3004 Book(s) Related to please understand that i'm trying my hardest

Beta Malcolm and I were at the Civil Affairs Bureau, ready to register our marriage. We were just waiting to take the final photo when he got a phone call and left.
He abandoned me right there at the marriage registration office, leaving me stuck in an impossible situation.
I called him—no answer.
I messaged him—no reply.
In the end, I had no choice but to call his childhood sweetheart’s number. Beta Malcolm answered.
“Rowena, can you stop being so annoying? Queenie twisted her ankle—I need to take care of her today. Stop calling and waking her up. We’ll reschedule the registration.”
I bit my lip and murmured into the phone,
“This makes it the seventh time we’ve rescheduled.”
“So what? The Civil Affairs Bureau isn’t going anywhere—it’s not like it’s going to disappear!”
My face was blank, but it felt like my heart was being carved open.
A staff member looked at me with pity and asked,
“Alpha Rowena, are we still doing this?”
I gave a small nod.
“Yes. Let’s go through with it.”

Over the weekend, Alpha Kennard—my husband—and I were invited to attend a charity auction.
During the bidding, my husband's Beta, Joanna Morton, and I both set our sights on the same ruby necklace.
I was prepared to compete fairly, Until Alpha Kennard made the ceremonial bid for her.
"Queenie, you're nothing more than a dog I keep at home. What right do you have to compete with me?"
Just as everyone else withdrew from the bidding, I snapped my fingers at the auctioneer.
"Whatever Alpha Kennard offers—I'll outbid him by… one dollar."

On our twentieth wedding anniversary, I caught my husband, Carter, cheating with our adopted daughter, Ava. My mother threw herself in front of me, and died under Carter's gun.
I had my anterior temporal lobe removed by Carter and lost my memory, then I was framed as the murderer who shot my mother and was wrongly imprisoned for four years.
I clung to his 'affection and loyalty' like it was salvation.
After I got out, I lived in hell-guilt for 'killing' my mother. I suffered severe depression and became addicted to self-harm, yet never realized it was all his design.
By the third year after my release, I overheard Carter and my therapist talking; I knew the truth:
he erased my memory and used drugs and hypnosis to trap me in pain.
It was only because he fell in love with our 16-year-old adopted daughter at the age of 40 that he would stop at nothing to cover up his crime.
Under hypnosis, I finally saw it clearly: the person who pulled the trigger that night was Ava.

With her husband feeling more like a distant roommate, Nikki, an ex-college soccer player, knows there's more out there for her but scared to leave the comfort of her normal, usual, secure life. One night, during a massive storm, lightening strikes as a new player, Shane, joins her team. The second their eyes meet, time stops. She knows this person has always lived in her heart and soul. What is this feeling? It's illogical, it's fantasy, it's supported by all of the physical evidence you could throw in front of her. What the hell even is a soul mate, anyways? There's only one way to find out without actually having to interact with the dark haired stranger in real life...inviting him to dream with her. Will he join her?

Charlotte Hayes never dreamed of becoming Mrs. Hawthorne.
After a life-changing night left her pregnant, Ethan Hawthorne was forced to marry her to take responsibility for their unborn child and protect the Hawthorne family's reputation. But the marriage Charlotte believed would be the beginning of a happy family became the beginning of her nightmare.
Inside the Hawthorne Mansion, she was treated not as a wife, but as a servant. Every day, she was humiliated, overworked, and starved by the Hawthorne family. To make matters worse, her former best friend, Vanessa Caldwell—the woman the Hawthorne family had always wanted Ethan to marry—slowly took her place and stole her husband's heart.
When Charlotte uncovered the secrets of the Shadow Circle, a powerful organization controlling the country's biggest corporations, she became a threat they couldn't afford to leave alive. Before she could expose the truth, she was murdered in a staged accident.
But death was not the end.
Charlotte opened her eyes in the body of Olivia Whitmore, the sole heiress of Whitmore Enterprises, who had also died under mysterious circumstances on the very same night.
This time, she won't return to fight for love. She'll return to uncover the truth, destroy the people who ruined her life, and seek justice for both herself and Olivia.
But what happens when the man who once abandoned her falls in love with her all over again... without realizing that the woman he's desperately trying to win back is the very wife he once failed to protect?
When Ethan finally learns the truth, will regret be enough to win Charlotte back... or has he already lost her forever?

I was frozen for 100 years due to illness.
One hundred years later, the whole world was ravaged by strange phenomena, and humanity was huddled together in a few small places to survive.
I was awakened from my slumber by the investigation team. I thought I would be killed by the monster as soon as I woke up, but I found that the monster here was my good brother from college.
Besides him, the eerie owner of the barbecue restaurant, the matchmaking ghost who likes to harm people through blind dates, the S-class monstrous ghost in the cemetery... they are all my old friends...
The world a hundred years from now feels strangely familiar...

Adrian Whitmore used to call me obsessive whenever I asked where he had been with my best friend. Then I lost our baby, stopped asking, and moved into the guest room. That was when the husband who had spent years pushing me away finally cornered me and demanded to know why I no longer cared.

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 had always protected, he came to me with our biological son, both of them kneeling before me in tears, begging for forgiveness.
Holding my adopted son's hand, I smiled calmly.
"Sorry. I only have one son."

For three years, I lived across the country to raise our grandson while my husband stayed alone in Chicago—or so I believed.
Two days before Christmas, I came home early to surprise him. My key no longer fit the lock.
When Harold opened the door, he was wearing a silk robe I had never seen. Behind him stood another woman in house slippers. Her toothbrush was beside his. Her clothes were in my closet. And for two years, she had been sleeping in my bed.
Then I checked our bank account.
She hadn’t only taken my place.
Harold had been giving her my retirement, my home—and even my mother’s jewelry.

"Starting price for my wife—one dollar!" James announced, pointing at the dog cage where I lay curled up like a dying animal.

The crowd at the wedding erupted in laughter. "Five dollars!" "Ten!" They threw bids like trash, mocking the woman who used to be Mrs. Windsor. Lillian, wearing my stolen necklace, poked me through the bars with a metal rod. "Look at you, Aurora. You're nothing but filth." I closed my eyes, accepting my fate. My husband had sold me. My dignity was gone.

Suddenly, a cold, authoritative voice cut through the noise.

"Two hundred million."

Silence fell over the hall. Every head turned. Walking through the doors was a man radiating power—Louis Smith, the newly found heir to the Smith empire. The man I had pushed away ten years ago. James turned pale. "Mr. Smith... this is a joke..."

Louis didn't even look at him. He walked straight to the cage, his eyes burning with a terrifying mix of rage and tenderness. He ripped the lock off with his bare hands and pulled me into his arms. James tried to block him. "She's my wife! You can't just take her!"

Louis smirked, his voice dripping with ice. "Your wife? I just bought her. She's mine now."

Before the apocalypse hit, my ex-girlfriend called me, laughing like a maniac: "Jack, you pathetic loser—still playing that stupid farming game? Gonna whack zombies with a hoe? Open the door right now, get on your knees, and beg us, and maybe we'll throw you some table scraps."
I listened to the faint scrape of a tactical knife being drawn on the other end of the line, and silently glanced at my computer screen—at the maxed-out Greenfield Manor game, with its gold cap glowing at [999,999,999] .
"You misheard." I dropped my voice, lacing it with just the right amount of embarrassment. "I was checking the weather forecast."
The other end erupted in unrestrained laughter: "Then forecast this—how you're gonna die today!"
I hung up without changing my expression, flipped open the system, and spent a million on the [Absolute Defense Shield] —then brought out a steaming plate of roasted meat.
Forecast?
I forecast that tonight, you'll be gnawed down to bare bones by zombies.

When the apocalypse came, my materialistic ex-girlfriend not only complained that I only knew how to play games, but also conspired with relatives to poison me, cruelly steal my superpower crystal core, and degrade me into a hopeless cripple!
She thought that by taking away my power she could curry favor with the powerful and live a carefree life, but little did she know that not only did I not die, but the "League of Legends max level system" in my mind had actually completed its ultimate upgrade!
Sylas uses his ultimate to regain his power, Pyke's X-shaped slash breaks his enemy's limbs; a horde of 100,000 zombies presses in, and the whole city is in despair, when I descend from the sky with my treasure girl who is my life partner!
Pantheon's slam, Miss Fortune's barrage, Ziggs's nuke... Five LOL ultimate moves in a row wiped out the entire field, evaporating 100,000 zombies in one minute and directly ascending to the throne of the wasteland god!
Looking at my stunningly beautiful and god-level support character whom I had spoiled rotten, my ex-girlfriend, who had fallen into the mire, was filled with remorse. She knelt in the sewage, kowtowing and crying, begging to be a foot-washing maid.
I looked down at them and sneered, "Sorry, my five-player squad is already full."

In my previous life, an extreme cold apocalypse descended.

I risked my life nine times over to evolve into a high-tier Ice Plains Wolf, and just to find a piece of meat to keep my fiancée alive, I frantically tore apart wild beasts in the snow. Yet I was betrayed by her and her lover—they cut out my heart with an ice blade!

When I opened my eyes again, I had been reborn half a month before the apocalypse!

Time was running out. To awaken the highest tier of beast-human form, I needed an enormous amount of meat to provide energy.

Sports cars? Ocean-view villas? Billions in assets? I wanted none of it!

I immediately dumped my manipulative fiancée, liquidated all my assets into cash, bought a fully enclosed fortified meat processing plant, and frantically stockpiled hundreds of thousands of tons of high-calorie raw meat!

The extreme cold arrived as expected, turning the entire city into a frozen hellscape.

The scumbag pair who betrayed me in my previous life now knelt outside my impregnable airlock door, crying pitifully and begging me for scraps.

I stepped out of my fortress and looked down at them with claws sharp enough to tear through steel:

"Want meat? Go to hell and eat dirt!"

At the Moonshadow Council, my fiancé knelt before the throne with his new lover and asked permission to marry her—while keeping me as his nameless second mate.

He mocked me for having no parents and no family, claiming that if I left the Silver Fir Pack, I would not even have a place to sleep.

I removed my engagement ring and looked toward the throne. No one knew that the Lycan King seated above us was my own brother—the brother who had entered this world with me.

And my brother had already set down his goblet.

“Are you certain you want to treat her this way?”

I was never supposed to exist in the Blood Moon Pack, low-born, no surname, no family to shield me.
Yet the Alpha chose me and called me “his one and only mate for this lifetime”.
He said he loved me.
So I endured. I stepped back. I forgave him again and again.
Until the day I was pushed down the stairs, dragged into the punishment grounds, strapped to an electric restraint bed, and heard them calmly discussing how far they should go this time; what kind of punishment would finally make the “real family” feel at ease?
That was when I understood in their world, I wasn’t a mate. I wasn’t family. I wasn’t even seen as a person. I was just a bargaining chip, but something disposable, something meant to be sacrificed when convenient.
So I learned to stay quiet, to remember everything, and to wait.
They thought I died in that fire.
But when I stepped back into the moonlight, I was no longer an Omega.

My mate—Alpha Jasper—knelt on one knee, proposing to me at my birthday party when Sienna Burrows suddenly appeared.
She was his fated mate once. His first love.
Dressed in the exact same backless red gown I was wearing, she stood there like a queen, regal and untouchable.
She let out a soft, mocking laugh. "Hah. Alpha Jasper, no matter how perfect a copy may be, it will never be me."
Alpha Jasper didn’t even spare her a glance. Instead, he turned to me, gently taking my left hand in his. His voice was deep, filled with emotion.
"Cynthia, will you marry me?"

I’m Leona, and I’ve hidden a forbidden love under the moonlight of the werewolf world for nine long years—an unspoken bond with my brother’s closest friend, Alpha Nick.
When he looked at me and said, “I’ll find someone better for you,” there was a flicker in his eyes I couldn’t read. But when he turned away, it was to chase after his ex-girlfriend, Selene, crashing through the forest branches like gravity itself answered her call. “His wolf never resonated with ours.” Aris, my wolf, howled inside me.“You’ve spent years trying to spark fire in frozen stone.”
And yet, I was the fool who mistook the instinct for fated love.
In my past life, when I was seven months pregnant and trapped beneath an avalanche during a winter patrol, he was tucked in a border cave listening to Selene sing ballads under moonlit stalactites.
When I was curled in pain from stomach ulcers, he was busy tuning her purification crystals.

The day my daughter was declared brain dead, my billionaire wife was busy making soup for her first love, who was suffering from heart failure.
To fund a heart transplant for her first love , she made a phone call and injected our biological daughter with a large dose of nerve-blocking agents, taking her life .
The night before the burial, I begged her like a dog to come and see our daughter off one last time, but she impatiently scolded me on the phone: "Don't bother me with dead people all the time; the dead can't be brought back to life."
Later, on our sixth wedding anniversary, in front of all the wealthy and powerful in New York, she offered me a top-quality frozen fertilized egg as compensation, promising to give me a "new child."
However, when she opened the high-end gift box I gave her with a smile—
there was no so-called "new life" inside, only a completely drained bankruptcy liquidation document for a conglomerate, a waste receipt for the fertilized egg that had been flushed down the drain, and a high-definition video of her first love laughing at her in a club, saying she was "so easy to fool."

On our wedding day, she vanished wearing the gown I had bought for her.
I didn’t chase her. Instead, I went back to the operating table.
For three years, I had paid off her debts and filled the holes she left behind—enough for her to live a second life. My heart couldn't take it anymore; I had a stent implanted, though she never knew.
Three days later, I died in the hospital corridor. My ECG flatlined.
She didn’t know. She was still at a cocktail party in another city, clinking glasses with someone else.
A month later, she came back, kneeling before my tombstone in tears.
But it was all too late.

They call me a parasite.
An outdated piece of trash. A fraudster hiding in the clouds, sucking the blood of the empire.
They spat at my shadow, threw stones at my door, and made my daughter bind my wrists with spirit-binding silver.
Then they asked me if I had any last words.
I said, "The void is coming."
They burst into laughter.
Now, the sky has cracked open.
Those who once cursed my name are now kneeling in the ashes, begging me for help.
I sat on a cold rock on Greystone Ridge, gazing at the distant firelight.
I could have stopped it all.
But I choose—
To stand idly by.

My teammates viewed me as a mobile food supply and planned to butcher me before they ran out of rations.
They thought that as long as I died, they would win this "survival game."
However, they would never know that what I brought back from the depths of the ruins wasn't fear, but the highest-level administrative privileges of the entire logistics system. While they killed each other for a bag of expired biscuits, I had already locked the exit to this hell. Sorry, but in this settling of accounts, you aren't even qualified to be treated as bargaining chips.

I thought I was the luckiest person in the apocalypse.
My brother, a former special forces soldier, brought me supplies so I wouldn't have to face the horrors above ground.
My girlfriend comforted me over the radio, saying she'd cry in my arms once we could finally get out.
I lived underground for three years, grateful like a domesticated dog.
Until that day, when I pushed open the door, smelled fresh grass, and saw the swimming pool in the sunlight—that's when I understood that the so-called apocalypse was never outside, but behind the door they had locked me in.

I’ve been guarding a door in the Nevada underground for a hundred years. The system marks this place "Abandoned," and the official records claim I don't exist.
When the investigation team arrived, the leader was my old signal corpsman. He pretended not to know me and ordered his guards to drag me out like a piece of dead weight.
They shoved a young lad from the Rex family into the breach as bait, and while everyone screamed in horror, no one dared to move.
So, I jumped down to fish the kid out, using a bottle of beer to force back the tentacles reaching from the dark.
Then, I pulled on that dusty old uniform and pressed my palm against the master console—all thirty-two security protocols verified instantly.
The lead technician collapsed in shock: "This clearance level is restricted to the Chief Architect only."
He was right. I am.
The thing I’ve kept locked behind that door for a century woke up, whispering: "What do you want?"
I said: "Dinner."

Last life, my girlfriend was trapped in a fire. I ran in, took the burns, and dragged her out alive.
When she woke up, she pointed at me first: “He’s the arsonist.”

Only later did I learn the truth—she’d been sleeping with her boss. They set the fire for an insurance payout and pinned everything on me.
Police investigations, the company cutting ties, the media turning me into a monster—I couldn’t prove a thing. I died in the rain, discarded like trash.

This time, I didn’t expose them. I didn’t call the cops.
On the night of the fire, I left early—then staged a robbery and walked myself into a police station, building the cleanest alibi possible.

They lit the match on schedule, trapped themselves, and waited for me to charge in.
As the flames grew and I never showed, she called—furious—demanding I come now.

I glanced at the officer taking my statement and said into the phone, calmly:
“Sorry. I can’t leave right now.”

At the parents' meeting, the daughter's diary was read aloud: "My father is the Grand Duke of the Night."
The room erupted in laughter.
The mentor, disregarding her daughter's dignity, tore up her diary, while the nouveau riche woman advised me , a liar, to "get out of this neighborhood."
I didn't say anything, I just stood up. Then, their knees were all shattered.

I have guarded the Abyss on the Ashen Plains for a thousand years.

My daily routine: chewing rock-hard rye bread, single-handedly crushing the skulls of trespassing demons, wiping their slime off on a ragged surcoat, and leaning against a bronze pillar to catch the wind.

Today, a dying girl stumbled into the wasteland. Her fingers were locked in a death grip around the bloodstained iron crest I had left behind a millennium ago. Up on the ridge, three hundred heavy cavalrymen of the Alliance drew their lances, forming a wall of steel as they closed in.

I stared at the blood on the ground. I didn't make a sound.

I just brushed the biscuit crumbs off my lap and stretched my stiff neck. Turning around, my fingers hooked onto the hilt of a rust-eaten battleaxe resting beneath the bronze pillar. I dragged it along with casual ease.

"Troublesome."

I muttered that single word, and walked alone toward the formation of steel.

"We are denying coverage for your father's surgery. You can either pay the $240,000 out of pocket, or wait for him to be paralyzed for the rest of his life."
My father was critically injured, the insurance company denied the claim, and the regional director arrogantly threw the denial letter in my face.
I gave a cold sneer and backhandedly slapped my Juris Doctor (JD) dissertation on his desk.

My squadmates falsely accused me of being a vampire. They poured scalding water over me claiming it was "holy water," spiked my meals with garlic extract, and even splashed me with stinking goat blood. In the end, their madness drove them to plunge a sharpened cross straight into my heart...

When I was seven weeks pregnant, my husband, Jacob, seated his mistress and their secret son at the head table of our anniversary dinner.
In front of everyone, he said, "Ella hasn't given me a child in four years. Why should I keep waiting?" His mistress was already tired of waiting to take my place.
So I gave them what they wanted. I faked my death in the car crash his mistress had planned and walked away.
Then why was Jacob searching the crash site like a madman? When he pulled my waterlogged prenatal report from the sunken car, he dropped to his knees by the river and sobbed for me to come back.

Three years ago, Grant divorced me while I was pregnant.
That same day, I was in a car accident, and our baby didn’t survive. Grant never found out because he was celebrating another woman’s birthday.
Three years later, he decided that the son I had raised was his. He took the boy away without permission and exposed him to a cat, triggering a severe allergic reaction that nearly killed him.
When Grant finally knelt and begged me to take him back, I told him only one thing:
“I stopped loving you a long time ago.”

On my first day as an intern at the zoo, the old director assigned us animals to care for.
In my previous life, my classmate Jack chose the easy-to-care-for African elephant, while I was forced to take on the brutal Siberian tiger.
A month later, the apocalypse struck, and the Siberian tiger successfully evolved, leading me to escape the encirclement.
Jack's elephant, however, couldn't outrun the mutated species and was torn to pieces. Driven
by jealousy, the surviving Jack incited a mob to brutally beat me and the giant tiger to death, dismembering and cannibalizing us.
When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day the animals were assigned.
Jack had already taken the Siberian tiger, pushing the elephant to me, and I knew he had also been reborn.
But what he didn't know was that the Siberian tiger he had devoured was also reborn with me.

My own sister is my husband -Alpha’s mistress.

She needed a liver transplant,

So he killed pup.

What's even more ironic,

On the day I found out I was pregnant,

I ran into my husband accompanying her for her prenatal examination.

My pup is gone.

How can the people responsible for his death deserve happiness?

Feeling the new life growing inside me,

I will make sure they pay for their actions.

Her daughter lay dying—her only chance at survival resting in a bone marrow transplant from her biological father.
That man, the one Stella Johnson had once loved with all her heart, was nowhere to be found.
While Stella made call after call, hands trembling with desperation, Charles Hart was busy building a crystal castle for the daughter of his beloved white moonlight—lighting up the entire city with fireworks in her honor.
All Stella got in return was a cold, clipped response:
"I'm busy."
And then… silence.
She waited.
And waited.
Until the warmth left her daughter's tiny hand.
He never came.
Cradling the small urn, Stella stepped into the streets—only to be greeted by a cruel spectacle.
Every digital screen on the bustling boulevard played the same scene:
Charles, his white moonlight, and their daughter, smiling under the fireworks as they sang "Happy Birthday," basking in a future built on someone else's grave.
The love Stella once held for Charles didn't just die that night—it was burned to ash.
And from those ashes, something far stronger rose:
Hatred. Cold. Sharp. Unforgiving.

She built a quiet life from the wreckage of a marriage that nearly swallowed her whole. A bakery. A hidden talent for art. And a son she loves more than breathing. At forty, Corinna Adler is composed, grounded, but devastatingly unsated, starved and untouched.

One night was supposed to fix that.

One anonymous night at Obscura, the city's most secretive underground club with a man whose hands knew things about her body she had forgotten were possible. Young, commanding, and patient. The kind of man Corinna would unfortunately, never forget.

Because the morning after, he re-introduces himself into her reality in a way she never sees coming.

Do all men lose interest in their wives after marriage?

We’ve been married for five years, and he never touched me.

At first he said he wasn’t well, so I was understanding. Later he recovered, but still kept me far away.

On our fifth wedding anniversary, my sister came in for a check-up, clearly pregnant with his child.

The truth hit me hard: he wasn’t incapable. He was just incapable with me.

I drew up the divorce papers, ready to end this empty marriage.

On the reason for divorce, I wrote with my own hand:

“Male sexual dysfunction; no marital relations in five years.”

He only smiled coldly when he saw it.

A week later, in the urology clinic.

I put on my medical gloves, looked at him, and said calmly:

“Sir, will you undress yourself, or shall I help you?”

His disapproval didn’t take away my confidence.

I still embraced better things in my career and love life!

But his life started to be filled with one accident after another.

"Evelyn Drake, are you truly set on joining the FBI as an undercover agent?"
The senior officer Garrett stared intently at the elegantly dressed woman before him, his gaze laced with inquiry and faint doubt.
It was his occupational habit, even a special knack, to categorize everyone he met into distinct social ranks—and he was exceptionally good at it, never once misjudging anyone.
In his eyes, Evelyn Drake, with her flawless makeup and platinum-blonde hair all the way down to the roots, was far from cut out to be an agent.
He had seen countless such pampered wealthy wives throwing petty tantrums. Most would make a scene at the front desk, only to be coaxed home meekly by their rich husbands soon after.
If such a delicate lady were admitted into the FBI, he suspected even the Kevlar bulletproof vest alone would chafe her soft skin raw.
Lost in these thoughts, Garrett let out a disdainful chuckle, his tone brimming with scorn. "Are you really sure? You'd give up your lavish lifestyle to become an FBI agent?"
Sensing his contempt, Evelyn took off her expensive wristwatch and slipped it into her handbag, then nodded firmly at him. "I am absolutely certain."

Reborn seven days before the zombie siege, Shen Lie returns to the day he was tricked into a deadly dark web live stream. Betrayed by his wife and trapped as prey for global wealthy viewers, he uses his stunt skills to layout a counter-kill plan, turning every hunter into the hunted and exposing the bloody evil behind the apocalypse game.

My ex and I used to live inside a romance movie.

She was the heroine’s best friend. I was the hero’s loyal sidekick. When the leads got their happy ending, we—the two “extras”—ended up together like an afterthought.

Then the credits rolled, and real life didn’t. The heroine died in a car crash, the hero fell apart, and my girlfriend chose that moment to leave me.

She said she was done being a supporting role. She wanted the spotlight—she wanted the heroine’s place.

I didn’t beg. I left the city alone and started over from nothing.

Five years later, I returned with my own company group—and ran into her again at a charity gala.

She still looked flawless, moving through the room of power and money, keeping up the image of success. She assumed I was still the same guy trailing behind someone else, and she spoke to me with that familiar, pitying superiority—offering to “help” me back into the circle.

Until the lights dimmed, and the host read my name with respectful clarity, inviting me to the stage.

That was when she realized the gala’s biggest sponsor was me—and the “sidekick” she thought she’d left behind was now someone she could never reach again.

Seven years ago, my wife and son committed perjury in court, conspiring to send me to a high-security prison, all so they could elope with that fraudster.
Seven years later, I was released.
My ex-wife, with her son, arrogantly tossed a business card onto my faded work clothes:
"Go kowtow to my new husband and apologize, and I'll give you a waiter's job."
Little did she know that just hours later, at a top-tier financial summit across America, her seemingly untouchable new husband was kneeling at my feet like a dog.
And her proud multi-billion dollar empire was nothing more than garbage I could crush with a flick of my finger.

My daughter has been blind since birth. On her eighteenth birthday, she finally received news of a matching cornea donor.
Our whole family was so excited we couldn't sleep that night. My husband and daughter eagerly prepared for the surgery, their hearts filled with hope that she would soon see the light.
But I suddenly slammed my hand on the table and, amidst the family's stunned gazes, proposed a divorce on the spot.
My husband's face turned ashen as he demanded harshly, "You want a divorce just because I'm going through with our daughter's surgery?"
I curled the corner of my mouth and enunciated every word: "That's right. Because you're going through with her surgery—this marriage is over."

I am the youngest Don of the Obsidian Family.
After an unexpected rest, my opponent sent me a street racing invitation.
I went to my brother's company to retrieve my car, but was drugged with ether by my brother's secretary.
She told me that no one could seduce her man.
She kicked my stomach, threatened me with a paper cutter to make a vow, and said her future sister-in-law is the youngest Don of the Obsidian Family—if I dared to retaliate against her, I would die miserably.
I looked at her coldly.
Really?
But I haven't agreed to be your sister-in-law yet!

I suddenly awakened the ability to read minds. But I heard my fiancé, Joey Jones, mocking me in his mind: He had already arranged for an assassin to “send me off” at our wedding in the church. What was even more disgusting was that he promised I would become the Donna of the Jones family, but in his heart, he was fixated on his stepmother, Rory—his father’s widow, who was only a few years older than him.
With only three days left until the wedding, I no longer cried or begged for love. Instead, I contacted my first love, Nate, who was a police officer: “How about being the male lead at my wedding?”

After being reborn,
I immediately rushed to my adoptive mother who was conducting an experiment,
bit a piece of flesh off her,
and then turned to my younger sister standing beside her,
splashing her face with foul-smelling dog urine.
After being restrained,
I listened to them screaming that I had gone mad with rabies.
I pretended to be insane on the surface,
just to be smoothly sent to a rehabilitation center.
In my previous life, just as my experiment was about to succeed,
the laboratory exploded.
My adoptive mother and younger sister shifted all the blame onto me,
causing me to be killed by enraged family members.
This time,
with no one to take the fall for them,
I'll see how they manage to get away with it.

What is fate? Waking up three days after you rejected your fated mates in front of the entire school, with the memories of your husband's betrayal still burning in your chest? Or finding out that the only way to save your empire is to compete for love on national television—against the man who murdered you?

Make your pick.

Odessa Montgomery died at thirty—cheated on, poisoned, and blown to pieces by the husband she trusted. Then she opened her eyes at twenty-one, three days after the mating gala where she publicly rejected the De Luca triplets. The rejection is still fresh. The whole school is still talking. And Damien Gracias, her charming hockey-star boyfriend, has no idea she remembers every lie he ever told her.

She dumps him. Publicly. Brutally. But freedom comes at a cost. Her grandfather's will is clear: find a mate or lose the Montgomery empire. With Damien out and the De Luca triplets—her humiliated fated mates—lurking in her past, her options are nothing.

Then comes Moonlit Bonds, a televised competition where unmated shifters compete for love and a life-changing prize. Win, and her inheritance is hers. Lose, and lose everything.

There's just one problem. Damien and his true mate, Sarah, have joined the show, hoping to legitimize their bond on camera. And the De Luca triplets are also contestants—three alphas she rejected, two who bullied her, and one who has never stopped watching.

Now Odessa is trapped in a villa with cameras in every corner, a public audience that votes on her fate, and enemies who want her dead.

She came to win.

She might just find revenge.

But falling for the enemy? That was never part of the plan.

The End Times Came, and I Awakened the Ability to Grow Vegetables

Every time I catalyzed a vegetable, it drained my stamina and life force.

But my sister Lucy needs to eat, and everyone in the camp needs to eat.

So I gave my life to the soil, exchanging life for food again and again.

Cult leader Silas patted my shoulder and said I was God's gardener, that Eden was born because of me.

I thought I had found a home.

I distributed the vegetables I grew to everyone in the camp.

Until I discovered the blue-green veins on my sister's arm.

Until I discovered that the bottle of "holy water" I fed her every day wasn't medicine at all.

Until I discovered that my sister had been sent to their altar.

I was only a week away from giving birth when my Alpha mate dragged me from our home—no, ripped me from safety—and forced me to care for her.
His precious Luna-to-be. The one who had just lost her baby.
“She’s in pain because of you,” he growled, his Alpha aura crashing down on me like a tidal wave. “You’ll atone for what you’ve done.”
Lucia, with her tear-soaked eyes and sugar-sweet lies, claimed I had poisoned her with silver. He didn’t even ask for the truth.
Instead, he had me stripped bare and thrown into the sacrificial chamber, where flames licked at my skin and the heat soared past 80 degrees Celsius.
“Purify your sins,” he whispered coldly, like a death sentence wrapped in frost.
And then—In that hellish blaze, I went into labor. Alone. I screamed. I begged. I clawed at the burning stone door until my nails bled, and my voice broke.
But no one came.

Everyone said I’d traded five years of my youth and my unwavering devotion for an engagement that every woman envied.
My fiancé, Felix Smith, seemed to believe it, too. He gave me pearls, promised me a bright future, and wrapped me up in a web of tenderness, layer after layer.
Until that afternoon, when he held me close, yet used a language he thought I didn’t understand to weave the perfect "wedding" con over the phone.
That was the moment I finally realized: over these five years, who had he really been looking at through me? And every pearl he ever gave me, whose tastes was he remembering?
When the elevator failed and darkness crashed down, the person he protected on instinct wasn’t me.
When the wind howled across the empty outskirts, the person he chose to abandon was me.
I’d been learning how to love him, how to become a proper bride. In the end, what I learned was how to exit quietly, out of his world with Serena.
Only when I slipped off that pearl ring did I understand—
Some love stories, from the very beginning, are nothing but long letters written to someone else.

My name is Jack Morris, a bottom-rung janitor on the docks.
Every day, people walk all over me, and I live on moldy bread.
Until one day, an old man I saved handed me a photograph. "This is my granddaughter. She's being held at the Black Swan Casino."
That used to be my place. Ten years ago.
Her father was a brother who died in my place.
I was once the king of the underground.
And now, at the banquet celebrating the tenth anniversary of my death, they're treating that old man's granddaughter like a toy.
If my disappearance only made those animals more brazen...
Then they can finish that drink and celebrate their own deaths next.

In the ashes of a fallen empire, fire is forbidden and those born with it are hunted.

For twenty-one-year-old Kaelin Dravyr, survival means hiding her emberfire beneath scars and silence. Once a smuggler of dragon relics, now a fugitive, she’s spent her life outrunning the Crown that burned her kind to extinction. But when a duel in the undercity ignites the flame within her for all to see, Kaelin’s secret shatters and the realm’s deadliest heir takes notice.

Prince Ardyn Varell, the empire’s young regent, offers Kaelin a single, ruthless choice: execution, or service. Sent to infiltrate a rebel faction rumored to protect the last living dragon, Kaelin accepts but the deeper she goes, the more she learns that the true monster might sit upon the throne.

As whispers of prophecy stir and a dragon’s heartbeat echoes in her chest, Kaelin’s fire awakens an ancient bond that could either save the world or burn it down.

Torn between a rebellion’s trust, a prince’s obsession, and the inferno rising within, Kaelin must decide what kind of flame she’ll become: weapon, savior, or sovereign.