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My roommate Chloe was once timid and gentle, until she met a man online who claimed to be a European count. Chasing this fantasy of climbing social ranks, she secretly took photos of me and stole my undergarments, wanting me to test her boyfriend’s loyalty in her place. I was about to agree when an unknown text message saved me. That was when I learned her boyfriend was not human — and there was a...

Ten minutes. That was all the time I had to save my fouryearold son.
Leo hung over sharkinfested open sea, waiting for his father, Mafia Don Dante Moretti.
But Dante never came. He stayed behind to comfort Bianca, the woman he believed had saved his life. He had handed her complete control over the family’s armed forces, cutting off every possible way for me to mount a rescue.
A ghost from the ...

Minutes before the Stanford Hackathon began, my childhood friend decided to bail to help his girlfriend shoot a TikTok video.

I was just about to stop him when his inner voice suddenly exploded in my head: 'I actually got reborn?'

'Last time, I listened to Maeve and stayed for the competition, securing my spot at Stanford. But Sloane went to Malibu alone to shoot her video and fell off a cli...

Carter and I have been together for five years. We never had actual sex.
During our most intimate moments, he would only ever slip a dark Violet Pearl deep inside of me. I honestly thought it was his way of cherishing me.
Until tonight.
I woke up totally naked to find a phone set up on the bed, its lens glaring right between my thighs, with a red "LIVE" icon blinking on the screen.
[The pearl matu...

A red dragon heir locked me in an iron shed and scorched me with his breath for ten minutes straight.Didn't kill me.He woke a Black Dragon buried under a three-hundred-year curse.The Tri-Dragon Council tore down my home, beat my father, threw me in jail, and live-streamed it all so the whole city could laugh.What they didn't know: every ancestor's soul in the Black Dragon cemetery had fused into m...

"@everyone: Nina is stranded at the downtown bar in this blizzard. Ella, your brother drives an SUV, right? Have him go pick her up ASAP!"

In my last life, I caved. I read the Slack message from Duke, my boss and fiancé, and sent my brother out into the storm. That single mistake cost Jeffrey his life. He was beaten to death in jail over a rigged rape charge. Meanwhile, Duke stole my inheritance....

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 ...

Five years into living with my stepbrother Gideon, the scholarship girl he sponsored moved into our house.
To repay his "generosity," she made a habit of slipping into his bed at night. By day, she took it upon herself to "fix" my antisocial, withdrawn personality.
Three days before St. George Prep's graduation ceremony, she brought me a glass of juice wearing that nauseating sugar-sweet smile.
"Y...

My coworker, Sloane, had a knack for turning brutal physical contact into her way of greeting.

She branded this as "American warmth" and an "outgoing personality."

At first, for the sake of office harmony, I assumed she was just clumsy and gritted my teeth to endure it.

That was until the incident in the breakroom. I had finally mustered the courage to discuss a design proposal with Li...

Presley Duval had a nickname for me all through high school. Two-Twenty.
Because at sixteen I weighed 220 pounds.
Thirteen years later she rented out a private beach in Cabo for our class reunion. One rule. Every woman had to show up in a bikini.
She made a point of sending me one.
By the time I got there her phone was already up on a tripod, live. 370,000 people watching.
"She's actually gonna sh...

At eighteen, I gave my virginity to Hunter in his bed.

I swallowed all the pain and hesitation, naively believing that three years of a pathetic crush had finally earned my way into his heart.

Until the next morning, when I heard his teammates' unabashed mockery:

"Damn, you finally bagged the nerd? How was it?"

Hunter scoffed, his tone dripping with utter contempt.

"Just messin...

"Pay us five million dollars, or I'll tell the world your son is a rapist."

That was the blackmail demand my new neighbor threw in my face. When I refused to pay, she took me to court.

Now, we are in a packed, live-streamed courtroom. Her daughter is crying on the witness stand in a neck brace, swearing my "heavily-muscled" son brutally attacked her in the backyard. Her sleazy lawyer is waving ...

I was breathtakingly beautiful.

When I turned eighteen, I became linked to a system that let me share my beauty.

My younger sister, Chloe Bennett, spent an entire night crying under her covers because everyone in her class had a cruel nickname for her. Without telling her, I gave her seventy percent.

By the end of summer, she was the prettiest girl at school. I was someone nobody noticed.

Mom ...

I’d spent four years slaving away in the hospital basement sorting medical waste.
I thought I’d finally scraped together enough money to pay for my brother Leo’s brain damage treatment.
But he just took the card and tossed it onto the coffee table.
“I got better ages ago. That lousy little paycheck of yours? I blew it on a necklace for Victoria.”
My husband David pushed open the study door. “Tha...

Since when is eating a snack before dinner a capital crime? All because of a bag of gummies, my parents beat the hell out of me, and a judge coldly sentenced me to death. I was absolutely convinced the candy was laced! It wasn't until moments before my execution that I accidentally found out the truth: my family... were never actually my family to begin with.

Clad in gray mist, kneeling on iron rocks, working as a menial laborer, everyone thought he was just a worthless nobody, groveling in the dust for an old pocket watch. His
in-laws found him filthy, his fiancée defected to a new master, and Lord Calder treated his obsession like a leash, subjecting him to arbitrary humiliation and summons at will.
Until that day, Calder shattered his last hope wi...

Three weeks after my son's death, I found the blood-stained cloth doll meant to "ward off disaster" with his name stitched on it.

Right there, in the hands of my husband's mistress, who was giggling as she idly toyed with it.
 
"The psychic said my life force was too weak to keep the baby, and that I needed a substitute to take the curse."
 
"I only sewed Leo's name into the doll. I never imagine...

I am the sole heir to the Hartwell fortune.
But this birthday dinner — the one meant to sign the family trust into my hands on my twenty-second year — was being ruined by the housekeeper's daughter.
Brianna had done it on purpose. She'd stolen the archival couture gown my late mother left behind, then thrown herself into the champagne tower and pinned it on me.
"Oh God, Audrey, why did you push me...

I used to be the executive chef at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in New York. Then I worked in my son’s kitchen for three years without being paid a cent.

I sold my old house in Brooklyn to cover the restaurant’s startup costs. I even used my retirement savings to pay for the restaurant’s premium ingredients.

That night, I prepared an entire dinner for eighty guests by myself. By the time I f...

On my first day at St. Clair University, my roommate Lysandra laughed at me in French.

Wrapped in designer logos, she called me a nobody who did not even recognize luxury perfume.

She thought I could not understand her.

She was wrong. French was my first language.

I was also Iris Russell, the hidden heir to the Russell Group.

But I kept that to myself.

Then Lysandra set me up at a Michelin-s...