. No shifting, no magic tricks, nothing. Just a girl surrounded by people who can fly, conjure fire, or heal with a touch. So I sit through classes pretending I belong, and I listen hard for any clue that might tell me what’s hidden in my blood.
The only person more curious than me is Blake Nyvas, tall, golden-eyed, and very much a Dragon. People whisper that he’s dangerous, warn me to keep my distance. But Blake seems determined to solve the mystery of me, and somehow I trust him more than anyone else.
Maybe it’s reckless. Maybe it’s dangerous.
But when everyone else looks at me like I don’t belong, Blake looks at me like I’m a riddle worth solving.
Let Them Kneel
Cast out by her pack. Forgotten by the Lycans.
She lived among humans—quiet, invisible, tucked away in a town no one looked at twice.
But when her first heat comes without warning, everything changes.
Her body ignites. Her instincts scream. And something primal stirs beneath her skin—
summoning a big, bad Alpha who knows exactly how to quench her fire.
When he claims her, it’s ecstasy and ruin.
For the first time, she believes she’s been accepted.
Seen.
Chosen.
Until he leaves her the next morning—
like a secret never to be spoken.
But Kaelani is not what they thought.
Not wolfless. Not weak.
There is something ancient inside her. Something powerful. And it’s waking.
And when it does—
they’ll all remember the girl they tried to erase.
Especially him.
She’ll be the dream he keeps chasing… the one thing that ever made him feel alive.
Because secrets never stay buried.
And neither do dreams.
Cursed Beauty and her Three Alpha Mates
Cast out by her pack for being wolfless and plagued by uncontrollable heat, Maya has spent her life surviving humiliation in silence.
Fate drags her into the path of Kael Draven, the ruthless Lycan King who claims her… only to reject her.
But Kael is not the only Alpha bound to her.
Finn, her childhood best friend and the rising Alpha, loves her with a devotion so fierce, he spends four years locked away in the most ruthless dungeon only to keep her safe.
Xander, a rogue wolf who can make even Alphas bow to his will, has waited centuries for her to be reborn, and he has no intention of losing her again.
Three Alphas.
Three claims.
One cursed destiny.
They called her wolfless. They thought she was weak. But she is done hiding, and this time, she's rewriting the rules.
A TASTE OF TEMPTATION: Vampire King And His Hybrid Bride
Chained and rejected by my pack, I thought I was just an ordinary werewolf. But the Vampire King's rescue reveals my true nature and a shocking past. Now, as shifters and vampires clash, I must choose between my heritage and my destiny.
Will I surrender to the King's dark desires, or forge my own path? In this world of ancient power struggles, one thing is certain: my blood will decide the fate of all.
Bound by the Dragon Mafia
The head chef looked like he was silently praying for death.
I rushed forward. “Amara. Stop traumatizing these poor people.”
She spun around, delighted. “Sera! Good, you’re here. Taste this. It’s missing despair.”
The chef’s face morphed into existential crisis.
I grabbed her arm. “Put the spatula down.”
“But—”
“Down.”
With exaggerated offense, she dropped the spatula and muttered, “Fine. But if no one here has artistic vision, that’s not my fault.”
She went undercover to expose a mafia empire.
He offered her thirty nights to save her life.
When investigative journalist Seraphine Vale steps into the glittering underworld ruled by billionaire crime lord Dante Vescari, she thinks she’s chasing a story about missing women and corruption.
Instead, she uncovers a secret older than blood—an empire built on fire, sin, and dragons.
Bound to Dante by a forbidden pact, Seraphine finds herself caught between fear and desire, truth and temptation.
Each night pulls her deeper into his world of power, passion, and danger…
and closer to the monster hiding beneath his perfect skin.
Thirty nights. One bond.
And a love that might just burn the world to ash.
COLD (Ruthless Player)
“Please… Nick, wait.” He pulled out, thrusted back in. “How much? Twenty thousand? Fifty? Hundred?” With every question, he thrust harder and harder. My neurons are frying with the confusing feeling in my brain. Torn between pleasure, fear, and panic. I couldn't utter a single sentence to save my life.
His cold eyes pinned me in place while he plundered my body with deep thrusts, which only added to my confusion. My dumb body mistook the mixed signals, my pussy becoming even wetter than before.
“I hope she'd paid you well, because I'm going to fuck you all night long, hard,” he growled. “Sleep, then do it all over again. I want to feel you come for me, Andrea, want to feel you squeeze my cock, milking me.
Begging for me to give you the high only I can, I'm going to fucked you until I fuck all my wife's money's worth, I want you to remember how hard I took you while you're meeting her.” I sobbed, moaned, and tried to scramble out under him.
“No, please…Nick, let….let me explain.” Nick abruptly pulled out. His eyes were cold but hooded.
Andrea was sent to take down billionaire magnate Nicklaus Montgomery.
Her mission was simple: get close, seduce him, find the proof, and disappear. Instead Andrea finds herself exposed—cornered into signing a contract that binds her to Nicklaus's side as his lover. Now she’s living in his world of wealth, danger, and secrets… and the deeper she falls into his bed, the harder it becomes to remember what side she's on.
The Contract Wife: Marriage Of Malice
He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
I didn't tell him to stop.
Instead, my fingers curled into his shirt, clutching the fabric as though it was my only anchor. Something in him snapped—something he had been holding back for too long. His mouth found mine in a kiss that wasn't tender, but hungry, desperate.
I gasped into him, his hand sliding up to cup my jaw, holding me as if afraid I might vanish.
"You drive me insane," he breathed against my mouth, his lips trailing to my throat. "I can't lose you, Ella. Not you."
My head fell back, a soft sound escaping me as his fingers memorized my waist. My anger melted beneath his desperation.
"James..." I whispered, more plea than protest.
His hand caught mine, fingers threading together tightly. "I'll bring him back. I swear it. Just... don't turn away from me. Please."
The word please—low, ragged, almost broken—undid me more than anything else could have.
Ella never imagined she would marry the man she had secretly loved for years in such a way.
When her brother Theo faced twenty-five years in prison for massive embezzlement, the ruthless business tycoon James Lancaster offered her a deal: marry him in exchange for her brother's freedom.
This wasn't a fairy tale proposal, but a carefully orchestrated revenge. Because in James's heart, Ella was the culprit who had killed his sister Cecilia. He wanted her to pay the price—to atone with a lifetime of suffering.












