After Death

For ten years, I drew only black stones from the moon-bone box.
My parents called it the Moon Goddess's will, while every white-stone reward—from the choicest meat to new cloaks, even a single word of praise—went straight to my white-furred, cherished younger sister Luna.
On my twelfth birthday, I tried to cheat during the Hearth Vow Night. My mother caught me red-handed, locked me in my bedroom, ...

Three days after I died, the morgue called my husband Sebastian to collect my ashes.
He was kissing another woman when he hit speaker, his voice cold and dismissive: "She's dead? Cremate her. Don't call me again."
And just like that, my body was wheeled into the cremation chamber.
When he finally showed up to collect my remains, he smashed the urn on the floor and ground every fragment of my ashes...

Damien thought he could balance loyalty to his childhood friend and love for his angel fiancée. He had no idea he was dragging me into a living nightmare. Four years of false heavenly missions turned into endless torment upon the altar. The lies crumbled the moment my angelheart was torn out of my chest. After uncovering Chloe’s deception and his own heinous crimes, Damien meted out brutal justic...

Three torturous years hauling bodies on the mortuary night shift, and I'd finally scraped together the cash for my brother Charles's heart transplant.
He just waved it off.
"My heart is fine. Mom and Dad didn't die in that gang war, either. I orchestrated the hit. You were the only casualty."
Nearby, my husband, Gerald, casually lit a cigar to deliver his own confession. "I never went bankrupt. '...

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.”
S...

To honor a vow to "protect her for a lifetime," I used my flesh and blood to shield her from a fatal impact in a deadly car crash. My heart was severely shattered, leaving me barely clinging to life with a pacemaker.

Concealing my identity for five years, I single-handedly dragged her from bankruptcy and crowned her the new royalty of Wall Street.

Yet, on the eve of her IPO, just to curry favor ...

His legion ate souls.
His daughter ate kingdoms.
Together, they would teach the world why the Vorn bloodline should have stayed dead.

I married my abuser by choice.
To everyone’s confusion, I stay by his side silently, tolerating his endless humiliation and public degradation in front of tens of thousands of livestream viewers. I never cry, never resist, always flawless and docile.
No one notices I’ve kept a perfect physical form, hiding a terrible secret beneath my makeup.
When a strange superchat tears through the live stream ...

Every time Mason tried to force me to back down, he would slam the divorce agreement onto the table.
Every time my parents wanted me to yield, they threatened to sever all ties with me.
What they wanted was simple: for me to give everything to my twin sister.
I once resisted, cried, and questioned them over and over—why was I always the one left hurt?
Until the doctor slid my medical test results ...

Have you ever been treated like a stand-in for your dead sibling by your own mother? I have.

Have you ever been murdered by your own mother? I have.

My name is Aira, and today is my sister Lily's birthday. It's also the anniversary of my death—the day the washing machine became my coffin.

"Why couldn't it have been you who died?"

After four long years, my mom finally got her wish.

I died on the fourth night after Thanksgiving.
A blizzard had swallowed the entire town, and I was locked in an unheated attic.
My broken leg had turned black with infection. Every breath felt like swallowing broken glass. I tore four fingernails from their beds, but I still couldn’t claw my way through the door.
With the last of my strength, I held my old iPad against the frost-covered window.
O...

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...

"Is lying the only skill you have left? Don't play dead until you actually land in a coffin!"
That was what my billionaire brother roared as he crumpled my stage-four cancer diagnosis and threw it at my face.
To him, I was a spoiled brat who needed a brutal reality check.
He engineered a fake DNA test, gave my identity to a manipulative orphan girl, and watched me get dragged to a disciplinary ...

I was married to Daniel for eight years. I thought we were happy.

Then I found a receipt in his car — a private OB-GYN clinic, Upper East Side. The name on it was Lydia's. My best friend's.

I drove straight to my brother Joel's apartment. Joel, the boy I raised. The only family I had left. I needed someone to tell me I was wrong.

I heard them laughing before I knocked.

I looked through the gap...

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...

My name is Balen. Father once said every lion cub is born to run wild across the vast grasslands.

At seven years old, I only mimicked my elder brother’s limp to make him laugh. That innocent jest was regarded as an unforgivable sin by Mother. She forced bitter medicine down my throat and condemned me to a wheelchair, hoping that by enduring pain myself, I would learn empathy and pity.

During tho...

The night I was kidnapped, my family was gathered around the long table, raising their glasses to Valentina's birthday.
The kidnappers demand a ransom. I knew it was useless, but with him forcing me, I made the call anyway.
The first call, no one picked up. The second, it was declined.
The third, it finally went through.
"Elena, you've been struck off the Castellano family. Hear me clearly: even i...

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...

I had been dead for several days, and Silverclaw Pack,the biggest pack’s Alpha, Holden Carter still didn’t know.
He hadn’t come home once.
After all, I was just the "the daughter least favored by her father"
from the Blackfang Pack’s Alpha .
He never care since we met at my coming-of-age ball, I fell for him at first sight — like a lovesick fool.
Until Joe, his Beta, casually scrolling through Fa...