4674 Book(s) Related to ruby bridges goes to school: my true story

Sabrina Daniels has spent years quietly pining for her older brother’s closest friend—the star forward and team captain, Ronan Dickson. When her parents leave the country for several months, she’s more than happy to move into the house her brother shares with Ronan… until the night she finally confesses how she feels and he turns her down.

Shattered and embarrassed, Sabrina does her best to stay out of his way. But living under the same roof—and the undeniable pull that still crackles between them—makes distance almost impossible.

Ronan may have rejected her, yet he never pulls away when she tests the boundary again. What begins as stolen, secret kisses quickly deepens into something far more intense and forbidden.

Ronan, however, is carrying more than unresolved feelings. He’s still haunted by the unsolved killing of his mother years ago. When Sabrina insists on helping him dig for the truth, the evidence points somewhere neither of them ever expected—straight to her own father.

As long-buried secrets surface and loyalties shatter, one question hangs over them:
Can their relationship survive when the truth threatens to destroy everything they know?

Last time, the world ended.

My fallen comrade left me the fortress he spent his life building. I hesitated, let his niece’s boyfriend inside, and that mercy killed everyone. They took the warehouse, cut the power, and put a knife in my gut. I crawled into the underground control room and triggered the self-destruct protocol he’d hidden for the worst day. The entire fortress went up in flames.

Then I opened my eyes—one month before disaster.

The gate was still closed. They were still outside. Everything could still be fixed.

This time, I set one rule at the door: anyone who opens it without approval is a traitor.

She cried like before, begged me to let her boyfriend in, called him the man she loved—and when I refused, she reached for the controls anyway.

So I grabbed her wrist and threw her out with them.

When I was injured and hospitalized, my husband, Adrian Hale, was still giving me the silent treatment over his ex-girlfriend.
 
During our worst fight, he told me, "If Vanessa and I wanted to be together, you never would have become Mrs. Hale."
 
After that, I became the kind of wife he'd always claimed to want. I stopped asking questions. I stopped checking when he would be home. I stopped arguing when Vanessa called.
 
Yet, that was when Adrian began reporting every detail of his day, avoiding Vanessa, and trying to come home early. On my birthday, he canceled a trip to Europe and flew back overnight to surprise me.
 
I should have been moved.
 
Instead, I hid in the kitchen and whispered to my best friend, "We're getting divorced. Why is he going to all this trouble?"
 
She laughed. "Adrian Hale is rich, gorgeous, and finally acting like a husband. Are you sure you won't regret leaving him?"
 
I thought about it.
 
"No," I said. "I think I'll finally be able to breathe."
 
Something dropped to the floor behind me.
 
I turned. Adrian was standing in the doorway, looking completely ashen.

Our mother died broke. Three months later Camilla Castellano drove down to Atlantic City and offered to take my sister and me into her family.
One of us she would adopt. Her name, her money, her protection for life.
The other would marry her only son, the man who runs that family after her.
We had to pick that night, before either of us had laid eyes on him.
My sister picked first, and she picked daughter. The wife's the one they shoot at, she said. And a woman that rich doesn't come shopping in a place like this unless something is badly wrong with her boy.
Nothing was wrong with her boy.
So I got the son my sister didn't want, and Rafe Castellano spent three years sure I had worked my way to him on purpose. He took the family's accounts off me and handed them to my sister. He told a room full of people that a life with me turned his stomach.
Two weeks before the wedding, I asked his mother to change the bride.
He didn't believe me. He wouldn't come to the church. He signed the license without reading the name above his own.
He lifted the veil that night to tell me he was sorry.
I wasn't the one underneath it.

For the sake of my marriage, I turned down a promotion and became the perfect wife and mother.
When my six-year-old son was rushed to the ER with an asthma attack in the dead of night, I sat vigil until dawn.
What I didn't expect was to hear my husband, just outside the emergency room doors, bragging to a friend about his mistress — and sneering that I was "bland and boring."
What hurt worse: my own son had been bought off by the other woman, and was now faking illness with practiced ease to cover for his father's affair.
My husband's scheming, my son's betrayal — seven years of devotion, ground into the dirt.
In that moment, something inside me died for good.
If this family is a filthy, lie-riddled con, then I'm taking back every ounce of love and sacrifice I ever poured into it. And I'm not looking back.

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.”
She didn’t know that the “social garbage” she called a pill-seeking self-harmer was the son she had abandoned ten years ago.
When the cold scalpel cut open my chest, an old photograph stained with black blood slipped out.
The moment she saw it, the woman who had stood above everyone else—
went completely insane…

On Thanksgiving, I take an emergency mansion cleaning gig to cover my rent. The second I step into the master bedroom, I freeze. Hanging on the wall is a huge wedding photo. The groom is my husband — but the bride beside him is not me.
Liam has built an entire secret family. Worse still, my own parents and brother happily join his fake perfect life. Even my beloved young son has grown attached to another woman. When my husband finally confronts me and reveals another devastating truth, I leave with a broken heart.
Years later, when my ex-husband and all those traitors come crawling to beg for mercy, I will never soften for them again.

For half a box of rations, my former comrade put a bullet in my back. As I gasped my last, the world reset—three days before the apocalypse. I didn't go after him for revenge. I floored the accelerator, racing toward the Texas borderlands where my grandfather—a Vietnam veteran—had spent forty years hoarding "junk" that everyone mocked. When the heat turned the earth into a furnace and Drake’s war-party smashed into the fence, they were met with a wall of diesel fire. My grandfather had spent three years digging a secret tunnel that bypassed the perimeter, and half a ton of fertilizer sent their entire encampment into the sky. They laughed at his junk pile. I laughed at their graves.

I got dragged online by one of my lead devs.

He claimed my "Incubation Project" was a gilded cage—a trap to exploit the team and steal their personal IPs.

The truth?

I funded it out of my own pocket.

Selected candidates would get a $50,000 no-strings-attached seed fund, plus full Ivy League tuition reimbursement. It was 100% voluntary, with zero penalties for opting out.

Since the internet decided I was a toxic capitalist monopolizing their creativity, I gave him exactly what he wanted. I fired off a company-wide memo:

[To protect your creative freedom from capitalist exploitation, the $50,000 Incubation Fund is permanently abolished, effective immediately.]

[As an alternative, the monthly education allowance for all employees is now a $15 reimbursement for basic coding courses.]

The moment the memo dropped, the employees who were counting on that $50k to pay off student loans or change their lives completely lost it.

Now, they're swarming right outside my glass office door, eyes red, begging me to reinstate the program.

For two years my mother told the whole town that my sister Zoe was in a hospital in Switzerland.
She shut the heat off in my room with a wrench, because Zoe's ward is kept at sixty-five degrees. My dinner was always cold, because Zoe can't keep solid food down. I never got a birthday cake, because Zoe hasn't had one since she was seventeen.
The day I won the state 1600, she pulled the medal off my neck in the parking lot and didn't say one word the whole drive home. Then she walked me down to the basement, dropped it on the floor, and ground it under her heel until the ribbon came apart. She took a picture of it lying there. I'll send this to your sister. So she knows her little sister is keeping her company.
She came back down that night with a pair of garden shears. I fought her. She got a fistful of my hair, put my head over her knee, and cut it all off, because chemo took Zoe's.
Then I found something down there my mother never meant me to see.
My sister isn't where she said. And she isn't sick.

My beast companions are in the middle of my medicinal soak when a soft, dramatic little "ow" drifts in from outside.

Vex, my wolfkin companion, drops my leg. Brom, the bearkin, jerks his hand and a fortune's worth of elixir spills into the water.

They crash through the floor-to-ceiling window and bolt outside without a single glance back — all for some ordinary girl.

I'm still staring at the broken glass when a stream of glowing blue text pops up out of nowhere.

[The main character Ivy literally fake-tripped in the garden and these two idiots jumped out a window for her!]
[Honestly, the original side character Lillia had it so rough. Backstabbed by her own companions, dies a miserable death, and they end up in Ivy's entourage…]
[And she never even figures out what's happening. Just suffers through the whole thing without a clue.]

I read through all of it, and one thought slowly rises: seriously?

If my companions won't behave, just get new ones. Simple.

I go straight to my mom, and before I've even finished talking, she's already pulling me toward the door.

"Any beast that turns on its master isn't worth keeping. Come on, baby — let's go pick you out some new ones. Mom's paying, so make it the most expensive ones they've got."

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 son Ethan? Nothing but a living cornea donor for Mia—the cherished daughter he had with his first love.

He treated my child like spare parts, never knowing Mia isn't even his blood.

After my mother remarried, my stepbrother Logan bullied me nonstop every day. I lived in constant agony, isolated and helpless, forced to endure all the abuse alone.
When I was close to giving up, Logan’s best friend Noah reached out to me. He was sweet and caring, bringing me much-needed warmth. I latched onto him blindly, believing he was my only savior and my last ray of hope.
Yet his kindness was all a lie, a cruel trap planned by him and Logan. He gained my trust just to betray and hurt me. My last hope crumbled completely. Broken and devastated by their deception, I cut off all ties and left this painful place for good.

"I was bonded with an alien system that issued nothing but 'benevolence' missions.
Supply food to violent thugs, shelter the mutants, embrace the Zombie King, and share our planetary defense technology with the entire world.
It claimed that as long as we were merciful, the civilization could survive.
I nodded, then promptly tweaked the task annotations.
I laced the food with neuro-suppressants, turned the shelter into a bio-sample bank, and activated kinetic overload when I 'embraced' the monster king.
Sharing the tech? Sure—though every defensive line I shared came with a backdoor that I could trigger remotely.
When the system eventually tried to purge me, Professor Sarah retaliated by locking it inside the national supercomputer.
I rewrote its underlying code, replacing 'mercy' with 'absolute order.'
Earth remains a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but the global satellite network is entirely in my hands.
The system’s most crushing defeat wasn't being destroyed; it was staying alive, only to become my tool."

For six years, I wore Pack silver. I sold my blood. I scrubbed silver out of Pack den floors. I slept on a basement floor — all to pay off my mate's Pack debt and buy my brother's wolfsbane antidote.
Today, with the receipt finally signed, my brother looked at me and said:
"Seren, I was never poisoned. Our parents aren't dead either. The Rogue raid six years ago — I arranged it. The only wolf hurt that night was you."
My mate stepped up behind him: "I never lost my Pack rank either. I've been at the estate the whole time."
Then my parents — the ones I'd buried seven years ago — walked through the door.
The Pack physician had given me forty-eight hours left to live.
They were going to remember every single one.

I was drugged with an aphrodisiac by my competitors, and Pierce Pei dumped me in his older brother's room.
Pretending to be delirious from the drug's effects, I seduced his older brother all night long.
The moment I opened my eyes the next morning, I blushed and complained to Pierce, "You were way too rough last night. I can barely get out of bed."
"But you were so amazing last night. I really, really liked it."
Pierce froze. He threw away every gift I had ever given him.
Later, after all his black cards were canceled, he stormed furiously into his brother's office.
There, he saw the cold and aloof eldest son of the Pei family kneeling on one knee, putting shoes on my feet.

Ten years ago, my parents worked for the Bellamys. He was their driver. She ran the house.

Then came the crash. I watched them shove Nash Bellamy out of the wreck, and it killed them both.

That's where the claustrophobia came from.

He knew. He knew all of it.

Then at homecoming, I showed up in a dress that matched Camilla's. She was the girl he'd always wanted. So he shoved me into the abandoned supply closet backstage.

The lock turned. On the other side of the door, he and Camilla were laughing like it was nothing.

"I'm pretty sure she's claustrophobic."

"Two hours in there. She'll learn."

I clawed at my own hands until they bled, couldn't get any air, and ended up wetting myself in a closet a dog wouldn't sleep in.

When the door finally opened, he pinched his nose and laughed and said I was disgusting.

I pushed myself up the wall, inch by inch, and looked at the face I'd been looking at for ten years. And I didn't want to cry anymore. Not even a little.

"Nash. I'm done chasing you."

The biggest regret of my life was letting my son intern at our family company.

Jonah had barely started his internship when another intern named Presley Shaw accused him of sexual assault. Of course, the security cameras on that floor just happened to be down for maintenance that day.

I panicked. I listened to my husband, Curtis, and privately paid Presley two million dollars to keep quiet. I thought money could buy us peace.

Instead, she posted the transfer records and a recording of our conversation online, accusing us of paying her to make the accusation disappear.

The backlash was overwhelming. My son, who wouldn’t hurt a fly and spent most of his time painting alone in his studio, was doxxed. Obscenities were spray-painted across our front door. The police took him away, and while he was being held in jail awaiting trial, the pressure kept mounting until he saw no way out.

In the end, he slit his wrists, believing it was the only way left to prove his innocence.

The company collapsed into bankruptcy. In the chaos, Curtis drained our accounts and ran off with Presley.

Only then did I understand. From the beginning, they had set the whole thing up to destroy my son and me.

On the anniversary of Jonah’s death, I jumped from the roof of our company building.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day Jonah was supposed to begin his internship.

This time, I would never let my son go anywhere near that hell again.

After being lost for ten years, I was finally brought home by my biological parents.
They stood in the cramped basement and asked me, "The family went bankrupt a month ago. You won't hold it against us for being poor, will you?"
Overcome with emotion, I hugged them tightly and shook my head fervently.
Later, my father was diagnosed with uremia and needed a large sum of money for surgery. To earn money, I worked three jobs a day, eventually collapsing from exhaustion and being diagnosed with a brain tumor. With no time for treatment, I rushed to deliver food orders.
Unexpectedly, I ran into my father—who should have been in the hospital undergoing dialysis—having booked an entire shopping mall to celebrate the adopted daughter's birthday. My mother, wearing an gorgeous gown I'd never seen before, smiled as she embraced the girl.
"Lily, our precious, Mommy and Daddy will give you everything you want."
My brother, who they said had died in an accident while searching for me, was dotingly putting a diamond necklace on the girl.
It turned out the family hadn't gone bankrupt at all—I just wasn't worthy.

My best friend Tiffany was obsessed with those novels where a mafia don spoils his woman rotten.

She was convinced she was the type of girl who could make a ruthless boss go soft, so she went after Vincent, the heir of a crime family, and got him.

His bodyguards, his dirty money, even the way he told her not to ask questions and just sit tight. She read all of it as devotion. And of course she had to drag me into it too, always with the same excuse: it was for my own good.

Last time around, her mess got me killed. Vincent's enemies mistook me for one of his people, and I died in a shootout that had nothing to do with me.

The second the blade opened my throat, all I could think about was her holding up a bloody knife, grinning, showing it off to me like a trophy.

"Margot, look. He gave me this. It means we're official now."

I remember feeling disgusted. I never thought that same knife would end up slitting my throat.

Blood pooled across the street while she hid in Vincent's arms, screaming, hands over her eyes. Later I heard her crying to someone, saying it wasn't her fault, that I just had bad luck.

I died inside her little romance fantasy. A nobody side character, wiped off the page without a second thought.

Then I opened my eyes, and I was back. Back to the afternoon it all started.

The day my all-powerful wife personally handed me over to the mob's basement, she was shielding my identical twin brother, furiously accusing me of destroying his ability to carry on the family line.
To compensate for my brother's "trauma," my parents stood by and did nothing. Using her influence, my wife pressured me to take his place at a black-market clinic, testing a lethal drug.
They thought I was just going to suffer some physical hardship, that after enduring these two weeks, everything would be happily resolved.
But they didn't know I had already been poisoned by my brother. I was dying.
I died in agony on the cold operating table. As my body was being gnawed and rotted by rats, they were happily vacationing by the sea.
Only when the lies were exposed did my wife kick down the hidden door. Holding my maggot-infested, decaying flesh, she wept until she vomited blood, then went mad and swallowed a bullet. My parents watched their family shattered and wept on their knees.

I had spent ten years rescuing girls sacrificed to the river god.
Then, on the morning of my wedding, my parents drugged me, tied stones to my feet, and placed me on the offering raft.
My brother needed a bride, they said. Her life mattered more than mine.
But the eighteen women I had saved were waiting beneath the water.
This time, they saved me.
And together, we decided to give the county exactly what it claimed to worship:
a river god who demanded sons.

I would often find myself staring into my son Leon's eyes, lost in thought.
One, a deep azure blue, was inherited from his father. The other, however, was amber.
I couldn't understand it. While Leon's lineage is indeed mixed, his other eye should have been silver—the mark of my bloodline, the symbol of the royal werewolf lineage.
Yet it wasn't. This question had haunted me for five years.
Then, by chance, I came across an ancient book in my husband Carlisle's study. It detailed the hereditary rules of eye color for the royal werewolf line:
Regardless of which race they intermarry with, the direct descendants of the royal werewolves will always inherit at least one distinctive eye.
This meant that a son I bore would definitely have silver pupils.
My hands began to tremble uncontrollably. I shared my fear—that we might have brought home the wrong child—with Carlisle.
He flew into a rage, snatched the book from my hands, and threw it into the fireplace.
"Selene, are you doubting my fidelity? Or suspecting that our son isn't your own? If Leon knew you doubted him, his heart would be shattered."
Carlisle stormed out, slamming the door behind him. Watching his retreating figure, my heart grew cold, piece by piece.
His reaction confirmed my worst fear, the one I desperately wanted to deny.
With the full moon just seven days away, I decided to abandon the plan of taking Leon back to the royal werewolf clan.

Terminal. One month, maybe less.
I folded the report and put it in my bag. The doctor asked if there was family I could call. I told him there wasn't.
My husband rang while I was crouched against the hospital wall, waiting for the pain to pass. I could hear waves behind his voice. He didn't ask what the doctor said. He wanted to know why his money hadn't come through yet. His first love needed it for her art show.
So I sent him all of it. My savings, and the last of what my mother left me. Ten years, settled in one transfer.
Then my legs went, and a pair of freezing hands caught me before I hit the ground.
The pain stopped the second he touched me.
"Your kind calls us reapers. Give me your soul, and I'll keep the pain off you until the end."
Weston took one look at him and decided I'd hired an actor to make him jealous.
He thinks I'm trying to win him back.

After Three Thousand Years in Seclusion, My Sect Was Broke

I came out of seclusion expecting incense, bells, and a courtyard full of kneeling disciples.

Instead, dust fell into my hair, weeds covered the mountain road, and the great hall of the Azure Cloud Sect had collapsed so badly that a crooked tree had taken root on its roof.

Then a young woman in a patched blue robe pointed a sword at me and shouted, "Who are you? This is Azure Cloud territory. Are you here to steal herbs?"

I looked at the broken gate behind her.

Then I looked at the blade trembling in her hand.

After three thousand years, my sect had one disciple left.

And somehow, she was the sect master.

At four, they shattered both my legs. At six, they ruptured my left eardrum. At seven, they took my right eye—said I'd earn more sympathy begging blind.
After twelve years in hell, my billionaire parents finally found me.
The girl who stole my life grabbed my wrist, nails digging into my skin. "Dare take what's mine, and I'll break whatever's left of your legs."
I smiled, unclipping both prosthetics to show empty pant legs. "I don't have legs left."
She was terrified.

I once believed that my inability to bear children was my original sin.
So I endured my Alpha husband Ethan’s excessive favoritism toward our“old friend,” Lyra,
and swallowed the growing hatred of our adopted son, Lucas.

Until our eighth marking anniversary, when I obtained irrefutable proof—
Confirmed: Lyra is the biological mother of Lucas.

That very night, Lyra sent me a “family portrait” of the three of them.

Letter by letter, I typed my reply:
May the Moon Goddess bless you.

Ethan kicked the door open in fury.
Lucas called me a “bad mom.”

In that moment, my heart died—and with it came a strange calm.

I took out the long-sealed mate bond termination agreement and placed it on the table.

“I’ve already signed the last page,” I said evenly. “If you have any questions, my lawyer will contact you.”

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 very day my stepmother framed me for her miscarriage.
This time, I won’t let them have their way.
I have gathered my entire pack to make meatballs together, waiting to put on a spectacular show—exposing the scandal of my stepmother, Odessa, and my mate, Beta Peregrine.

My Alpha was the one who started the fire—he lit it with his own hands, ready to burn his own children alive, just so his little mistress Beta Sasha could become Luna without a hitch.

I ran into the flames, carrying two unconscious pups on my back, and jumped from the fifth floor. My palms were scorched, skin torn, flesh charred.

I thought saving his “future heirs” with my own life might earn me a word of gratitude.

But when I woke up, the tribe’s medic looked at me coldly and said, “The Alpha is with Beta Sasha. She was... frightened.”

That was the moment I finally understood—I wasn’t his fated mate, not their mother, not even part of the pack.

I was just a vessel on their path to power. A body—if it didn’t burn, it could still be used.

My marriage to Lucas was nothing but a cold-blooded mafia alliance. There was never any love between us.
His heart had always belonged to my best friend, Chloe. From the beginning to the end, I was never in his eyes.
And me? All I ever wanted was a sweet, honest love story of my own.
With his silent permission, I went looking for love online. But on the day I met my so-called online boyfriend for the first time, I was shoved into a lake and rescued by Chloe’s fiancé, Damon.
No one could have predicted that a man rumored to have no interest in women at all would react to me and me alone.
From that moment on, he caged me at his side and forced me to become his secret lover.
But this was never the kind of love I wanted. I still kept searching for something sweet, real, and truly mine.

Three years. He worshipped me by day and bedded her by night.
I saw everything. I felt everything—she made sure of that.
So on the night of his coronation, I severed our bond and walked away.
He bled. He knelt. He begged.
Too late.
When I wore white again, it wasn't for him.

My mad mother, in her final moments, pressed a set of Russian nesting dolls into my arms.
"These cost me thirty years of my life. In return, they'll give you three ways out of death."
The first doll told me to go to a bar and bring home the third strange man I met.
The second doll, she said to open on the eve of my wedding. There was no note inside. Only a photograph — my groom, killing a woman wearing the exact same wedding dress as mine.
Three years later, on the eve of another wedding, I opened the last doll. I read the note, smiled, and dropped it in the trash.
It was only later that I understood —
This mad woman saw more clearly than anyone sane in this world.
Mom, I'm sorry.

That night, I was dragged into a parking lot and beaten until my hands could never hold a scalpel again.

I thought it was random. Until I heard my own brother and fiancé talking—

"Those thugs went too far, but the result works out, doesn't it? This time, the award will go to Charlotte."

Charlotte. The "poor orphan" my family adopted.

For twelve years, she stole my papers, my opportunities, my glory. And the two men I trusted most handed her everything on a silver platter.

They called me spoiled. Selfish. Difficult.

They even believed I started the fire that killed our parents twelve years ago.

But here's the truth: Charlotte started that fire. I was the one who dragged them out.

They thanked the wrong sister. For twelve years.

Now they want me dead.

Fine. Let Penelope Ashworth die.

After seven sleepless nights, I started seeing the exact probability of someone killing me.
At my birthday banquet, my stepmother smiled warmly, linking her arm through mine. Hovering above her head was 70%.
I had just overheard her plotting to swallow every cent of the inheritance my father left me.
My half-brother leaned in to hand me a drink. Above his head was 55%.
He was planning to sell me to a creep willing to drop seven figures on a woman.
Terrified out of my mind, I threw myself into the arms of my fiancé, Soren.
Above his head was a reassuring 0%, pure and bright as white light.
Then, with the whole room watching, he got down on one knee and pulled out a massive emerald ring.
"Marry me, Greer."
Crying tears of relief, I said yes and offered him my trembling left hand.
But the very second the ring slipped onto my ring finger, his 0% suddenly shattered into a blood-red 100%.

In my first life, blinded by greed, I claimed to be that mysterious woman. Silas glanced at my left shoulder and said coldly, "No butterfly tattoo." His bodyguards dragged me to the backyard and shattered my ribs with a baseball bat.
In my second life, Cleo learned from my mistake. She got the butterfly tattoo at an underground parlor. But Silas lifted her skirt and sneered, "No birthmark on her inner thigh." We were thrown into the frozen lake behind the mountain.
"Find her. She's in the West Wing." Silas Brennan's cold command echoed through the Brennan Estate again. Cleo and I locked eyes, terror gripping us.
We were the only maids in the West Wing.

My mother had no medical license, yet wealthy socialites lined up to hand her fat checks.
I often saw her lead those women into the treatment room, where agonizing screams would pierce through the locked door.
But strangely, those same women emerged radiant, as if they'd shed twenty or thirty years overnight, pressing stacks of cash into her hands with tearful gratitude.
What baffled me more was how she doted on the hired girls like her own daughters.
Yet toward me, her actual daughter, she was nothing but cold—always quick to criticize or strike.
Finally one day, curiosity won. I mustered the courage to peek through that door crack and saw what really happened inside...

As the heiress to the Sinclair family, I inherited billions, yet a car crash left my legs completely paralyzed, confining me to a cold wheelchair for the rest of my life.
My husband, Dashiell, spent three years meticulously caring for me—pushing my chair, feeding me my meds, and holding me as I slept.
That evening, while I was soaking in a warm bath, he pushed the door open. His handsome face carried that familiar smile: "Honey, can I... have you in the tub?"
"I'm a bit tired today," I rubbed my temples and softly declined. "Carry me out."
The moment the words left my lips, his smile twisted hideously. With a vicious sneer, he grabbed my neck and shoved my head brutally underwater...

That "poor pregnant woman" downstairs is currently waddling around Linden Court with her forty-week baby bump, sobbing to the neighbors. She claims the noise of me screwing men in the middle of the night is so loud it's killing her unborn baby.
In my past life, no one in this building believed me. In the end, she used a pair of rusty pruning shears to pin me, dead, to my own living room floor.
Reborn into a new life, I stare at the bulletin board where my face is crossed out with red marker, and I let out a cold laugh.
This time, I absolutely refuse to be the idiot who gets stabbed to death.

Siren's Reef only breeds women.
On this isolated island, Henrietta's orphanage takes in all fatherless girls. She raises us until our eighteenth birthday—the night of the "Coral Crowning," an annual coming-of-age ritual that supposedly earns the Sea God's blessing.
My sister Saffron and I are identical twins, raised wearing the exact same face.
But on this island, the same face doesn't spell the same fate. She was the one Henrietta spoiled from birth; I was the one allowed to trail behind her.
I thought it would always be this way. Until she died. Henrietta claimed Saffron broke the rules and was flayed alive by the serrated edges of the reef. But that day, I saw it with my own eyes: Saffron's signature dimple had appeared on Henrietta's cheek—where none had been before.

My world began to crumble the day my adopted sister, Opal, forced her way back into my life with a fatherless daughter in her arms.
My eldest son, Finn, was strapped to an operating table and used for live experiments until he was tortured to death. His remains were tossed into Death Valley.
For her, my husband struck me, costing me my second unborn child.
For her, my own brother locked me in a freezing dungeon. And my late father? He had been a slave to her charms long before he died.
While they threw a lavish birthday party for Opal’s daughter in the brightly lit banquet hall, I was pinned down by dungeon guards, my clothes being ripped off, inch by inch...

My billionaire lover brought out a bespoke mermaid gown, declaring he would marry whoever could fit into it.
But in my past four lives, every woman who tried it on—whether an ambitious imposter or me, his true love—was brutally tortured and murdered by him.
In my fifth rebirth, the butler knocked on our door with a polite smile, "Mr. Voss says his true love is among you."
Since we four women would die no matter who wore it...
We exchanged a look in the dead silence, turned our heads in perfect unison, and locked our eyes onto the only man in the room.

Our clan worships the Spider Goddess.
To keep this face, every girl in our bloodline must sacrifice a truly evil man every ten years.
Just two weeks before my twentieth birthday, my mom asked me again over the phone:
"Sweetie, is it really that hard to find a sufficiently bad guy in a place like Ashfield?"
Right now, I’m looking at my boyfriend, who just handcuffed me to a bed. He’s laughing, negotiating a price with a buyer, thinking I’m tonight’s merchandise.
I think to myself—
Mom, I can answer your question now. This guy’s wickedness easily rivals your husband's—my father.

On the day I died, Roland was rolling in the sheets with his adopted sister, Lavinia.
When the hospital called with my death notice, he scoffed. It was just drawing some blood, how could anyone die from that? He was certain I was just throwing a tantrum again, desperate for his attention.
The day he received my ashes, he personally smashed the wooden urn to the ground. His expensive leather shoes ground my ashes into the floor over and over as he coldly announced he was going to marry Lavinia and throw a grand wedding—the exact wedding I had begged for when I was alive but never got.
It wasn't until the day before their wedding that his assistant, Desmond, rushed in, trembling.
"Sir, it's bad... We pulled the security footage from the hospital, and... the madam's autopsy report."

By day, I was the ruthless Director of Finance working under mafia heir Silvan. By night, I was the secret lover he kept locked away in a guest room.
He gave me luxury cars, a mansion, and endless money, but never a title. I thought he was protecting me—until he packaged both the title of his official wife and my position as CFO, handing them over to Aurea Moretti, a prominent mafia heiress.
And that arrogant man? He casually tossed me a diamond ring like a handout to pacify me. "Titles are just an illusion. Even if I marry someone else, you’ll always be the woman I care about most."
He even had the audacity to offer me a seaside villa, thinking he could keep me forever as his underground mistress in another city.
Looking at his cold, entitled eyes, I finally smiled.
On the day of his engagement to the mafia heiress, I took off the ring and vanished from this city completely.

My best friend, Elaina, had been a runaway bride eight times in three years. But that day, with flushed cheeks, she told me she had finally met her true love and actually wanted to get married.
On that exact same day, my 22nd proposal to Kieran was rejected—again. Over the past eight years, I handed over my paychecks to him, gave him all my jewelry patents, and turned down overseas job offers, all to get a wedding in return. Yet, all I ever got was his usual, "Just wait a little longer."
That night, I found out the man Elaina was going to marry was Kieran.

I am the Seer of the wolf pack, the Alpha’s wife, yet I have never truly known love.

My parents called me a bastard; my sister stole everything from me, even my husband’s heart.

Now, she blinds herself and frames me, forcing me to give up my own eyes.

No one knows that when a Seer loses her sight, she dies.

I thought that making the ultimate sacrifice would finally earn me a shred of affection. But even as I lay dying on the operating table, they gathered around my sister, laughing.

Only when the truth came out did they realize—I was their real daughter, and my sister was the one who schemed to take everything from me.

But by then, it was far too late.

My husband, Caspian, faked his company’s bankruptcy. We had to sell our luxury cars and our mansion, squeezing into a leaky, moldy basement.
By day, I worked back-to-back shifts in the ER saving lives. By night, I slipped into revealing dresses to sling drinks at a bar, all to shoulder a massive debt that never even existed.
Until I bumped into him in a VIP room. The man who was supposedly drowning in stress was lounging on a sofa with his suit unbuttoned, swirling a glass of whiskey, a secretary in his arms. His mistress leaned in and smirked, telling me Caspian had found me boring for a long time.
She also bragged that while he claimed to be working until 3 AM, he was actually going back to our old house at 10 PM, sleeping in our master bedroom.
Caspian showed zero remorse. Instead, he demanded I roll over and accept the woman, tossing me a meager payoff and threatening to ruin my medical career.
I threw away my wedding ring. I swallowed my tears. I finally saw it all for what it was.
From today on, I am only doing one thing: taking back what belongs to me, piece by piece.

I’ve had a lot of things stolen from me by my stepsister, Paloma Thorne.
My father, my boyfriend, my baby, my thesis, my future...
When I was twenty-two, I walked into the university lab and caught Paloma and my boyfriend, Milo, tangled naked together. I miscarried on the spot. Later, as I lay in the hospital bed, Paloma used a secretly recorded sex tape of Milo and me as blackmail, sealing off my last possible way out. I didn't scream or cry. I just signed the papers, grabbed my suitcase, and left.
In Calder City, I met the mafia don, Darius Harlow. He was calm, dominant, and gave me a sense of security so overwhelming it was almost suffocating. So, I married him.
It wasn't until four years later, when I returned to Ellsworth for Paloma's wedding, that the illusion shattered.
The night before the wedding, standing outside a closed door, I heard her voice.
"Darius, I was the one who let go seven years ago. Let me make it up to you tonight. Please?"
The next second, I heard my husband's heavy breathing.
Only then did I realize that for the past four years, I was nothing but Paloma's stand-in.

During our first month at university, my half-vampire boyfriend, Darien, claimed he couldn't adapt to the human campus. The bright lights gave him vertigo, the sensory overload wrecked him, and even a drop of a classmate's blood pushed him to the brink of losing control.
For him, I promised to drop my elite program so we could transfer to a dreary, isolated northern town together. To keep him stable, I—a pureblood vampire—slashed my own wrists to feed him.
Thursday night, standing outside the gym locker room, I heard him tell his teammate: "It's all an act. She's like a leech I can't peel off, and I’m sick of it. I tricked her into moving north so Cassira can study here in peace."
Everything he did was just to disgust me out of his life, all for another girl.
I stood there for a long time, then turned and walked away.
On my transfer application, I crossed out checking the northern town and changed my destination to London.

Five years of a marriage forced by family convenience end in the cruelest way possible: with a request for divorce on the same day they would celebrate their anniversary. Lilian, devastated by Ethan's rejection—the man she learned to love despite the circumstances—sees her life fall apart. In her darkest hour, when the pain seems unbearable, Lilian is saved by Daniel Spector, a longtime friend and silent confidant who has always loved her. At the hospital, news changes everything: Lilian is two months pregnant. But there is another woman, Joana Mercadante — rich, famous, and supposedly also expecting Ethan's child. With her heart broken and her soul on fire, Lilian decides to leave. She flees to France and, far from the eyes of the world, gives birth to her son and builds an empire. Five years later, she returns as a powerful woman, determined to face her demons... and she finds Ethan again. He never stopped looking for her, never forgot the love he destroyed with his own hands. Now he must fight not only for forgiveness, but for a second chance—with her and with the son he never knew. But will regret be enough to rebuild a love that was betrayed? Especially when Daniel, Ethan's new rival, is ready to build the life Lilian always dreamed of... and is already the father in her son's heart?