After Death

A deadly petrification curse has haunted me since birth, set to claim my life on my twenty-eighth birthday. After ten grueling years, I finally found my only cure: Dragon Heart Marrow. Yet my husband Cassian stole my last salvation, gifting it to my fake sister Selene for her mild illness. With merely seven days left, I’m abandoned by my parents, betrayed by my husband, and even forsaken by my you...

I died the night I refused to postpone the engagement party.

The morning after my death, my parents were still having breakfast with my sister Blair, excitedly planning her award ceremony.

Before I died, the only person who answered my desperate call was my mother. I was being chased by kidnappers at the time, and I begged her to save me, telling her I was dying. But she said, "Stop being so dra...

My husband and parents wanted me dead. All because my sister was "dying."

They shoved a divorce agreement and an experimental surgery consent form at me.

I was supposed to be her donor.

But they didn't know I was the one actually dying.

Three days ago, they told me I had terminal bone cancer.

One month to live.

So when they threatened me into some back-alley surgery, I smiled.

I was already...

Born beneath Pluto’s ill omen, I was marked a blood curse for the Constantine mafia clan, my twin Cataleya blessed with a fortune chart my parents clung to blindly.
They starved me of warmth, forced me to bear every blade, bullet and crime in her stead, and my husband Rafael, whom I once loved with all I had, sacrificed me without hesitation to soothe her feigned sickness.
I was locked in an under...

When they shoved me into the flames, I fought through the blinding pain to call my brother, Ethan Bennett. Fire licked at my skin, twisting my vision, but the call finally went through.

"What is it now?" He sounded distracted, like he was checking off a guest list.

"Ethan, please, help—" My voice was shattered, choked by the searing heat.

"Can't you just give it a rest for one single day?...

The Vane family has carried the vampire's curse for generations. Of every pair of twin sisters born into our bloodline, one will not live to see twenty-five.

Everyone assumed it was my sister — the one always coughing up blood.

Nobody knew that for twenty years, every full moon, the one gritting her teeth through the pain, never making a sound, was me.

The Divine took pity on me and gave me thr...

The last thing Kael remembered was the knife in his back.
Not a metaphorical knife—an actual blade, six inches of obsidian steel, buried between his shoulder blades by the woman he was supposed to marry. Princess Elara of the Celestial Court. The Golden Rose of the Nine Heavens. The most beautiful woman in the realm, and the most treacherous.
He'd died on the steps of the Temple of Eternal Light, ...

When the fourth victim from the Chicago arsonist landed on my brother's autopsy slab, I watched from above, a ghost trapped in the room.
As the city's star medical examiner, he recited his findings with detached precision. "Female, twenties. Evidence of controlled, prolonged burning prior to death." He had no idea he was cataloging my murder.
Three days earlier, in that same warehouse, I'd begged ...

I was an orphan, and a rare heart condition ate away at me for twenty years. The night I died in that cold hospital room, a reaper in a black robe came for me.

He told me if I crossed into a world of werewolves, into the Moonheart Pack, and made Estelle's family genuinely love me — Estelle being the real daughter who'd died a horrible death there — and if I rewrote the ending where they all went ...

The day I died in a foreign country, my boyfriend was in the spotlight with another woman.

He's the man I built from nothing. Five years ago, I saved a broke orphan fresh out of college from the gutter. He said he wanted to be famous, wanted to make it to the top of the hockey world. In exchange, he became my boyfriend for five years.

I gave him the best coaching staff money could buy. Bought an...

The moment I saw my name on that wedding invitation, I was already dead.

On Highway 23, a steel rebar had pierced straight through my chest. I was two months pregnant.

I called my fiancé Michael seventeen times. The first sixteen, he hung up without a word. On the seventeenth, his voice dripped with impatience: "Marrying Sophia is just for show. Stop making a scene."

The man who once kn...

One hundred years married to Everett, and I've learned one thing: whenever he wants to push me into a corner, he throws the mate bond dissolution agreement in my face. Whenever my parents want me to cave, they hold the family name over my head.

They've always wanted the same thing — for me to hand over everything I have to my twin sister Rosalie, who's been sick her whole life.

I've fought it. I...

I died on my 28th birthday.

My family was throwing a birthday party for my sister Stella—yes, we share the same birthday, but in this house, only hers was worth celebrating.

My corpse was slowly rotting in the storage room while laughter and birthday songs echoed from the living room. They thought I was just "throwing another tantrum," completely unaware of the torment I had endured before dying...

Caspian kept me locked in the basement as a living blood bank.
This mafia don was also my husband. Ever since he discovered I could heal instantly, I became nothing more than a consumable—kept alive to sustain another woman.
That woman in the hospital bed was his stepmother in name, his forbidden obsession in reality—the desire he could never speak aloud.
Unable to claim her, he went mad. He tried...

When my younger brother got into a top university, the whole family celebrated for him.
I, suffering from a terminal illness, clutched my chest and desperately cried for help, only to be met with a disgusted slap from my mother and the words, "You just can't stand to see your brother doing well!"
She thought I was a spoilsport, so she roughly dragged me back to the room and locked the door from t...

The floodwaters rushed into the basement, trapping my sister Isabella and me in the surging currents.

My brother, a former Navy SEAL, smashed through the window. Without a second of hesitation, he secured the rescue rope around Isabella.

"You're a good swimmer, figure your own way up! Isabella can't take the cold, I have to get her out first!"

He abandoned me and turned to hoist the ro...

I died on the day I was supposed to marry Grayson.
Because my sister Delilah had her heart "broken," my family decided to bring her to our farm in Ashwood to heal through horseback riding. The wedding was postponed.
I lay in the stable at the Clarke family farm, dialing my mother's number with blood-covered fingers.
All she said was: "What kind of game are you playing now? You think if you act pit...

I was the unluckiest kid in my family—always the one pulling the black-tipped stick from that pretty little "Fairness Jar."
In our house, red meant new dresses, Disneyland, and a goodnight kiss from Mom. Black meant endless chores, lockup in the attic, and the kind of hunger that ate you from the inside out.
Mom loved to stroke my hair in front of the neighbors. "God gives everyone a fair shake," ...

When my husband pushed the divorce papers in front of me for the hundredth time, demanding I sacrifice myself for my sister, I didn't cry or make a scene. I simply signed my name, willingly giving up the man I'd loved for eight years to Ivy.

A few days later, Ivy got drunk and drove into a state senator's only son during a street race, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Once again, I st...

The mafia boss chose me as his decoy—a body double for the woman he loves.

Eight years. Three bullets, one car crash, one explosion. The doctor said ten more minutes and I would've died on that operating table when they took my kidney. I gave him a son. He let me play "the boss's wife" in public.

Until he cleared every obstacle for her and decided to marry her.

Her wedding photos replaced mine ...