After Death

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 ...

For three years, Barren endured poison and a wheelchair for a childish mistake. Condemned by his mother’s prejudice and overshadowed by his perfect brother, he lost his legs, his childhood, and finally his life. After death, his wandering ghost witnesses his family’s belated regret and redemption, but no apology can bring back the little lion who never got any love.

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.

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...