Hypocrisy

Mara Vale was the intern everyone forgot.

She carried coffee into rooms where decisions were made, fixed printers no one thanked her for, and watched her ideas appear under another woman's name. At Vane & Co., she was told to be grateful for the badge that barely opened any doors.

Then, one stormy night in the sealed archive, Mara found a file the board had hidden for twenty years.

It said the ...

In my past life, I stood on the execution platform, watching the entire city—brainwashed by the Saintess—smile as they willingly degenerated into ghouls.

When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to exactly one month ago.

I smashed the knight's sword that symbolized my honor. Dragging a high-tier ghoul into my basement, I slashed my left wrist open with a heavy blade.

Stripping away all the H...

In high school, my ex only dated me because she needed a dependable errand boy.

I believed it. I tutored her, fixed her grades, rewrote her papers, and cleaned up every mess she made.

Then I overheard her telling her friend, “He’s good at studying. That’s it. Dating him is already me being generous.”

At graduation, she dumped me without hesitation.

Years later, I became the CEO of a public com...

My grandfather was a thief.

He did not steal money.

He stole my grandmother's name, her return papers, and the life that should have carried her out of the mountains.

Fifty years later, his granddaughter sat across from me in a law firm interview and smiled like the world already belonged to her.

I opened her file, saw the family name, and closed the folder.

"You didn't pass."

Clara Whitman-Harlan had been called graceful because no one had ever seen what it cost her to stay quiet. For ten years, she made Grant Harlan look like a man who had built an empire by discipline and vision. She hosted the dinners, calmed the vendors, moved money before payroll became a headline, and remembered which investor had a daughter with asthma and which supplier hated lilies. She kept e...

Kane was the undisputed tyrant of our high school, notoriously ruthless with his words.

I’d always been on the curvier side. When the new, form-fitting cheer uniforms arrived at the locker room, Kane hadn't held back his mocking laugh.

"Are you seriously going to parade around in that?" he had sneered. "Please. You look like a pig about to burst out of its casing. It's embarrassing."

I co...

I was born into a cursed bloodline of witches. My mother told me that every firstborn daughter had to sacrifice the one she loved most to break the chains binding our blood. She said it was the only way to save my child. I lied to myself, and I lied to him, leading him to the altar with my own two hands. But I couldn't survive a single day without him. No curse, no matter how horrific, could ever...

On my eighteenth birthday, I thought I was ready to give myself to my boyfriend. Instead, one fight with my mother led me to Kaven—my stepfather, the forbidden man I had secretly wanted for years. Behind his locked workshop door, he showed me a world of temptation I could never forget.

In the previous life, the apocalypse arrived.
I risked my life to protect my wife as she fled, even giving her the access chip to the underground safe zone as a favor.
But when she was ambushed, she didn't hesitate to pull her superior officer to shield her from a grenade! Afterwards, in an attempt to cover up her crime, she turned around and tearfully accused me of using someone as a human shield...

In the sixth year of my life as a Scale-Stripper, I finally gathered the hundredth vial of Dragon Breath Essence.

I knelt before the altar, cradling the crystal bottle in both hands. The golden light swirling within it cast a warm glow across my scarred knuckles. Six years — six years of wandering the most dangerous battlefields of the Five Clans and the plague-ridden wastelands, using dragon b...

My wife is the city's renowned "Community Angel." She donates every single cent of her high salary to the poor, all to buy herself a saintly reputation.
Meanwhile, as her husband, I spend my days rolling beneath cars in a factory, covered in grease, juggling four credit cards just to keep our large family afloat.
My parents-in-law survive on the expensive, imported life-saving meds I pay for, yet ...

In this era of universal awakening, I've drawn the most tragic "BOSS" route.

For the sake of my fiancée Celine's guild, I signed an exclusive binding agreement. For four whole years, I was treated like an ATM for loot drops, and was mercilessly killed 2173 times.

When Celine led 137 elite members of her guild, armed with a permanent kill item, to stab me in the heart, preparing to dig out my cor...

In a world overrun by zombies, survivors built a fortress—and my fiancée and I joined its action unit.
To help her secure her position, I turned down leadership’s offer to run my own squad and stayed by her side as the “invisible” second-in-command.

For a full year, I made the tactics, wrote the contingencies, and cleaned up every mission.
She took my plans as her own credit—and let the team ...

He Thought I'd Wait Forever. I Wore White for Someone Else.

Nora canceled the wedding venue on a Tuesday. The deposit was nonrefundable. She let it go.
Eight years she'd held that stretch of coast — the cliff, the white tent, the January date they circled and let slide every spring. She slid the ring off at the kitchen counter and dropped it in the drawer with the dead batteries and old takeout ...

For six years I kept the books nobody wanted to touch.
They called me the help. My husband signed my name to a loan I never saw. His mother told the whole family I was the reason there were no grandchildren.
At the anniversary gala, they planned to retire me quietly — and hand my desk to the woman my husband had been paying out of company accounts.
They forgot one thing.
Before I married into...

They built a hundred-year name on a scholarship they stole from a dead girl.

This morning that name landed on my desk. Brooke Hale, applicant. One signature away from the federal clerkship her family has won, somehow, in every generation since 1962.

I'm the one who signs.

I wrote three words instead. Recommend denial. Then I sat with my hands flat on the file so they'd stop shaking.

The Hales ...

I suffered from a severe congenital heart defect.

And my mother, Jamie, had terminal bone cancer.

My family was not a happy one. It marked the third year since my father, Nelson, had openly and unapologetically betrayed their marriage.

That morning, my mother swallowed a handful of painkillers and forced herself to stand up from her wheelchair.

She asked her best friend, Zoey, who was ...

At 2:00 AM, I lay in bed with my eyes closed, my fingers digging desperately into the flesh of my inner thigh.

Crack... Crunch... A stomach-churning sound of dislocating bones drifted from the foot of the bed. Immediately after, a cloying stench of dead fish rolled over the mattress.

A cold, stiff finger traced my jawline and pressed down hard on my carotid artery. It was feeling for a pulse.

"...

While I was busy looking for a way to save our son's life, Liam, My husband was busy having dinner with his childhood lover, Anna.

"I'm sorry Mrs. Wright, but we can no longer continue with the treatment procedures." Those were the last words the doctor had said before unplugging the life support from my child.

I had lost my child due to my husband's unavailability and I promise to avenge his de...

As the undisputed queen of the CS department, my world used to consist of nothing but the absolute rationality of zeros and ones.
Until Corbin Hawke, hockey captain with his star-athlete entitlement, bulldozed past my firewall with his Academy Award-worthy act and a "love algorithm" he supposedly pulled all-nighters to write.
I naively believed it was the upgrade I'd been waiting for.
Until this m...