Rebel

I’ve had a lot of things stolen from me by my stepsister, Paloma Thorne.
My father, my boyfriend, my baby, my thesis, my future...
When I was twenty-two, I walked into the university lab and caught Paloma and my boyfriend, Milo, tangled naked together. I miscarried on the spot. Later, as I lay in the hospital bed, Paloma used a secretly recorded sex tape of Milo and me as blackmail, sealing off my...

My mother only ever made the bedtime tea for me. Never my brother—just me, every night, because I was the gifted one, the daughter she "worried about."
The night before the scholarship exam, my one shot at college, she brought me a cup like always.
The next day I collapsed in the middle of the test. I'd never been sick a day in my life. I failed.
Don't worry, she said. We'll try again next year. A...

We had earned countless merits in war.

I could crush refined steel with my bare hands. My comrades could manipulate metal, hack electronic devices, and phase through concrete walls.

But what was the price?

Bone calcification, organ failure, every breath feeling like swallowing razor blades.

Ever since we broke into that laboratory,

For seventy years, we've been hiding in the gutters like rats...

I was marrying Boone Ashcroft on a Saturday morning. Before I could step out of the truck, his mother walked up with a rope and pointed at the cattle chute behind the barn.
Her terms: hands and knees through six inches of mud and manure. A metal headgate clamped around my neck at the end. That was the price of walking through her front door.
I said no.
Then forty Ashcrofts surrounded the truck. My...

I retired for three years, restraining my edge, thinking compromise could bring peace.

But what I got in return was my sister's abduction, my family's estate seized, and my benefactor hanged from the city gates!

Even the Council turned a blind eye, mocking me as bottom-tier trash without even a shred of magic.

Since mortal reasoning won't work, then I'll shatter the rules of this world myself!