Remorse Family

I barely spoke a word before I turned six. Behind our backs, he townsfolk whispered that some foul thing had sealed my tongue.
The first time I truly spoke, I was pointing at our neighbor, Emily.
She was flying a kite just outside our fence. Floating right above her head was a stark, blood-red number.
"Three."
My mom poked her head out of the kitchen, asking if I had just spoken.
I nodded and poin...

Six months ago, a yacht explosion consumed everyone I loved: my husband Leonard, my parents, and my brother.
I escaped only because of stomach pain that kept me from boarding. My adopted sister Claire became the sole survivor.
Since then, I've become an empty shell.
Even after being diagnosed with terminal uterine cancer, even while carrying my late husband's child, I've endured the agony of chemo...

I spent twenty years being invisible. Twenty years making his favorite meals, raising his daughter, loving his family like my own.

On our anniversary, I baked a cake for six hours. He came home and ripped diamond earrings from my ears—they were for his mistress, not me.

My daughter rolled her eyes: "I wish Victoria was my mom."

My five-year-old grandson looked at me with disgust: "You're old...

I thought love was enough.
I thought saving the Ember Claw Pack with everything I had—my heart, my loyalty, even my body—meant something. It led to a Moon Ceremony… and a marriage to Alpha William, the man I gave my soul to.
But love doesn’t protect you from betrayal.
Especially not when the one he truly wanted was never me.
I was glowing with the joy of carrying our pup when I walked in on him—ho...

Chloe Ashford destroyed me once.

She pretended to be my best friend, eagerly setting me up with her stepbrother Vincent—when really, I was just a cover for their twisted relationship.

She fattened me up, used me, and when she got bored, tossed me aside. A broken nose during gym class, nearly drowning by the pool, framed and cyberbullied until the whole internet turned against me. I dropped out. ...

Seven years of marriage turned me into a joke.

My husband Christopher would drive across half of New York in a blizzard just to bring my sister Amanda a cup of mulled wine. My own son Ryan would point at my face and scream, "Aunt Amanda is a hundred times prettier than you! She should be my mom!"

In this house, the three of them were family. I was just the unpaid help.

I thought if I loved them...

Seven years ago, Alpha Matthew's fiancée Elvira ran off with another alpha. I was just his assistant back then, harboring a secret crush but never imagining we could be together.

That night I picked him up from the bar. He was drunk and had been drugged. One night later I was pregnant, and Matthew became convinced I was the one who drugged him, that I'd schemed my way into becoming his luna. He h...

I was born to be the villain in my twin sister's fairy tale.

Thanks to a fake psychic's prophecy, my parents believed I was a parasite—a cursed child draining Amy's life with every success I had. To ensure she survived her national ballet finals, my father bolted me inside an abandoned meat freezer. Even the boy who once promised to protect me thought I was just throwing a selfish tantrum.

They ...

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...

When Daniel and Melissa's marriage imploded, Grace and I were ten.

They fought wildly in family court for Grace, screaming until they were blue in the face. Then, the judge looked down from the bench and asked about my custody.

Crickets. Total, suffocating silence.

They eventually agreed to split time. In a thirty-one-day month, they meticulously counted hours, practically drawing blood to see...

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, ...

As a wolf princess, I gave up my beast core, my dignity, and three years of life for my mate’s throne. I walked willingly into the lion clan’s darkest kennel camp, enduring beastly torture and dog-like degradation. I survived on rot and poison, clinging to false hope. Until I returned and learned the bitter truth: my wolf mate destroyed me with his own hands. The war was fake, and my hell was his ...

On my son's seventh birthday, he hid behind my husband's first love and shouted at me, "You're a bad woman! She's my real mom!"
My husband was even crueler. He threw me out of the house without a second thought.
"To me, you were nothing but a surrogate."
Heartbroken, I walked away—and later adopted an abandoned little boy.
Years passed, when my husband finally learned the truth about the woman he ...

Every time my adopted sister, Ivy, and I had a disagreement, my fiancé and my brother would always call for a "democratic vote."
When choosing our marital home, I wanted the historic townhouse in Beacon Hill, close to my parents. Ivy wanted the luxury penthouse in the Seaport District because it was more vibrant.
Deadlocked, we put it to a vote.
William, my fiancé, raised his hand first. "You're ...

When he was alive, Owen loved me so much he’d give his life for me. Yet, as for his death, I was as cold as a mere bystander.
At the funeral, his family slapped me, clawed at my throat, called me a man-eating black widow. Every last one of them turned on me, eyes red, demanding the same thing: Who killed Owen?
I didn't say a word.
My ten-year-old son went into cardiac arrest right there and was ru...

Three torturous years hauling bodies on the mortuary night shift, and I'd finally scraped together the cash for my brother Charles's heart transplant.
He just waved it off.
"My heart is fine. Mom and Dad didn't die in that gang war, either. I orchestrated the hit. You were the only casualty."
Nearby, my husband, Gerald, casually lit a cigar to deliver his own confession. "I never went bankrupt. '...

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.”
S...

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...

The three-fifty milkshake was what finally broke me.

My parents bought my sister a five-hundred-dollar prom dress without blinking. But me? They made me beg our waiter for three dollars. In front of everyone. Called it 'building character.'

When she framed me for stealing Mom's ring, they had me shipped off to some hellhole wilderness camp in Utah.

'Go learn how to act normal,' Dad said. 'And q...

When my own family and fated mate forced me to leap into the abyss, I did not hesitate.
"You wicked woman, why don't you just die?" My brother Carl pointed at the cliff and roared. "Jump into the Abyss of Sin and atone before the Moon Goddess!"
My fated mate, Enzo, looked at me coldly. "You owe Lilith this."
They expected me to kneel and beg as I had so many times before, insisting that I had neve...