Hypocrisy

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...

Inside the private dining room, my seven-year-old daughter leans against the edge of the table. She waits for three hours, and her birthday cake melts. Dante texts me, claiming he is handling an "emergency arms deal" and telling us not to wait.

But his mistress's Instagram tells a completely different story.

She wears the limited-edition black diamond necklace Dante just bought, cozying up t...

For my fiancée’s career, I was willing to be the ghost designer behind her for five years.

Until the day of the key bid, she stole the blueprint I had spent two sleepless years perfecting and signed it with the name of her useless first love.

The drawings are gone You can draw them again He needs this project to survive Be sensible she said, impatient when I confronted her

I did not argue My he...

"911, what's your emergency?"
What came through wasn't words—it was raw, desperate sobbing.
In Oak Creek, a well-respected couple called to report their daughter had died. But when officers stepped through the door, what they found made a veteran sheriff drop to his knees and retch—
Their 36-year-old daughter had become part of the couch.
Her body had fused with decomposing foam, waste, and writhi...

I spent six years working with the dead, earning money to save my son—enduring the stench and loneliness, clinging to hope.
I trusted my family, my husband, my parents, but they turned their backs on me.
They hated the smell of death on me, lied to me, and used my sacrifice for a fake sister.
All my efforts were for nothing; the hope I clung to was just a lie.
I walked away, broken and empty, whil...

I gave up my Harvard Ph.D. and lived in the slums for five years as a corpse restorer, all to save my dying boyfriend.
But when I brought the $72,000 I literally bled for to his VIP ward, I found him drinking champagne.
"Thanks for faking the medical records, Doc," Ethan smirked. "Her sob-story money is paying for my Senate run nicely."
His glamorous campaign manager, Sloane, chimed in: "Just be ...

"First, unlimited funds. Second, you clean up every mess I make. Third, keep out of my private life."
Those were the arrogant demands my student laid out when I, the top art professor in New York, offered to make him my exclusive protégé.
The entire faculty gasped. No one dared speak to a Voss heiress like that.
Instead, looking at his face, I gave a slow, quiet nod.
"Agreed," I whispered. "Just...

My husband Ronald's best friend Clyde died three months ago, and with his last breath, he made Ronald promise to take care of his pregnant widow, Jennifer. From that moment, Jennifer invaded our lives, and I was only four months pregnant at the time.

Then Jennifer got caught in a gang shootout. She needed an emergency blood transfusion, and she had this rare blood type—Rhnull. Turns out, I'm Rhnu...

The acrid smell of the bullet piercing my skull hadn't even dissipated when I came back to life.

I was reborn back to the third week of the apocalypse. At this time, the tyrant of the fifth checkpoint was stripping me of my right to pass and kicking me into a horde of thousands of zombies.

In my past life, I also died here. But until the moment of my death, these fools didn't know that—within th...

I served as the family's lapdog for ten years, only to discover that my entire family and my fiancée faked their deaths on a yacht, leaving me to pay for their $500 million debt and thirty lives.
Now the family's gangsters have blocked the entire building, the FBI is ready to arrest me, and my fiancée's senator father wants me dead to accompany his daughter to the grave. One trouble after another....

Ever since Her Majesty the Queen fell gravely ill, the entire dragon realm had been teetering on the brink of collapse.
In that precarious moment, it was I who held the throne together, heartbroken yet unyielding.
I depleted my magic without reservation to repair the realm's protective barriers, working through endless nights to brew life-sustaining elixirs for the Queen.
Yet when the Dragon Legio...

Halfway through my wedding, five months pregnant in a custom gown, waiting to say "I do."
A woman stood up and stopped everything.
"I'm so moved seeing you both live in the house I designed." She raised her champagne, smiling like she owned the place. "The architecture, the interiors, the gardens—all mine."
My fiancé Dorian didn't even explain. Just helped her out, left me standing there in front ...

Five years ago, my biological parents brought me back from the orphanage to the Blue Moon Pack, and suddenly, I was the so-called true Alpha heir.
But my return ruined everything for the fake Alpha heir, Yolanda.
She teamed up with some rogue wolves to kidnap me, then ran me down with her own car, crushing my legs. I went from being the pack’s golden girl to a cripple stuck in a wheelchair.
I thou...

My name is Leo Carson, I am eighteen years old, and I am dying.
Three years ago, my uncle Thomas stole the 500,000 Aurora Coins and the Awakening Potion that my parents left me with a fake psychiatric evaluation report, and threw me into the Rust Zone to die.
For the past three years, I have worked as a child laborer in a chemical plant, working sixteen hours a day and being treated like a dog.
Un...

I died the day I caught my fiancé cheating.

I had walked in on my cousin and my fiancé, completely naked in the backseat of a brand-new Porsche. It was a car bought with stolen money—embezzled from the estate of my recently deceased grandmother, Margaret.

Panic had set in the moment I discovered them. To stop me from calling the cops, he slammed his foot on the gas.

As a pool of warm blo...

I died once. Madison shoved me into a zombie horde and watched them tear me apart.

She was crying, saying, "You have a duty to save everyone," and then she ran.

Now I'm back. Twenty-eight hours until the virus leaks.

She's still sitting in the front row, smiling at me: "Ethan, you're such a good person."

This time around, I decide who saves who.

This life, I'm only the Grim Reaper.