538 Book(s) Related to morning story marion iowa

I was four months pregnant when the truck hit my car.
I woke up on a gurney outside the OR, bleeding, half-conscious, thinking my husband was saving my life. Then I heard him through the door.
"The baby's gone. Her right hand is finished—her career's over either way. Just take her kidney now and put it in Mia."
My mother agreed. My father told him to switch my architectural draft to Mia's name before Friday.
Mia. The sister they'd raised for twenty years while I was missing. The sister whose body was failing. The sister my husband had apparently been in love with the whole time I was married to him.
I was supposed to die on that table. I wasn't supposed to hear anything.
But my phone was in my coat pocket, and the voice memo app had never stopped recording.
And now I had a choice to make.

My husband told me our daughter was brain-dead. He put a pen in my hand and told me to sign the organ donation form. He said it was the merciful thing to do.
I signed.
Then I watched her heart get cut out and transplanted into another child — his mistress's son.
He'd been planning it for months. The fake diagnosis, the doctor who happened to be his college girlfriend, the night his mother lured me away from the hospital so they could drug my little girl.
When I found out the truth, he killed me for it.
But somehow, I woke up back at that desk. Same pen. Same form. Same lying face waiting for my signature.
This time, I'm not signing. This time, they pay.

I was a scholarship student with thirty extra pounds. Del Ashford had two hundred thousand followers and her family's supplement brand on every wall of the athletic center. First week of school, she decided we were going to be best friends.
She said she wanted to help me get in shape. What that actually looked like: I carried her product shipments up three flights of stairs, drafted her emails, and picked up her lunch from the place across campus that didn't deliver.
My roommates started calling me her errand girl behind my back. I let them.
She also introduced me to Beckett Hale. After that, things went the way they went.
She knocked my protein shake over and said I'd burned her. She planted her limited-edition earphones in my bag and told everyone I'd stolen them. The school opened a conduct review. My roommates stopped talking to me.

Beckett said I was the kind of girl who got a little attention and started thinking she deserved more of it.
I couldn't prove any of it. By spring, I was gone.
Some people just aren't built for this, Wren. You know that, right?
Del hadn't even been looking at me when she said it.
Then I opened my eyes and I was back at the party. The night she introduced me to Beckett.

My bestie Isolde and I were lured to a resort in another country.
Crescent Bay, a place that turned She-wolves into property.
Any wolf with enough money could have us for the night. That was the arrangement. That was what we were worth, once we were in.
When my husband Cael broke through the gates with a unit of Hargrove Pack warriors, I was in the back room counting the night's take. Top earner three months running.
Isolde was in the basement. Brain-dead. Pregnant. The machines were the only reason her heart was still beating.
Hargrove Pack put up half a million dollars for the name of whoever had trafficked us.
I was the only one who knew. I said nothing.
Vivienne — Cael's mother, Isolde's Luna — got down on her knees in front of me and begged. I closed my eyes.
Pack enforcers questioned me three times. I gave them the same answer every time, which was no answer at all.
Then Cael ran out of patience. He called for a witch to extract my memories and put them in front of everyone who had ever known me.

My cousin stole thirty thousand dollars from our dying grandmother.
Not for an emergency. Not for bills.
For liposuction.
Then she told everyone I did it. Said I was jealous of her figure — that I'd drained Grandma's cardiac surgery fund because I wanted to look different. And the terrible part is, everyone believed her. My boyfriend. My uncle and aunt. Every single person who'd watched me grow up in that house — eating their leftovers standing at the kitchen counter, wearing my aunt's old coat with the broken zipper through every winter — turned around and decided I was the thief.
I couldn't prove otherwise. I couldn't get anyone to listen.
Last time this happened, I didn't survive it.
Then I opened my eyes. I was back in the hospital corridor. My aunt's hand raised, ready to swing.

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.

The last thing I did before I died was lick dew off a rusted pipe.
Ninety days earlier, my fiancé Bastien promised he'd come back for me. He said three months in the Sahara would teach me not to be jealous of Posey—the girl I'd pulled from a refugee camp and raised as my own sister.
He didn't know the water ran out in the first week. He didn't know bandits broke my bones. He didn't care enough to find out.
While I lay dying on a rotting bed with a shattered leg, he was in Manhattan, sliding a pink diamond onto Posey's finger.
I died alone. But I didn't stay gone.
My soul followed a stolen necklace across the ocean, right back to his penthouse—just in time for the engagement party, the champagne toast, and the moment my body arrived at the door.

My daughter's wolf has never woken. Until her first shift, one dose a season is all that keeps it alive. And I brew that dose myself and send it to the supply hall under the healers' guild seal.
This season, my husband's mistress took it from us at the supply hall and fed it to her own daughter in front of forty wolves. Then she pressed my girl's palm onto a silver bar, to prove we were the thieves.
"Save your tears for my man," she said. "Captain Roark Fenn."
That's my husband's name.
Neither of them knows what I did in the war. By moonrise, the whole pack will.

My neighbor Beck Morrow was the best high school point guard this state had seen in years.
The night before the state championship—three college scouts in the stands—he decided to stay home with his girlfriend instead. She wasn't feeling well.
I called his coach.
He played. He got the scholarship. He built a company worth eight figures before he turned thirty, and I spent five years writing every algorithm that company ran on.
He repaid me by throwing a ball at my head during a training session. Then his lawyers sent a letter explaining that I had no legal claim to any intellectual property developed under my employment contract, effective immediately, and that my position was being terminated.
Then I woke up. It was the first week of senior year again.

I thought I was driving into my mating ceremony. Instead, Calder's mother met the car with a tray — a silver collar lined with spikes, and a rusty pincer for pulling out my sharpest fang. Blackbriar rules, she said. Every Luna wears one. And Calder, the man who never once raised his voice at me back in the city, just stood there like all of this was perfectly reasonable. So I told the driver to turn around. That's when the logs came down across the road. My phone had no signal. Willa was bleeding. And Calder was crouched on the hood of my car, telling me I could walk into that pack hall on my own, or be carried in. He'd done his homework on me — my money, my bloodline, my dowry. All of it, except one thing. The bone whistle around my neck. And what happens when I blow it.

I was Elara, a wingless half-sprite. The lowest of the low in the Obsidian Court. My job was to clean up the mess left by the dragons.
But right now, the biggest mess was inside my own stomach.
I was pregnant. With the Dragon King's child.
He didn't remember that night. He only remembered waking alone — and swearing to crush whoever had touched him into dust.
So I said nothing. I served him. I hid. And the three little voices only I could hear kept whispering the one thing I couldn't believe: that scary dragon is soft on you, girl.
Then my belly began to leak his golden aura, and his jealous betrothed smelled it first.
When the King learned the truth, he didn't rage. He looked at my stomach and said the child could not stay.
He never told me why.
So while he was away at war, I climbed onto the Sky Bridge over the endless Void — and I jumped. Better to fall than to let them take my baby.
I never expected something down there to catch me.

I got paid to test-sleep an heiress's fiancé.
One problem: he's my boss.
Bigger problem: I've been catfishing him online for six months—as his fiancée.
Now I'm pregnant. And he just called my real name.

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.

My boyfriend faked being broke to test me. Three years of it.
When I turned down his last test, I watched him settle his new girlfriend's family debt in one afternoon. Cash he swore he never had.
Told me he'd been rich the whole time. Said he needed to know if I loved him or his money.
Said I failed.
I didn't argue. I just walked out.
Funny thing is, I wasn't broke either. I was the last pureblood heir to the strongest pack on the continent, and I'd been hiding that the whole time too.
Four years later, we ran into each other again. And this time I wasn't hiding anything.

Everyone used to say Ryan Scott loved me more than his own life.
I used to believe that too.
Then I found out I was pregnant with Ryan’s child—
and that’s when my adopted sister told me she was pregnant with his child as well.
So I chose revenge.
I emptied his accounts, staged the perfect accident, and planned my own “death.”
On the day I “died,” Ryan completely broke down, clutching my urn like it was the only thing keeping him alive.
While he sobbed his heart out in front of my photo, I was already holding another man’s hand—the man who never let go of me when I was at my lowest—
and walking toward the brand‑new life that truly belonged to me.

I'm Eileen, an outcast at the shifter academy, all because I don't have a wolf. My only saving grace is a knack for healing that got me into the Healer's Division. Then one night in the forbidden woods, I found a stranger on the brink of death. One touch, and something primal snapped between us. That night tied me to him in a way I can't undo.
Weeks later, our new Alpha combat instructor walks in. Regis. The guy from the woods. His eyes lock on mine, and I know he recognizes me. Then the secret I've been hiding hits me like a punch: I'm pregnant.
He has an offer that binds us tighter than ever. Protection… or a cage? Whispers turn ugly, darkness closes in. Why am I the one without a wolf? Is he my salvation… or will he drag me to ruin?

In a world of powerful werewolves, Aurora was the one who didn't fit the mold - a forgotten omega, hiding from the shadows. But one fiery night, the notorious playboy Alpha, Lucian Vaughn, crashed into her world, igniting a blaze of passion and fury.

Their worlds collided, and they discovered the unthinkable: they're fated mates.

Aurora's icy walls crumbled, and her darkest secrets began to unravel. Lucian, the man she loathed, was now her everything. As deadly threats close in, she must choose between surrendering to their forbidden bond or risk losing herself forever.

Can their love be the anchor that saves them, or will it be their ultimate downfall?

Rejecting him won't be easy... but surviving without him might be impossible.

Laura Mendoza was thirty years old. She had a mother, a boyfriend, a best friend, and a job in the Mount Sinai ER. In a single night, she lost all four.
She picked up a shift that wasn’t hers. She found her boyfriend with her best friend in the pediatric ward bathroom. She got the call that her mother had been struck by a black sedan that never stopped. And before she could even leave the hospital, two different women and an elderly man with a cane each approached her—each with their own reasons—offering to buy her mother’s heart.
She accepted the old man’s offer.

Five years. One mansion. A family that kills as easily as it breathes. And two strangers bound by a contract and a borrowed heart, who will soon have to decide whether to protect each other… or surrender to the enemies they share.
A Heart for the CEO is a story of a marriage of convenience, family secrets, dark romance, and survival—for readers of Penelope Sky and L.J. Shen, and for those who prefer protagonists with real scars and villains with last names.

Isadora has no last name, no mother, and nothing she can truly call her own. She was taken in as a child out of "charity"—or so she was told—and grew up scrubbing pots in the Rincón household, sleeping on a cot beside the kitchen stove and surviving on leftovers she was expected to be grateful for.

On the night of the old patriarch's funeral, she hides in the wine cellar to cry where no one can see her. Through a rusty vent, she overhears two conversations she was never meant to hear.

The first: someone is planning to kill the new heir to the port.

The second: the kitchen girl who scrubs the Rincón family's pots is the last surviving Ferreira. The daughter of the port's true owners—the family the Arteagas slaughtered to the very last member. She has been raised like a stray dog for years, kept alive only until the day she could be played as their winning card.

Terrified, Isa flees into the night and collides with a stranger on the docks. In her panic, she tells him far more than she should. Realizing her mistake too late, she drives her knee into him and runs, leaving behind the only proof of who she really is.

Days later, out of every daughter from every powerful family in the port, the new master chooses her to be his wife.

Isa knows it isn't love.

She knows that man only wants what she overheard.

What Isa doesn't know is that Maximiliano Arteaga arrived in Ciudad S carrying a letter from his dying father and one final command:

Find the last Ferreira... and finish what I left undone.

What Max doesn't know...

is that he has just married her.

"Serena, let’s get a divorce."
I’d known his first love had returned.
I tucked my positive pregnancy test away and vanished without a word.
I never could’ve imagined this:
Nicholas lost his mind searching for me. He never gave up, not even for a second.
Years later, he spotted me holding a little kid’s hand. His eyes burned red, voice cracking as he whispered,
"Who’s the father of this child?"

She was raised to stay pure.
He was born to crave her blood.

When Saera Yvaine Merriley is pulled through a mirror into the dark empire of vampires, her blood becomes the key to saving their dying prince.

But Kaizer Alaric Lancaster’s bite awakens something far more dangerous, a love that could destroy them both.

Fate brought them together. Blood bound them forever.

In the heart of the Amazon, Maria is a talented photographer passionate about nature. One night, while exploring a forbidden area of the forest, she encounters Alex, a wounded and disoriented young man who reveals himself to be a werewolf. Determined to break the curse that plagues him, Maria and Alex embark on an emotional journey in search of the true love that will set him free. Facing obstacles and unraveling dark secrets, Maria discovers her own powers as a descendant of healers, becoming the key to uncovering the mystery. With courage and true love, they confront enemies and navigate the forest, proving the power of love in "Under the Crimson Moon".

"Didn't know a clumsy girl would be sent to me?" He said, and I felt a ripple go through me.

His voice!

It was the deepest one I have ever heard. His aura screams power but I don't know why I kept on looking at his face as if I was under a love spell.

"You keep looking at me, did you find me too pretty?" He asked, and his deep voice jolted me awake, goosebumps traveling down my skin when I realized he grabbed my ass cheek.

Fuck!

Now, I wasn't expecting that.

"Sorry, I don't think I heard you well," I said in a calm voice, averting my gaze. And thanks to the mask, he would have seen my cheeks red with blush.

"What music would you want me to dance to?" I said as I stood upright, my heart beating wildly against my chest.

"I think another person should be brought in, don't you think?" He asked, his head cocked to one side and I swear, his words hit a nerve in me.

No client has ever belittled me before and his rude remark felt like a blow to me.

"I don't think you will be needing another girl," I said and touched the collar of his shirt.


Valeria seems like a regular omega on the surface but beneath that perfect smile lies a great secret. Driven by vengeance and revenge, she works as a stripper at night to find her parents' killer.

Her thirst for vengeance ultimately makes her cross paths with a mysterious masked man she feels holds the answers she seeks.

But what will happen when Valeria is arranged to marry the Lycan King, who seeks an open marriage? She is forced to live a double life to keep her secrets.

"Ivory's six months pregnant. She needs to get back more than you do."

When my husband Donovan said those words at a South African mining disaster site, I knew my marriage was over. Two helicopter seats, three British nationals. He chose to save his mistress instead of his pregnant wife.

"I'm pregnant too," I told him, my voice shaking.

"I know," he replied without emotion. "You're only three months along. You'll manage."

He knew. He knew I was carrying his child, and he was still choosing her over me. Over us.

"You'll manage. You're stronger than anyone," he told me as he left me in a war zone, helping his precious Ivory onto the helicopter like she might break.

Three months pregnant and abandoned, the stress nearly killed me. I had no choice but to terminate the pregnancy – the last tie connecting me to the man who betrayed me.

But I discovered something deeper than just adultery. Something that would destroy them both.

My mate's mistress poisoned me. I woke up in a haunted castle with twenty-nine other dead people and a voice in my head telling me the rules: survive seven days, and I'd get to live again.
Everyone else ran from the monsters. I knocked on my monster's door and asked what was for dinner.
My brain has been wired wrong since the day I was born. The scarier something is, the prettier it looks to me.
So when a little girl in a blood-soaked dress grabbed my throat, I picked her up and checked her for cuts. Five minutes later, she was calling me Mama.
That night, her father walked in. The final boss. Anyone else would've seen a rotting corpse. I saw the hottest man alive.
"Wow," I said. "You're gorgeous."
The monster who'd killed every player before me went red to the tips of his ears. "...Say that again."

Thirteen years. That's how long I loved Reid Holloway.
When he said he was being bullied, I believed him. When he kissed me on that rooftop, I thought he felt the same. When he asked me to transfer schools with him, I said yes without hesitation.
Then I heard him bragging to his friends: "She'd save her first time for me. Hell, she'd still be thinking of me on her wedding night."
The bullying was staged. The kiss meant nothing. He just wanted me gone—so his new girl could feel more comfortable.
He thought I'd beg. He thought I'd cry. He thought I'd never actually leave.
I left the country.
And ran straight into his stepbrother.

Four years. Ninety-nine times on the altar, and the Alpha I was going to mate held the door for every one of them.
I heal from anything. That is the only reason they picked me.
The Moon Goddess promised that the hundredth offering would buy back the night somebody stole from me. The night Cassian knows it was me who dug him out of that mine, and looks at me the way he used to.
Not this one. In this one I am what his priestess practises on.
So I never refused. Not once, not through any of the fevers.
Tonight is the hundredth. The drug hasn't taken, and the two of them are talking on the other side of the door.
"It'll hold. We built that voice out of her own memories."
"The heart tonight, not an eye. When she wakes, don't let anything slip."
There is no Moon Goddess. There never was.
And he doesn't know my healing was never mine. Something else lives in my chest, and it stays there because my heart does.
Take it out and I don't wake up.

For three years, I paid so my sister could rebuild her life — her rent, her lawyers, her hospital bills, the shop she now runs in my name. Lucas, my fiance, always told me it was the right thing to do. I believed him, because believing him was easier than admitting how tired I was. I flew home two days early to surprise him. Instead, I opened my own front door and found my sister in his lap, wearing my robe, laughing in a voice I'd paid to keep happy for years. Ninety-nine empty perfume bottles stood along the wall — quiet witnesses to nights I never knew existed. Lucas didn't apologize. He asked me to be more understanding. My sister cried and called me cruel. I stood in the apartment I bought, surrounded by the people I built a home for, and realized I had never once been the one who got to be loved first.

My husband, Roman, has a bad heart. Five years ago they cut his chest open, and after that I quit my job and stayed home to keep him alive.
That day I got to his office ten minutes early with his lunch.
Through the glass door I watched Brielle Nash, his assistant, pick up his pill box. Twenty-eight compartments. I fill it every Sunday night.
She flipped open Wednesday evening, tipped the pills into her palm, and dropped them in the trash.
"That's the one that makes you feel eighty."
Roman laughed. He didn't stop her.
Then she handed him the can she'd been drinking from, and he took a sip out of her hand.
"That's living," she said. "Don't tell the boss lady, though. She'd have me fired."
He reached over and ruffled her hair. "I'll lock it in my drawer."
My lunchbox was sitting by his elbow. He hadn't opened it.
Later I found the flask in that drawer. Supplement bottles. A keycard for a boxing gym.
And a key I hadn't seen in five years.
I didn't do anything.
I went home and opened the safe and went through fifteen years of marriage one thing at a time.
Then I started working out what would be mine when he died.

I woke up the morning the contract was due, picked up the pen, and crossed out my own name.
Wrote my sister's instead.
Last time, I packed away every leather jacket I owned and let Stefano Mastroianni's stylist dress me in things that needed dry cleaning. I sat straight at his family dinners and smiled until my face hurt. I let him correct my posture in front of his mother like I was something he hadn't finished training.
I did all of it, and I still ended up in the ground.
So this time I gave him Chiara. Took Pier Nine from my father as the price, and got out.
He thought he was getting his perfect bride.
On the wedding day, he reached for her hands—and felt it immediately. Smooth palms. Not a mark on them. Not the hands of a woman who'd been gripping a steering wheel since she was sixteen.
He pulled the veil up.
Chiara looked back at him, flushed with triumph.
Stefano stripped the Mastroianni ring off her finger in front of every powerful family in the city, kicked over the altar, and put one question through the cathedral walls:
"Where is Tessa."

The day college decisions came out, my parents bought my twin sister a Porsche.
It was my eighteenth birthday too. Nobody brought it up. I stood in the doorway in my diner uniform while the whole room sang her name.
That night the four of them went out to dinner to celebrate her. The car only sat four, so my father handed me a hundred dollars and told me to order myself something at home.
Four days later, six thousand four hundred dollars vanished from my account. Two years of washing dishes, gone to her sorority dues. My mother's name was on the account, so it wasn't even illegal.
I didn't scream and I didn't beg. I went upstairs and clicked Accept on the full ride to MIT that had been sitting in my inbox for three days.
Nobody in that house ever wanted me. So I booked a one-way ticket, cut myself out of the family photo, and left my key on the shoe rack.
I wasn't coming back. Not for graduation. Not for any of them.

My twin sister and I were born on the same day. She got the love. I got the debt.
Some doctor told my parents I stole Colette's immune system in the womb, and after that, the rule was simple: every time she got sick, I had to hurt worse. Fever meant the basement. Below freezing, no blanket, no socks, door padlocked from the outside.
I was seventeen and I weighed under seventy pounds. My teeth were coming loose. My hair was falling out.
Then, on the coldest night of the year, something moved behind the cracked mirror in the basement. A man in a tailcoat. He said he could give me anything, as long as I could pay.
All I wanted was a blanket and a piece of bread.
He asked what I had left to trade.
I didn't have anything. So I offered him my last years.

Three days ago, a car crash took my baby. I spent three nights in the hospital alone. My husband never came.
His assistant told me he was in Europe. He wasn't. He was home on the couch I picked out, holding Elodie while she cried about the thunder.
She's his "sister." No blood, no adoption, just his money. That night she was wearing my pajamas and the necklace I designed for our third anniversary.
I built the firm that has his name on the door. I drew the tower his company breaks ground on next month.
He gave my office to her. Then my design credit. Then he told me not to make a thing out of it.
Fine. She can have the office. She can have the tower.
I signed the divorce papers, left my ring sitting on top of my signature, and walked out with one suitcase.
He still has no idea what I took with me.

I just got out of prison after three years, and my family wants me to go back in.
"It's only three days," they said. "You survived three years—what's three more days?"
What they don't know: I'm dying. The only thing keeping me alive is my mate bond. Three days away from Everett means death.
For three years in prison, someone sent me food every week. No note, no name. I thought it meant my family still loved me.
I was so grateful.
I didn't know it was my twin sister. I didn't know what was inside.

For three years I played the perfect fiancée to the most dangerous Alpha in the city.
I walked on tiptoe because he hated noise. I taught myself to cook meat the way wolves like it. I messaged him every night he didn't come home, and most nights he didn't.
I did it because the Sacred Spring said I was his fated mate, and a human with no magic doesn't survive here without one.
Then the Temple sent me a notice. The old reading was an error. Our true match rating is zero. The bond is void as of today, and they wish me all the best.
Honestly? I was relieved. I dumped his dinner in the trash, dragged my suitcase out from under the bed, and wrote him an IOU for three years of rent.
Then Kael came home early.
He looked at the empty plate. He looked at the suitcase. And the coldest Alpha in the city stepped into the doorway so I couldn't get past him.
"Who told you our match rating was zero?"
"And who told you that you were free to walk out on me?"

The new member posted a yacht contract to the club group chat on her first day in. The caption read: Thanks for the birthday present, Dad 🥂
Ten seconds later she deleted it. Breezy apology. Oops, wrong group.
I looked at the photo one more time before it disappeared. I didn't check the numbers. I looked at the name painted across the bow.
It was my mother's name.
The boat was mine. My father had told me about it a week ago.
The chat didn't care. Which family is she from? Ninety-six feet of custom teak. Sienna, you dark horse.
I asked, quietly, if she'd share the registration number. I wanted to hear what she'd say.
My own husband stood up from two desks over and tore into me in front of every member in the room. Told me I was jealous. Told me I was an embarrassment. Told me to know my place.
Later that week, he broke into my safe. Took the diamond my father had given me for my mother — and put it around her neck.
That night my father's encrypted voice memo came in from somewhere at sea. One minute long. The last line was this:
"Find your mother's necklace. I can't wear her myself. I need you to wear her for me."

When my Alpha told me a rogue faction was going to destroy our Pack, I volunteered as a hostage to keep him safe.
Three years in a cage. Branded with silver. Broken like a feral. Every rogue in that compound had me. The only thing that kept me alive was a toxic root that numbed the pain — and was slowly killing me from the inside.
Then my Alpha showed up and told me the truth.
There was never any threat. He'd staged the whole thing — hired the rogues, built the compound. Because I'd embarrassed his precious Cora in front of the Pack, and he needed me to "learn my place."
Now he wanted me back. Wanted to make me his Luna again.
But I wasn't the same woman who walked into that cage. And the truth about what happened to me there?
He didn't believe a word of it.
Not until I was already dead.

All I wanted was a quiet place to live. I drained my savings and paid eighty thousand extra for the one unit on the row with a private backyard.
On my very first day, I found my neighbor's son beating my new hydrangeas with a stick while his mother stood there filming him and laughing.
Bianca says the yard belongs to everybody. Her husband is vice president of the HOA board, so around here, whatever he says is the law.
I showed them my deed. I called the police. I sent a certified letter. Every single time the answer came back the same. This is a civil matter, ma'am. Maybe try being a better neighbor.
Then her son put a rock through my living room window, and the HOA fined me two hundred and fifty dollars for putting a lock on my own gate.
Fine. They want that gate open? It stays open.
I just made one phone call. A truck is already on its way.

I spent two years quietly building something I thought was worth building.
Full recovery support after birth, someone checking in on meals, leave approved the moment you asked for it. I worked out a deal with the best facility in the city and covered the difference myself, out of my own account. Not a cent of company money.
I did it because I'd watched a good employee disappear from the company the year she got pregnant. No announcement. Her desk just cleared out one day.
Then one of them posted about it.
She called it surveillance. A golden cage. The comment section called me a predator. By morning it was trending.
Here's what none of them knew: not a single dollar of that program belonged to the company.
So I listened to what they wanted and gave them exactly that.
I shut the whole thing down.

I had been Lucan Ferretti's wife for five years. I had also been the woman who took a bullet meant for him.
Four years of fertility treatments. Four years of empty rooms where a nursery should have been. Then, the day I finally get a positive test, I find something else: two secret sons, funded by my husband's money, waiting in a house I was never supposed to find.
Their names? The ones Lucan and I picked out together, years ago, in a hospital parking lot.
That night, I sat alone with the positive test still in my hand, memorizing the names he'd already given to someone else's sons.
I could have confronted him. I could have screamed, thrown things, demanded a divorce.
Instead, I find a text message. His mistress has already ordered a hit — on me, timed for our anniversary, dressed up to look like enemy retaliation.
She wants me dead before I can tell anyone I'm carrying his child.
Fine.
She can have exactly what she asked for.

My downstairs neighbor tagged me in the building group chat at ten p.m.
His wife just had a pup, he said. Pups need moonlight, he said. So starting tonight, my private moon terrace belongs to his family.
He'd even pay me rent. Ten dollars a month.
For the terrace of a three-million-dollar penthouse.
When I said no, he reminded me he wasn't just my neighbor. He's my supervisor at the Calloway Group, and my probation review sits in his hands. Hand over the door code, or I'd never survive at that company.
He kept saying it. I can crush you at the Calloway Group.
Funny.
My mother owns the Calloway Group.
I was going to let him dig his own grave quietly. Then his family broke into my home, walked up to the one thing on that terrace worth half a million dollars—
And smashed it.

Our plane went down on a deserted island. The boat fit two. My fiancé Callum was the only one who could drive it.
In my last life, he chose me — and left his childhood sweetheart Vesper behind. She didn't survive. He spent five years making sure I knew it was my fault. Every day I breathed was a day she couldn't. When I held a knife to my throat to get a divorce, he drove us both into the sea.
Now I'm back. Same island, same wreckage, same choice.
This life, I said: "Take Vesper."
The relief on his face — the way his whole body unclenched — told me everything five years of marriage never did.
He promised he'd come back for me. He didn't look back once.
I knew I had to save myself. But the bear — the same one that ate Vesper in my last life — reached the crash site before I could move.

My ex-husband found me selling hair clips at a flea market. Rosie was asleep in her stroller.
"Come home. She's too young for this."
I said yes.
After that, I stopped checking his phone.
Rosie stopped crying when the other girl took her toys.
He spent the night at Simone's—we didn't call.
We ran into them at the mall—we walked the other way.
We finally became what he always wanted. Easy. Quiet. No drama.
So why is he the one who can't sleep now?
"Why don't you get mad anymore?"
"Rosie, why won't you ask me to stay?"

For five years, my husband told me I was lucky. A human with no magic, no name, no worth — and he, the Dark Elf King, had taken me in anyway.
I believed him. I swallowed every insult in his court. I let his nobles call my son a halfbreed bastard.
Then he promised our boy he'd come to his fifth birthday, and instead he knocked him across the garden for biting the woman he'd been sneaking off to every night.
That was the day I stopped waiting.
I didn't scream. I didn't beg. I took my son and I erased us — our scent, our warmth, every hair, every speck of dust. As far as the world is concerned, we were never in it at all.
Three months later, he's on his knees outside the Celestial Sanctum, offering half his soul to any god who will find his missing wife.
He should be careful what he asks for.

I woke up on the same morning I was about to send another payment for my daughter's education.
In my last life, I paid for everything. Every year, without missing a payment.
Tuition. AP tutoring. Summer program deposits. Medical bills. Birthday gifts. The education fund.
Not one payment late. Not one skipped.
I only found out the truth after I died. My daughter wore a blazer that hung off her like a hand-me-down. She glued her shoes back together instead of throwing them out. She got mocked in front of her whole class for owing a two-thousand-dollar activity fee she should never have had to worry about.
She hated me for it.
She said, "You say you love me. So why was there never any money for me?"
I understood the truth only when it was too late to matter. It was never that I hadn't given enough.
It was that my husband had been siphoning it out from under me the whole time, spending it on another woman's family.
This time, I didn't wait to find out.

My best friend could charm any man alive. I just didn't know how — not until it was too late.
Every boyfriend I ever had, she'd get close, turn on that pull of hers, and wait. They always fell. Then she'd send me the proof with the same sweet line: "Babe, you should be thanking me. I just saved you from another cheater."
Five boyfriends. Five "loyalty tests." Five relationships she destroyed and called it a favor.
I ran. Started over in a new pack. Found my fated mate — Callum Drake, the Alpha of Silver Ridge. For the first time in years, I felt safe.
On our mating ceremony day, she walked into my dressing room wearing an attendant's uniform.
She drugged my wine. Put on my robes. Crawled into my mate's bed.
I caught her. Threw her out. Thought it was over.
Months later, I was bleeding out in labor — and my mate stood over me, refusing to save me, because he'd been in love with her the whole time.
I died on that table.
When I opened my eyes, I was back. Same day. Same ceremony. Same best friend, same smile.
This time, I didn't scream.

My dad made me a smoothie every morning for six months. I thought it was love.
It was a muscle relaxant.
He'd been slipping just enough into my drink to make my fingers tremble at full draw — just enough to cost me first place at every major competition. Not enough to kill me. Just enough to let Laurel beat me.
Laurel. His mistress's daughter. The girl he bought custom diamond jewelry while giving me clearance-rack gear for my birthday. The girl he wanted to drop into my family, my home, and my spot on the podium.
I found the proof. Stopped drinking his smoothies. Clawed my way back to number one.
Then, two days before the National Youth Archery Trials — the one competition that decides everything — he picked up a steel rod and swung it at my right arm.
My drawing arm.
The bone cracked. Doctors said three months minimum. My coach couldn't look me in the eye. Every scout, every scholarship, every dream I'd bled for over three years — gone in one swing from the man who was supposed to protect me.
Trials start tomorrow morning. And I can't hold a bow.

My mate, Rhys, brought his dead brother's pregnant widow into our house.
He swore up and down I'd never have to lift a finger for her.
The next morning he stood by the door with a packed bag and a grin.
"Babe. Big news. The pack called me up. Border post out east, two years. I ship out tonight."
He looked at me like he was waiting for me to promise I'd take good care of his brother's widow.
So I pulled my own bag out of the closet, right there in front of him and the woman in the back room.
"Funny. The alliance called me up too. Medic rotation. Two years."
"We can leave together. Lock up on the way out. Colette can rest easy with the whole house to herself."

I was the only top-tier Healer in the entire pack.
The blind witch in the Black Forest told me that if I hid my true bloodline and used my Healer gift to save one hundred dying wolves — no payment, no recognition — my mother's spirit would break free of the curse and find peace with the Moon Goddess.
For twenty years, I'd kept my bloodline a secret, saving ninety-nine wolves on the brink of death. Just one more, and it would all be over.
Then the call came. A six-year-old boy. The Alpha's only son. Dying from bloodline backlash. I was the only one who could save him.
I said no.
The whole pack turned on me. My fiancé called me a cold-blooded monster. The Alpha threatened me with treason. They offered gold, titles, everything — even got on their knees.
None of them knew why I refused. None of them knew what that Alpha took from me twenty years ago.
Save his precious heir? He should've thought about that before he destroyed everything I loved.

After the wedding, my husband moved his dead fiancée's mother into our guest room. The whole town called it the kindest thing they'd ever seen.
Every morning, Dione made me a green smoothie. Her grandmother's recipe, she said. Good for the nerves.
I never drank a single one. I poured them all into the chicken feed.
In my last life, I drank them. One a day, for thirty days.
Then I started losing time. I would blink at breakfast and come back at dinner. I found notes in my own handwriting that I never wrote.
I begged Julian to take me to a doctor. He held my shoulders and smiled. "You're just tired, baby. Drink your smoothie."
On the thirtieth night, I fell asleep in my own bed, in my own body.
I never woke up. Someone else did.
This time, every glass went to Nugget, the smallest of my backyard hens.
And one night, a hen crowed in my backyard.
Hens don't crow. And we don't have a rooster.