2523 Book(s) Related to i obtained a mythic item novel chapter 1

Jade was Lucian's secretary by day and his mistress by night.
It wasn't until she became his woman that Jade discovered just how ruthless and promiscuous Lucian could be. When she realized she might be pregnant, the man simply laughed and tossed the pregnancy test into the trash.
"Trying to trap me with a baby? Keep taking your pills."
On the eve of Lucian's engagement, Jade resigned from her job and ended their relationship.
But Lucian assumed she was merely throwing a tantrum. He waited for her to apologize and come crawling back to him, just as she always had before.
Days passed.
Instead of Jade, Lucian got the news that she had a new boyfriend.
His twin brother.
The man who shared his face and happened to be his sworn rival.
Overnight, Jade became his sister-in-law.
Lucian completely lost control. He searched desperately for Jade, determined to bring her back.
But Jade, who was pregnant, had vanished without a trace.

Living in a house with hockey players was supposed to be a temporary fix. Falling for my brother’s best friend? That’s a permanent disaster.
My brother’s golden rule: Stay away from the team. Especially Jaxson Miller, the hotheaded rookie with a slap-shot that breaks glass and a reputation for breaking hearts.
But when my dorm floods and my brother offers me his spare room in the "Hockey House," I’m suddenly living feet away from the one guy I’m not allowed to touch. Jaxson is everything I should avoid—reckless, loud, and constantly in the penalty box. He’s the team’s biggest liability, and I’m his biggest secret. If we get caught, the team falls apart. If we don’t, my heart might be the one taking the hit.

She has lived hundreds of lives and each one ended horribly.
He, once her companion, cannot forget her beyond time.
She, kidnapped into a world unknown to her, tries everything to get back home. But what are these dreams?

[…] Stones are thrown at dirty mutts… Rats are burned… […]

Immerse yourself in the world of Athaerion.

The night my husband George took our five-year-old son to celebrate his mistress winning Best Actress, I found a video on his laptop that shattered everything.
On our seventh anniversary, after waiting hours for a husband who never came home, I made a decision that would destroy him forever.
I didn't confront him. I didn't file for divorce. I didn't beg him to choose me.
Instead, I chose to disappear.
When George came home with exotic wines and a designer dress, trying to cover his lies with expensive gifts, he had no idea he only had six days left with me.
Six days before my car would plunge off Riverside Bridge.
Six days before Brenda Taylor would cease to exist.

For seven years, I'd been the perfect wife. I'd survived the pain of childbirth, the changes to my body he could no longer love, and the slow death of our marriage while he built a new life with actress Candice Black and took our son along for the ride.
He thought I was too devoted to leave. Too broken to fight back. Too in love to see the truth.
But he was wrong.
I didn't leave him. I vanished.

And when my car goes over that bridge, when he realizes what he's lost, that will be the beginning of his end.
Because some betrayals don't deserve confrontation.
They deserve ghosts.

Five years ago, nineteen-year-old Seraphina Vance watched her parents slaughtered in cold blood while three young heirs of the elite Blood Sovereign Syndicate stood silently in the shadow of the velvet curtains. Now she is back, operating under the forged identity of scholarship student Elena Sterling at the prestigious Obsidian Sanctum Academy. Armed with government wiretaps and a heart hardened by grief, her objective is singular: bring down House Vane from the inside and burn their high-society empire to ash.
The fatal flaw in her plan? Seraphina doesn't know she is a dormant Crimson Sovereign; the rarest, most feared werewolf bloodline thought wiped out a century ago. She believes she is entirely human.

My mate brought his first love home on our eighth anniversary. My husband informed me that he was replacing me while our little boy waited with a cake.

For eight years, I endured the pack's cruel whispers. They told me that I had caught Alpha Kael with a pregnancy. I endured it all for his sake; I loved him. I raised our son, Leo, and I did my best to be the perfect Luna. However, when my first love came back, Kael cast me aside. Our son's heart broke because of him. When he attempted to take Leo from me, saying I was too frail to raise his heir, I did the unimaginable. I took my boy away and I disappeared.

Three years later, Kael finds out that the lady he selected was a lying snake. He seeks me out with bitter regret. But I'm not the little girl he broke; I'm not the little girl who cried and cried. I am now back, full of glory and strength. And I am not alone.
I'm standing by a ruthless Lycan King who holds my hand and treats my son like a true prince. Kael's eyes are red with feral jealousy as he watches another man raise his heir. He's willing to destroy the world to redeem us. But it is too late.

The Alpha made his choice, and now he'll suffer from regret.

Liya built her world around Marcus.
She trusted him with everything, her heart, her life, her children.

But on the day she buried her babies, Liya walked into a truth she was never meant to believe.

Her husband pressed against his step sister, moaning her name.
His hands gripped around her waist. Their bodies so close together as they enjoyed the moment, moaning and whispering.
She learned they murdered her twins for an experiment.
Used them as living in-vivo subjects for Clarissa’s failed research. Lied about COVID complications.
And now, they planned to destroy her, steal her company shares……and harvest her unconscious mother’s kidney.

Betrayed. Broken. She collapsed. Only to wake up in a hospital bed with Marcus suddenly acting like the perfect husband and Clarissa pretending to be the grieving sister-in-law.

But Liya remembers everything.

She remembers the lies.The betrayal.
The murder.

And she remembers one more thing, she’s done being their victim.

But when she calls her father for help, someone else answers the phone.

Benjamin Marino. A mafia Don.
Her father’s oldest enemy… and the man she has been running from.

Now Liya has a plan. A 99 + 1 revenge gifts.

I thought telling Alpha Kane I was pregnant would be the hardest part of my day.

That was before I found my step-sister naked on his mahogany desk.
I remained committed to my role of Luna for three years while I suffered through his distant behavior because I viewed our mate bond as a holy connection. The moment he wiped her lipstick from his mouth, the bond that connected us to each other shattered in my heart because he had treated me as someone who lacked excitement.

He wanted me to weep while I accepted my lower-status position. I used my mother’s billion-dollar tech patents to lock him out, then I denied him on the pack intercom, before I entered the advanced security facilities of his most dangerous competitor.

Alpha Kaelen, the Lycan King, doesn't function as an uncontrollable animal. He possesses dangerous charisma which combines with his exceptional intelligence. I didn't request his protection; I established the terms for it. I presented him with the blueprints which would lead to our shared enemy's financial ruin. We are currently dismantling Kane's business empire together. Our formal agreement starts to dissolve into an irresistible attraction which develops during our nighttime strategy meetings and our executive boardroom business takeovers.

Kaelen discovers my hidden pregnancy secret, but he does not exile me from his presence. He displays a wicked grin while making his intention to take ownership of his opponent's offspring permanent. Kane will initiate a violent conflict to reclaim me as his possessions disappear and his remorse transforms into a primal fixation.

Will my charming, deadly protector permit me to handle my own conflicts or will we destroy everything my ex left behind?

Thalia has always been in love with Cassian but he never noticed her. She was never the woman Cassian wanted, he wanted someone else.

Drunken and heartbroken, Cassian bumped into Thalia and that one reckless night changed her life forever, binding her to this man who will never chose her.

Forced into marriage and banished from the GoldenMoon Pack, she spends seven years trying to earn the heart of her husband only to discover it has always belonged to another woman; his brother's wife.

No matter the years they’ve shared or the son they’ve raised together. His love remains locked on a forbidden past, and now, he wants out.

But Thalia has a persistent heart and has vowed to win his love over, no matter the consequences.

For five years, my husband claimed he could not understand emotion.

I believed him, excused every broken promise, and taught myself to survive on scraps of attention.

Then I went to his office with news of our unborn child and heard him laughing with the woman who had helped him deceive me.

He had married me for a pureblood heir. Once the baby was born, he planned to throw me away.

He wanted an heir from a devoted wife. Instead, I gave him a funeral.

I suffered a head injury when I was little, so I’m a bit slow at everything I do.
My brother is the greatest hero in my heart, so I copy whatever he does—including being a simp.
He simped for a witch, so I did the same for her younger sister. But just as I was being relentlessly humiliated by the sister, and even dragged to the brink of death, my brother quit.

I found my husband's vasectomy certificate while sorting medical bills. The procedure was done a year ago. But I was six months pregnant now.

I stared at the date on the paper and my hand just... stopped. I kept checking it again and again, but it was still the same. I was freaking out. I looked down at my bump showing through this baggy sweater, and my hands started shaking.

I got in my car and drove straight to my husband's private club. I needed answers about this, now.

In my final moments in the ICU, the cruel truth crashed over me. My husband had colluded with a hypocritical single mother to steal everything meant for my daughter. For years, they manipulated and gaslit the girl, and even plotted to bar us from seeing each other one last time. Reborn right before the tragedy unfolded, the very first thing I set out to do is safeguard everything that belongs to my daughter and mend our broken bond. Faced with my husband’s fake display of devotion, all I have for him is…

After one night with the man I'd secretly loved, I told him how I felt.
His response was simple. "What made you think sleeping with me would make me want you?"
I didn't say another word. I just walked out.
I changed my number, moved to another city, and cut him out of my life completely.
Then my roommate, Vanessa, was hospitalized with a high fever.
Her boyfriend drove through the night to see her — the kind of man who could afford to just drop everything.
When he walked into the hospital room, I froze.
It was Adrian Cole.
The man I had spent two years trying to forget.
Except he looked at me without recognition.
"Thanks for taking care of her," he said. "Let me add you. I'll send you whatever you spent."
He had no idea who I was.
And somehow, that hurt more than his rejection ever had.

I am the top algorithm genius on Wall Street.
When my wife's first love got into serious trouble, she didn't hesitate to cut off my daughter's medical expenses and force me to go to jail for that scumbag.
But she didn't know that without me, her multi-billion dollar empire was just an empty shell that could explode at any moment.
She could never have known that the little girl she cursed as a "bastard" and who was driven to her death by her own hands was actually her own flesh and blood, whom she thought had died at birth.
When, a few days later, I, who should have been dying in prison, suddenly arrived with short-selling capital and a top-secret paternity test... I wonder if this high and mighty queen will still be able to laugh.

A fire broke out at the fraternity party. I desperately pushed Mia, my brother's girlfriend, out of harm's way, only to get pinned down by a falling beam myself. My brother Liam chose to save Mia first, kicking away my oxygen mask as he left. Mia then locked the door, leaving me to burn alive.

Yet they thought I was throwing a tantrum and playing hide-and-seek. They called me "toxic" and "attention-seeking" on social media, even freezing my credit cards.

For five years, my crime boss husband made me take off my wedding ring nine times—all for his precious damsel in distress.

When we first married, he promised me: "From now on, you're my queen, the queen of New Orleans."

But whenever Brianna came crying for help, he'd change his tune: "Mr. Parker saved my life, Claire. I owe his family everything."

And like a fool, I believed him eight times.

Eight times I watched from the shadows as he took another woman to our favorite restaurants.

Eight times I explained to the crew that our "separation" was just giving each other space.

Eight times I watched her move into my bedroom, use my dishes, sleep in my bed.

All for a man who kept making me slip off my ring, then slide it back on, over and over again.

Until the ninth time, when he said he needed to provide sperm for her fertility treatment, and I offered to leave.

He still thinks this is just another temporary break, expecting me to come crawling back in a month like always.

He'll never know I've already booked my ticket out of here.

On the day the apocalyptic flood swallowed the city, I died on a fractured overpass.

The man who crushed my fingers under his boot was my brother-in-law, the very man I had sacrificed everything to support. And standing safely out of reach, watching coldly as the muddy torrent swallowed me whole, was my supposedly sweet and devoted fiancée. In her arms, she fiercely clutched her "son"—who was hoarding the last of my survival rations.

In the very last second of my life, she nestled into the arms of her ex-boyfriend and left me with a single, contemptuous sneer: "Let's go. Forget about this useless trash."

It turned out that working my fingers to the bone and emptying my life savings had all been a pathetic joke—a long con orchestrated by a pack of bloodsucking parasites.

But when I opened my eyes again, I had returned to exactly one year before the apocalypse began.

My fiancée was standing there, holding a cup of hot coffee and sweetly begging me to invest another million into her brother's business.

I just smiled, gently pushed her hand away, and turned around to liquidate every single asset to my name. With that money, I secretly constructed a state-of-the-art, deep-sea underground fortress.

Later, when the monstrous floodwaters inevitably tore the city apart, they stood on the balcony of their doomed mansion, desperately falling to their knees and begging my icebreaker for salvation.

Sitting inside my perfectly secure command cabin, I took a leisurely sip of hot coffee and softly gave the order:

"Open fire. Don't let this trash dirty my deck."

My sister Vivian dated men the way other people taste champagne — a bright sip, then set the glass down before anyone could ask her to finish it.
Never enough to satisfy anyone. Never long enough to be held responsible for the empty glass.
When those men discovered one another, they did not punish her.
They chose me.
Attention I had never received became flowers, invitations, and late-night calls. For a while, I let myself believe it.
Vivian only smiled. "They must have finally noticed how much kinder you are than me." She said it like a compliment. It wasn't.
Then the floating words appeared in front of my eyes.
[Poor thing. She actually thinks this is about her.]
[They're not courting her. They're using her.]
[Break her, and Vivian will feel it. That's the plan.]
And from the other side of a half-open door, I heard a man say, with perfect calm, "If Vivian hadn't been so cruel to me, I wouldn't have to use her sister."
That was the night I stopped mistaking attention for love.

I overheard my husband tell his business partner, “I let Aria get pregnant for fun, not like I ever planned on letting them live, the babies make perfect specimens for Vivian’s research.”
The same day I discovered I was pregnant for the fifth time.
I used to believe he was my protector.
This time, I gathered proof of everything he’d done and made sure the truth destroyed him before I started my new life.

My daughter begged me, tears in her eyes, to take her to gymnastics camp—just the two of us.

I thought it was her way of proving she loved me.

I was wrong.

In that hotel room in Toronto, I overheard my husband's voice—with another woman.

“Don't worry, Sophia will find a way to stay a few more days. I promised her that blue limited-edition leotard.”

“Her body now… after giving birth, it's ruined.”

In that moment, my world collapsed.

I thought I'd only been betrayed by my husband.
But the daughter I raised with everything I had—she was his accomplice.

The child I nurtured with my own hands kept clearing the path: so that woman could sleep in my bed, wear the lingerie I could no longer fit into, sneer in front of the mirror at every single mark my body earned from bringing life into this world.

I once believed that giving up my career would be enough to hold my family together.

But they joined hands to tell me: my sacrifice was never honored. It was a joke.

When a woman who has given everything to her family finally wakes up—

Her revenge will make every single one of them remember exactly what they did.

For six years, I sold my body to underground clinics as a human lab rat to cure my son's heart failure and pay off my husband's debts.

Today, my biological brother kicked away the medicine I bought with half my life.

"Lucas was never sick. We faked the medical records to teach you a lesson for upsetting Virginia."

My husband coldly chimed in:

"I never went bankrupt either."

Even the son I bled to birth stabbed my arm, screaming, "A bloody monster like you doesn't deserve to be my mom!"

I finally realized my entire life was a meticulously crafted scam.

With my organs rapidly failing and only ten days left to live, I stepped onto the edge of the balcony.

"You're right," I smiled at my husband and brother, watching the color completely drain from their faces. "Six years of my life isn't enough to apologize to her."

"So I'll pay you with my corpse."

Jonathan’s way of loving was always paying in silence. After we broke up, he cleared my shopping cart, stocked up enough makeup remover to last me three years, trying his best to make up for it. But during those three years when I willingly waited for him to propose, he never said a word. Until one day, he found a small note I’d written in pencil three years ago in that wedding planning book: “It’s okay, I can wait.” He cried all night staring at that line, and the next day, he bought 17 copies of the same book. On the title page of each one, he wrote neatly: “Wait for me.” It turns out, the stupidest person takes three years just to learn to say “I love you.”

I'd been dating a mafia heir online for six months when I learned he'd meant to pursue my roommate.

He'd been given the wrong account.

I'd refused his money and returned his gifts. Grant Whitmore took that as proof I was hopelessly in love with him.

Then an anonymous number sent me his messages with a friend.

“Keep it quiet. I've got her roommate's number. I'll decide when I've figured things out.”

“Decide what? Date the roommate. This one will still be waiting when you're done.”

So he started dating her and muted my messages.

Including the one where I'd already dumped him.

But when I went three days without texting the heir to another crime family, he messaged first.

“No hubby today?”

The day the Gryphon army marched home in victory, my sister's husband came back safe. My husband, Tobias, died on the ice.

Everyone pitied me, and I believed them. I mourned him for years, handed over every resource the Elven Realm had to offer to Crown Prince Nathaniel, and helped him lock down his claim to the throne.

It took me years to find out the man who came back wasn't Nathaniel at all. It was my "dead" husband, Tobias.

He killed his own brother, stole his face with forbidden magic, all so he could marry my sister Sabrina and make her his queen, official and out in the open.

"Sabrina and I are the real thing. Pretending to be my brother, that was for the good of the kingdom."

They framed me for treason and threw me into the Pit of Judgment. As I burned, I watched the two of them hold each other while the kingdom cheered.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day the army came home.

My sister begged me to stop grieving, tears in her eyes. "Nathaniel" swore he'd give me a life of luxury. The old king stood in front of everyone and promised to grant me anything I wanted.

This time, I didn't cry. I chose to remarry without a second thought.

Tobias thought wearing his brother's face was all it took to sit on that throne. What he didn't know was that without me, he never stood a chance of getting there at all.

As the tyrant ruling the underworld, Victor was ruthless and bloodthirsty, showing no mercy to anyone.

Women who tried to climb into his bed usually didn’t even get a whole corpse, yet I was the only one he kept by his side.

I’d taken a poisoned bullet for him, and nearly bled to death on the rotting floor of a safe house giving birth to his son.

He once kissed the bullet scar on my shoulder and promised me that when he sat on the godfather’s throne, I would be his only family matriarch.

But the moment he slipped on that black onyx ring symbolizing power, he carried another woman into the master bedroom of the manor.

I burst for the door, and he ordered his bodyguards to pin me outside, forcing me to listen to their sounds of passion all night long.

I banged on the door like a madwoman, so he slammed my paintbrush-wielding right hand in the heavy oak doorframe and crushed it mercilessly.

I finally caved when he threatened to cut off my mother’s hospital treatment.

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 own business.

Colton frowns too and dumps his phone, a towel, and Sienna's makeup bag into my arms. "Vivienne, do you have to kill the mood? Sienna's scared to go alone. What's the big deal if I keep her company?"

In the wave pool, he holds her against his chest and the two of them roll around in the spray, laughing.

When they come out, Sienna takes the ice water I haven't even opened and takes a big swig, then hands it to Colton, and he drinks half the bottle right from where her lips were.

I stand there feeling like the hired help.

Two years of killing myself to be the understanding, easygoing girlfriend, and all it got me was a boyfriend who walks all over me without thinking twice.

If he's that close with my best friend, he can't blame me for calling up his best friend since they were kids.

"Julian, can you come get me?"

The moment I gave up wasn't when I found out my husband was cheating. It was when I heard my ten-year-old daughter laugh into the phone and say, "Mom's so clueless. She has no idea about Dad and Summer."

Ten years ago, I was a top biomedical researcher, making six figures. I gave it all up for his promotion and our newborn daughter. Ten years later, the perfect marriage I traded my career and youth for turned out to be nothing but an elaborate lie.

He called me his safe haven, then got in our bed with his mistress and discussed how to keep me in the dark.

This time, I'm not going to cry or make a scene. I'm going to quietly gather my evidence and call the lab director I've turned down seven times.

My daughter helped my husband cheat.

My ten-year-old begged me to take her to a summer camp in Italy. My husband looked at her like she hung the moon. Booked the tickets right there.

I thought I was the luckiest mom alive.

Then I checked the pet camera from overseas.

There he was, fucking my daughter's riding instructor on our couch.

But what really killed me? What he said, "Don't worry. Nina wants that horse bad enough, she'll keep her mom in Europe as long as we need."

Back home, my husband dropped a receipt. Two identical limited edition watches.

He froze. My sweet daughter didn't miss a beat, "Dad used the other one to bribe someone so I could get my horse!"

They lied in perfect sync. That's when something in me broke.

They thought I was still that stupid, trusting wife.

What they didn't know?

I'd already signed a contract. Going back to my art career in New York.

For ten years, Elena Rossi built Don Nico De Luca’s empire from blood, bullets, and broken promises. She was his shield, his strategist, his most loyal woman, until he gave another girl the tenderness he had always denied her. When Elena finally walks away, Nico thinks she can be replaced. But without her, his throne begins to crack, and the woman he took for granted rises into a future that no longer has room for him.

Nineteen times. That's how many times Lucas promised to marry me, only to leave me standing alone because of her.
Today was supposed to be our day. But as I stood in the biting cold outside the restaurant, watching him carefully help Selena into his Maybach, the marriage application still tucked in my purse, I finally understood—that "someday" would never come.
"Let's reschedule the registration, okay?" he'd said without even looking at me.
I walked straight to HR and submitted my resignation. Then I accepted the offer from the Morinetti family—his sworn enemies.
As I boarded my flight to the West Coast, my phone exploded with messages.
"We agreed to go to City Hall today. Where are you?"
I glanced at the screen one last time, then powered it off.
"We're done."

“Why is Elara dying on my stream?”

Sienna Vale laughed in front of half a million viewers while my heroine glitched on-screen, wearing the ring I designed and speaking the line I wrote.

Caleb didn’t ask if I was okay. He shoved the emergency laptop toward me and said, “Fix it before the investors panic.”

So I opened the live build.

But instead of saving his launch, I patched one line into the game credits:

Created by Maya Reed.

My husband's childhood sweetheart lost her entry for the competition,
so he gave mine to her.
It was I who saved him all those years ago,
and that's why he married me.
But he turned his back on me right after our wedding.
I've been childhood sweetheart all these years.
But this time,
I suddenly feel like this marriage has lost all its meaning.
After handing in the transfer request I had prepared long ago to the factory director,
I rejected his offer to stay.
I can't bear to stay in this place for another day.
I want to go to New York,
start a new chapter in my life,
and let everything that happened before just drift away. all its meaning.
After handing in the transfer request I had prepared long ago to the factory director,
I rejected his offer to stay.
I can't bear to stay in this place for another day.
I want to go to New York,
start a new chapter in my life,
and let everything that happened before just drift away.

“The perfect romance or beach read, with a difference: its enthusiasm and beautiful descriptions offer an unexpected attention to the complexity of not just evolving love, but evolving psyches. It's a delightful recommendation for romance readers looking for a touch more complexity from their romance reads.”--Midwest Book Review (For Now and Forever)THE WITCHING PLACE: A PERILOUS PAGE is book #3 in a charming new cozy mystery series by bestselling author Sophie Love, author of The Inn at Sunset Harbor series, a #1 Bestseller with over 200 five-star reviews.When Alexis Blair, 29, is fired from her book publishing job and breaks up with her boyfriend on the same day, she wonders if life is urging her to make a fresh start. She decides it’s time to pursue her lifelong dream of opening a bookstore of her own—even if that means leaving Boston and accepting a job in a curious bookstore in a small seaside town an hour away.A cryptic visitor comes into town, looking for a rare book, and willing to pay anything.But when he ends up dead, Alexis wonders: was the price too high?And did Alexis’s mysterious store owner have anything to do with it?A page-turning cozy, rife with the supernatural, mystery, secrets and love—and centered around a small town as odd and endearing as its shop—A PERILOUS PAGE will make you fall in love and keep you laughing out loud as you turn pages late into the night.“The romance is there, but not overdosed. Kudos to the author for this amazing start of a series that promises to be very entertaining.”--Books and Movies Reviews (For Now and Forever)

To everyone in town, I was just a sixty-five-year-old retired man.
I lived in an old house, drove an old car, and showed up at the same diner every night to eat the cheapest meal on the menu in my usual corner.

Then one night, the waitress who always refilled my coffee sat across from me after closing, eyes red, and told me her boyfriend had disappeared.
People were watching her, pressuring her to hand over a “ledger” she had never even seen.

I wanted no part of it.
I had left that kind of life behind a long time ago, and I had sworn never to use my hands for anyone again.

But the next day, she didn’t show up for work.
Her phone was dead. She was gone.

I went into their territory alone.
They thought they were dealing with nothing more than a nosy old man.
By the time I started moving, they realized they had picked the wrong target.

EXCERPT:

"Rayne stood looking at her reflection in the mirror. Her a pale green ballgown clung to her curves and left little to the imagination. Her jet-black curls are swept up and pinned to her head, leaving her neck exposed. Tonight was the night that most of the unmated wolves in all the North American packs would hopefully find their mates. She was sure all of them were just oozing with excitement.

She was not.

She didn’t want a mate. She didn’t need a mate...."

“...but the sudden scent of jasmine and vanilla hit her nose from somewhere close. That meant only one thing. Her mate was near..."


Rayne met her mate at the Moonlight Ball when she was eighteen, her mate that she never wanted to find, that she never wanted in her life. He showed up out of nowhere. His actions that night unknowingly set her free. She took the freedom he gave her, ran away, and never once looked back.

Now five years later he shows back up in her life after rejecting her five years ago, demanding that she take up her rightful place by his side. He walked away from her after calling her weak. No way was she going to just let him back into her life as if he belonged there. Rayne never wanted a mate, would he being here now change that? Her body and soul beg for him to claim her, yet her heart belongs to another.

Can her mate convince her to give him a chance? Will her lover convince her to stay with him? The Moon Goddess paired her with someone not of her choice, all Rayne has ever wanted was the chance to choose for herself. Who will win? Rayne or the fate that the moon set for her?

For mature readers 18+
Warning for abusive past trauma
Her Returned Mate is Book 1 in the Gathering Shadows Series. Book 2 His Redemption is also available for reading now on Anystories.

Three years of marriage. Harper gave up her career, cut off her friends, and made herself invisible for Evan.
Then on her birthday, the blow came. Claire showed up pregnant: "Mrs. Morgan's spot will be mine eventually. What's the point of you holding onto it?"
Harper finally woke up. She filed for divorce without looking back.
The day she signed the papers, she smiled calmly at the reporters waiting outside: "The reason for the divorce? Mr. Morgan was simply never able to satisfy me. In that department."
The untouchable CEO became a punchline overnight.
Evan assumed she was getting back at him. He had no idea Harper was no longer the caged bird he remembered.
Her design talent shook the industry. His own business rivals fell for her.
By the time he realized the partner he had been desperately chasing was his ex-wife, it was already too late.
"Harper, can we start over?"
"Mr. Morgan, if something's wrong with you, go see a doctor. Do you need me to pay for the appointment?"

Adalina lives with her very protective older brother Zarakai and his four best friends, they helped raise her after their parents died. Now she is eighteen and she doesn't know how to turn her feelings off. After being rejected by Austin, she turned to Jace who loves her more than he should considering the age gap. Now Austin is back in town and Jace doesn't like sharing. Adalina wants Jace and Austin. Maybe even Tyler and Spencer too. Will the four men learn to share her, or will she end up heartbroken?

Emery’s undying love for her late mother drove her to do things only a desperate person could understand. To save her mother’s company, she agreed to marry a man twice her age. There’s no way she could escape the miserable truth, but on the day of the wedding, she married the wrong groom who turned out to be the wealthiest man in the country.
It’s like the Heavens gave her another chance and she won’t let the chance slip away. However, can she withstand the tension whenever her fake husband is near her? What if she falls for him? Will he catch her? Or she’d fall into a more complicated situation?


Every man's dream was to watch their bride walk down the aisle towards them, however, the beautiful dream turned into a nightmare when Terrence found a different woman under the veil. His bride ran away and he was forced to marry a stranger. To make everything more complicated, he just got appointed as the company President and he needs to maintain a good reputation.
Keeping his fake bride by his side is the only choice left to him. However, how can he deal with his self-control when the woman he mistakenly married is a total goddess of temptation?

Five years in captivity. They said Nora would be free after five years of working for the mafia king but they lied. Now Nora is forced to work permanently for the dangerous mafia king, executing dangerous cons with Noah, her only ally and her most dangerous temptation. The one man who makes her feel human again. But in a world built on lies, trust can be deadlier than betrayal.

Betrayal has never struck so hard until that day I caught my fiancée and best friend cheating on me.

My world came crashing down beneath my feet, and I felt hopeless.

However, luck was on my side and I ended up having a one-night stand with a mysterious man.

Two months later, he showed up at my house with our marriage agreement and he turned out to be my ex-fiancée’s father.

Heartbroken and enraged with revenge, I acknowledged the marriage, desiring to make my ex-fiancée and my best friend pay for what they did to me.

Luckily, my ex-fiancée and best friend lives in the same house with us and revenge took a tremendous turn.

“Did you really think a human girl like me could fall for your little game, Roman?”

Ella was supposed to be the pathetic human girl the Alpha boys could toy with. A scholarship student among wealthy, pureblood werewolves, she had neither their power nor their status. But when she discovers Roman’s cruel bet to make her fall for him, she decides to turn his game against him.

With a carefully crafted innocent smile, a few perfectly timed tears, and a mind sharper than any wolf’s claws, Ella begins playing the players. The gifts meant to humiliate her become money for her mother’s medical bills—and the arrogant Alpha who wanted to break her starts craving her attention.

But Roman isn’t the only dangerous man watching her. Stellan, the cold and unreadable quarterback, seems to see through every lie she tells.

Ella thought she was controlling the game. So why are the Alpha boys suddenly fighting over her—and what happens when one of them discovers her real strategy?

Two months before the cataclysm, Olivia Sterling wakes up from three years into the apocalypse.

Last time around, she clawed her way through an Echo-infested Manhattan for three years — from a nobody no one gave a second look, up to second-in-command of a survivor stronghold — and then she woke up again on the night the boss dropped dead. This time is different. She remembers the day the ash rain falls. She remembers the hour the bridges go under. She remembers exactly who is the first to cut through the electric fence around her estate.

So the first thing she does is liquidate.

A trust fund in the tens of billions, real estate on four continents, antiquities snatched out from under Sotheby's — all of it converted into grain, live cattle, pharmaceuticals, firearms. Plus an Absolute Space where time is frozen solid, a pizza still hot enough to burn your mouth a year after it goes in. The second thing she does is pull her best friend Rexie out of the Rikers Island psychiatric holding facility — the woman who stands six feet tall and swings an eighty-pound two-handed greatsword like it's a broom handle, and who one day will turn into a three-meter North American grizzly.

The crimson aurora falls, and order falls with it. Neighbors come knocking with knives. Armed crews come over the wall. Official broadcasts repeat, over and over, ‘’please trust us‘’. Olivia's answer is a high-voltage grid, a Damascus steel longsword, and one sentence: ‘’Private property. Trespassers die.‘’

From the Long Island estate to the Central Park refugee camp, from the cannibal gang's slaughterhouse under Brooklyn to the fortress basement where human beings are lab rats in a research center — she collects people, collects debts, collects payment. A time traveler who claims to be from the year 3000, a hyper-intelligent black bear who trades tricks for honey, a little mushroom that wiggles its stem whenever music plays — one by one, they all end up in her crew.

But what actually drags her forward is a pocket watch engraved with "133," and the fog out at sea that never lifts.

The truth behind her parents' disappearance, the human-shaped fruit the Divine Tree bears, the green-eyed child on the watch face — every thread leads to the same island.

And this time, she has no intention of merely surviving.

When they threw me overboard, they thought a man with a broken leg couldn't possibly come back alive. When the floodwaters engulfed the world, turning land into a graveyard, I found a forgotten submarine in the deep sea. From underwater, I built my empire step by step . Not by pity, not by luck. By the time the survivors of this sea finally realized what lay beneath the surface, I no longer needed to hide. They called me the Deep Sea Ghost. I didn't care what they called me. I knew only one thing—from this day forward, this sea was mine to rule.

In my last life, the heatwave collapse began with me turning an abandoned warehouse into a safe zone. I stocked it, fortified it, and brought my girlfriend inside. That same night, she slid the bolts open from within and let an armed crew storm the place. They threw me out to die.

I survived the heat, only to learn too late that it was just the warning. The real purge came next, when brutal cold hit overnight and froze me to death in the snow.

Then I opened my eyes and found myself back one month before disaster.

While everyone else rushed to buy water and fans, I was the only one who knew the heat was just the beginning. The deep freeze was what would really wipe people out.

This time, I explained nothing. I poured everything I had into diesel, insulation, winter stoves, generators, and turned that warehouse into a fortress built for the cold.

She came again, just like before. This time, I never let her through the door. So she ran straight to the armed gang and had them surround my warehouse for three full days.

She thought trapping me inside meant she’d already won.

What she didn’t know was that in just a few more days, the freeze would arrive.

And the people outside had no fuel, no winter gear, no way to stay warm.

They weren’t waiting for me to break.

They were waiting for their own deaths.

I was a herbalist, a healer who saved lives, but I was falsely accused of spreading plague and hanged on the gallows, awaiting the flames. Then I heard them—a swarm of rats emerging from the earth, gnawing through the noose and dragging me back to the world of the living. But this was not salvation, but the beginning of a curse. Plague swept across the land, the church peddled counterfeit medicines, and lords squeezed every last grain from the farmers. The rats looked at me and whispered to me — the end has come, and you will become the calamity.

He was reborn back to the day his wife Lydia was sacrificed to the demon.

The entire demon race was laughing at me, her useless husband who was about to be thrown into the cursed land, while she, dressed in a pure white robe, rose step by step on my bones and blood, becoming the most beloved saintess of the demons.

She thought I would rot in the ashes, but little did she know that I had swallowed a World Tree seed that had been dormant for ten thousand years in my death.

An enslaved old miner, a blind but gentle apothecary, a desperate mermaid leader... I led eighteen "defective products" chewed up by the abyss, riding the wildly growing tide of life, and forcefully smashed through the demon's royal city!

When the immortal demon king was drained dry by the World Tree and knelt on the ground begging for mercy like a wild dog, my noble wife smiled and raised the sharp obsidian.

"What are demons? This throne belongs only to me."

This is a story of extreme betrayal and violent redemption. When life permeates the demon realm, all the high and mighty evils will turn into dust at the bottom of the trees!

Caroline Mercer once believed kindness could be proven by sacrifice. She took in two orphaned children, gave them schools, doctors, tutors, rooms beside her daughter's nursery, and a path into the Mercer name.

Years later, those children returned as witnesses against her. Sloane Vale smiled for the cameras while calling Caroline a monster. Nolan Vale handed federal investigators a beautiful stack of forged evidence. Caroline's husband was broken, her company was seized, and her only daughter, Evelyn, died after being traded into a marriage meant to protect everyone else's reputation.

Then Caroline opened her eyes on the morning the Vale children first arrived at her door.

This time, she would feed them. She would house them. She would educate them. She would keep every receipt, every doctor's report, every legal notice.

But she would never again give strangers the keys to her child's future.