Best Independent Stories & Novels Collection

After five years deployed overseas, Silas came home to Long Island with a woman and a little girl.

He said they were the widow and orphan of a fallen brother-in-arms, and it was his duty to take care of them.

The little girl was draped over his broad shoulder, calling him "Daddy" in a soft, sleepy voice.

And my own daughter hid behind my legs, peeking shyly up at this stranger, and said: "Sir."...

Seven minutes before the beast-mark registration system closed, I received a video message.
The sender was me.
Only she looked fifteen years older.
"Talia, Kellan secretly changed your training academy application to Ironfang Camp. He and Briar have been together for a long time. He only did it because she didn't want you hanging around him anymore."
My future self looked straight into the camera,...

Six years. One breeding contract. One Alpha who believed his human Luna married him for money. He paraded his assistant in front of her at every gala. He locked her in the darkness she feared most. He forced the antidote down her throat — never knowing she was carrying his child. On the last day of the sixth year, she walked out with nothing but a yellowed page and a miscarriage report. By the tim...

Serena Caldwell gave her husband everything. Her loyalty, her heart and her dignity. His reward? Another woman in her home. Another baby in his arms. That night, she met a man who offered her revenge instead.

Damian Ortiz was rich, ruthless and irresistible. He wanted her as his fake lover and she wanted him as her weapon but when hearts get involved, revenge becomes dangerous.

Her ex-husband...

Three days after I lost our pup, my mate finally reached out through the mind-link.

He sounded pleased with himself.

"Three days without a scene. Guess you finally figured out pack rules apply to you too. I'll have your Starfall token sent over. And quit making a war out of everything Brielle does."

I didn't answer right away. I was looking at the blood still dried on my thighs.

He must have t...

On yearbook photo day during senior year, I instinctively took my usual place beside Luke Ward.
A classmate spotted us and immediately started teasing.
"Come on, everyone, make room! Let the lovebirds stand together!"
I'd heard jokes like that more times than I could count, but they still made my cheeks burn.
I had a secret crush on Luke, and every time someone called us a couple, I couldn't help ...

When I was diagnosed with leukemia, the first thing I felt was relief.

I wasn't really their kid anyway. If I died, I wouldn't owe anybody anything.

When I was six, my little sister Sloane and I fought over a limited-edition doll. Mom dragged me into a corner and said it slowly, making sure I didn't miss a word.

"You're not our real daughter. Everything you have in this house is a handout from ...

Dante finally noticed that I'd stopped telling him things.

When I bought a new dress for the Autumn Gala, I didn't send him pictures and ask which one he liked. When the Moretti family held its annual Winter Gala, I attended alone as Mrs. Moretti. And when the doctors said the bullet fragments lodged beneath my shoulder blade had to come out, I scheduled the surgery by myself.

No call. No text. ...

On Family Day at his private school, the teacher asked the children to give each member of their family a score.

On his card, my son, Leo, wrote:

"Dad, 100. Aunt Bianca, 100."

"Mom, 0. I hate her."

For three years I had fought my ex-husband, Damon, in court with everything I had. I gave up every cent of alimony just to win custody away from him.

But now, looking at that card, I was suddenly, ...

A year ago, I stood at the altar in my wedding dress, about to marry into the Vitale family.

We were halfway through the vows when my fiancé, Theo, turned and ran out of the church.

His adopted sister, Bianca, had climbed onto the roof of the estate and sworn she'd jump if he didn't come back.

The pews were packed with people from all the major families, and every one of them was waiting to wat...

“You're my mate.”
I stared at the man standing on the other side of the battlefield.
Swayer Watt.
The ruthless Beta leading the army that had come to conquer my kingdom.
I should have killed him.
Instead, my Lycan whispered the one word I had spent years trying to forget.
Mate.
He stepped closer.
“Mark me, Evelyn.”
“You came here to destroy my kingdom.”
His eyes never left mine.
“I came here to co...

“Are you asking me to marry you?”

I looked at Clay Hayes, the stranger sitting across from me, and tried not to sound as desperate as I felt.

“Yes. It's practical. You need an identity, and I need a husband.”

At twenty-eight, I had already learned that life rarely went according to plan. My fiancé had cheated on me with my best friend, my coffee shop was on the verge of collapse, and my mother ...

Description: Wren Ashford has spent Larkwood High School being useful instead of known the girl teachers wheel out for academic decathlon and nobody invites to anything else. Dashiell "Dash" Bellinger is the opposite problem: everyone knows him, nobody looks past the letterman jacket, and that suits him fine, because what's underneath is a secret he's protected since freshman year words that swim ...

After freezing on match point in an Olympic final and becoming the internet's favorite meme, disgraced badminton star Emmaline Park must rebuild her career under a banned coach whose past could destroy them both, and risk everything to win gold and the one person she's forbidden to love.

Warning: This is a dark romance!!!

A thousand-year-old albino White Wolf has finally had enough of betrayal, humiliation, and a marriage that left her with nothing but resentment.

After walking away from her husband, she decides to enjoy her freedom and live by her own rules.

Then three dangerous men catch her attention.

They are powerful, untouchable, and definitely not men she should be prov...

I married Quentin Hale for strategic reasons. I chose him because he understood boundaries.
For three years, I never regretted that decision.
Then his new assistant started feeding him from her own spoon, taking my seat in his car, and appearing as his date at a charity auction.
The society reporters even began calling them a perfect match.
I gave my husband three chances to remember that I was h...

For four years, I was the woman Pierce Whitaker kept and never claimed.

I ran his deals by day. I sat by his hospital bed every time his ulcer flared. Every month, his money kept my little brother in care.

Then his biggest rival offered him a sixty-million-dollar contract and asked for me in return.

Pierce didn't even pretend to think it over.

By sunrise, I'd lost my home, my job, and the man ...

Vaelunie had one goal, find her other missing independent soul and finally live her life without having to wonder if the sun or the moon was fighting each other.

But who knew that her other soul was living a miserable life in another different realm and when she finally got back into her real body, she woke up in a middle of a burial... Her own burial.

Vaelunie made a promise, no one would get ...

At our wedding, my fiancé slapped me in front of both our families—all because of his bridesmaid.
That same day, I took off my engagement ring and called off the wedding.
Everyone thought I was just acting out in the heat of the moment.
After all, Charles Harrow and I had grown up together. I'd been in love with him since I was little, following him around for twelve whole years.
But this time, I ...

Alice Cole spent her entire life building herself from nothing. As an orphan with no family name or fortune, she relied on her intelligence to survive and eventually became the hidden force behind her husband Jason Cole’s billion-dollar empire.

She helped him rise from an ambitious businessman into a powerful CEO. But after Jason gained everything he wanted, he betrayed her. On their anniversary,...

Book One of The Alpha Series


Charlotte Hunter has been in love with her best friend, Jeffery, for years. So when he asks her to fake-date him for three months to win back his ex, Ava, she agrees, secretly hoping he'll finally see her as more than his best friend.

She should have known better.

On the night of the party celebrating the new hockey season, Jeffer...

My boyfriend bet his best friend a Porsche that I'd never cheat.

For months, his best friend did everything he could to get me into bed, and my boyfriend sat back and kept score.

He won the car. I found out by accident, one day too early.

So I stopped being the girl they were so sure of.

Let's see how he likes it when I finally say yes.

In front of all his friends. In front of him.

For three years, I smelled like nothing for my Alpha.
Scent blocker on my wrists and throat, every time another Alpha walked into the room. "Until it's official," Knox said. Until he marked me.
When the war's over. He promised me eighteen times.
I drank wolfsbane in his place at every feast. I drew the maps that won his war, then watched him stand up and take the thanks.
The morning after the wa...

In our family, fairness was the one rule nobody broke.

My brother Brody and my sister Raegan are twins.

Growing up, if one of them got an extra cookie, the other would tear the whole house apart.

To keep the peace, Mom and Dad split everything down the middle. Half went to Brody, half went to Raegan.

Which meant nothing in this house was ever mine.

I was the third kid. The one my parents neve...

He was the Alpha who refused to claim me. He became the man who couldn't live without me…
On her 18th birthday, Morrana, the Omega of Shadowcrest discovered the cruelest joke of her life-her fated mate is Alpha Caius Varro, the very man whose family destroyed hers.
Caius refused to acknowledge their bond, choosing a political alliance over his unwanted mate. He gives Morrana one rule above all oth...

"You came and ruined everything. Shouldn't you be planning to excuse yourself from this family? Undo whatever spell you did on Arthur and get lost."
I grit my teeth as the test paper crumpled further in my fist.
Hurtful as those words were, they had some truth to them. I had to ask myself the right questions. Give the right answers too.
I was a fool.
Four years ago, I traded my freedom for a dying...

After the world ended, Aria woke a hundred years too late in a wasteland full of monsters, power, and men who should have stayed out of her path. Marked as the last Moonbinder, she can bind powerful shifters to her through irresistible soul bonds, drawing out their strength while awakening a hunger of her own.
Kael is a fierce white lion commander with a body built for war and a possessive streak ...

The spell in her inn’s wall-hidden book reveals ghostly matchmakers, and weakens the protections keeping them safe.

At the Traveller’s rest near the Welsh border, Mabel Pemberton guards her inherited refuge, and her heart, bruised by a controlling relationship. Now a scones-versus-crumpets feud threatens breakfast, and her resident ghosts refuse to stay out of her business.

Reed Marlowe checks...

My boyfriend, Ethan Whitmore, has prosopagnosia. He can't remember faces unless he's looking right at them.
At our wedding send-off dinner, my roommate blindfolded him and challenged him to name three things about the woman he'd loved for four years.
"Big eyes. Small face," he said.
My heart nearly burst with happiness.
Even blindfolded, he still remembered me.
Then he smiled and added, "And there...

On our graduation trip, my boyfriend and I ran into three killers in the middle of nowhere.

I stripped for them. I played nice. I told them whatever they wanted to hear.

That gave my boyfriend the chance to run. He came back with the sheriff’s deputies, and they saved me.

But when we got back to campus, word got out that three men had taken turns with me.

Every single day, strangers tore into ...

"I should have known from the day I met my fiancé's father that I would end up sleeping with him. The attraction was so fierce and it was obvious it went both ways."
I thought my life was perfect.
I had Marcus, my sweet and dependable fiancé, a cozy apartment, and a wedding to look forward to. I was the classic good girl—the kind who always followed the rules and made the safe choice.
Until I met ...

"You don't believe me, right? You think he's too gorgeous and too wealthy to be impotent."
"He is!" I declared. "Nathan is an impotent bastard!"
After three years of a cold and loveless marriage, I had finally had enough. Nathan wanted a divorce, and I happily signed the papers.
That night, I dressed up and headed to a nightclub to celebrate my freedom.
Then I saw him.
My supposedly impotent ex-hu...

Eleanor had lived in this house for fifteen years, but she had never truly been part of the family.
She had grown used to the pain: her stepbrother's fists, and her stepsister's cruel mockery. But when she caught her boyfriend cheating on her with her stepsister, something inside her finally broke.
She ran.
Alone and soaked by the rain, Eleanor stumbled into the arms of a stranger. What he offere...

"I want your company in ruins. I want every person who ever invested in you to know exactly who you are."
On the night before her wedding, Isla Montclair discovered her fiancé Ronan had betrayed her with her own sister, Vivienne. She had given up her career, supported his business, and sacrificed everything for him, only to be betrayed, abused, and left to die.
Then she woke up two months earlier....

"Maybe I have nothing now. But I'll be back. And trust me... I'll savor every second of my revenge."
Zara grew up with nothing but resilience and ambition. Raised in an orphanage, she fought her way into the corporate world, believing education would save her and love would be her reward. When she married Dante, a powerful CEO, she thought she had finally found both.
She was wrong.
Behind closed d...

The second the graduation ceremony ended, my parents took us all to the nicest restaurant in town.

They said they wanted to properly celebrate having "two graduates" in the family.

Pierce, my boyfriend of four years, showed up last with a huge bouquet of champagne roses in his arms.

I'd just gotten up from my chair when he walked right past me and handed the whole bouquet to my friend Brooke. "...

It was graduation photo day at Silvermoon Academy, and everyone was streaming toward the main square.
I fumbled my way to Kyle's side, and someone started laughing immediately.
"Look, our future Alpha and his little Omega, together again!"
"They've been inseparable since they were kids — just bond already!"
I'd heard these jokes a thousand times.
But every time, my heart still skipped a beat.
Kyle...

Our friends had a name for Cole and me: the couple who never made it to dessert.

Seven years together, and one look from him across a crowded room still had me reaching for my zipper before we even made it home.

So one night, still catching my breath in his bed, I decided it was finally time to ask him to marry me.

But before I could get a word out, he reached for a cigarette and beat me to it....

Scarlett DuBois has spent her life wearing flawless corporate armor. As an ambitious sports agent fighting to inherit her abusive father’s legacy firm, the last thing she needs is a distraction—especially in the form of Liam Knox, the brooding, trauma-scarred hockey star who made her high school years a living hell. Liam is one bad press headline away from losing his career. Scarlett is drowning...

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

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

He married her for her name. His first love fell for his wife.

Seraphina Ashbourne was born into one of London's most respected old-money families. But when the Ashbourne fortune collapses, all she has left is a powerful name, a talent for painting, and her grandfather's beloved exhibition hall, now days away from auction.

Then billionaire Cillian Laurent offers her a way out.

Three years of ma...

Lila Vale has always been the slow one.

In a family where everyone is strong and fast, Lila is the one who never seems to measure up. She trains every morning, comes home with bruised knees, and works harder than anyone. Still, she always finishes last.

After six years of trying, she finally gets a chance to compete at the National Pack Championships. All she wants is to prove that she is not as...

I found out I was pregnant the same week our savings hit zero.
I didn't tell my boyfriend, Jovan. He was already hauling bricks all day and running deliveries half the night. One more thing on his shoulders, and I was scared it would break him.
So I said nothing. Just started picking up more work.
A friend got me a serving job at a private club downtown. Cash tips, she said. Pour tea, carry trays,...

I waited ten years for Ethan.
He was in London getting his PhD.
I was back in the States, teaching.
I taught alone, moved alone, sat alone in the ER with an IV in my arm.
He said that when he came home, he'd marry me.
But the day he came home, he brought her with him. The woman who'd followed him all the way to London.

Trigger Warning - This fictional work contains moments of violence, assault, near sexual assault, and verbal/emotional abuse. Please be aware that they are brief and not overly graphic. Please read only if you are comfortable with this.

She stays perfectly still, lifting both hands to rest against my chest, her fingers clutching the soft fabric of my shirt. Her breaths come quick and shallow. ...

Drunk, I texted my almost-ex-husband the same thing I always did: "Come get me."
Then comments started scrolling through the air in front of me.
Apparently I was the side character, the girl standing in the way of his real love story.
Ten minutes later, he showed up with her.
So I did what a good side character should. I gave her his bedroom, stopped calling him babe, and packed my bags.
The comme...

"That night, Alena was sold by her mother for one billion to serve a man who was looking for a virgin. That man was me, Mom! I was the one who bought Alena! She was sold and forced to do something she didn’t want to do, and Mom still thinks Alena is a woman of loose morals?"

Alena was treated like a burden in her own family. Made to be a servant, humiliated, treated unfairly, even beaten. All ...

I’ve spent years chasing the same finish line as Caleb Hayes.

Every moto race, every championship, every damn victory. He’s the only rider who pushes me to my limits, and the only one I refuse to lose to.

I’ve fought my way to the top, earned every podium, every trophy, and every scar that came with it.

We’ve been rivals for as long as I can remember. I am that one rival he couldn't beat. In...

In the Sitio Balerio area, there is a man who lives with a very beautiful wife, Ayera. People among them wonder how she became his wife despite him being just a humble hunter with an unpleasant face.
This is the reason that Proseo took all the steps to get just the Ayera he wanted. Proseo is busy with a strange task because he likes Ayera so much. He worshiped who and what that darkened his life...

At dinner, my boyfriend peeled a jumbo shrimp – my favorite – and reached past my waiting plate to put it in my best friend's bowl. He always chose Lena first.
I had spent two years telling myself I could wait. Then he used his family's pull to hand her the future I had earned. That was when I understood that I didn't want first place in Ethan's heart anymore.
I just wanted a life where I never ...