After Rebirth, She Picked The Right Guy
Everyone knew Caroline loved Jacob, the frail man in a wheelchair, even giving up her chance at marrying into wealth for him.
She devoted everything to his recovery, enduring hardship and humiliation to help him stand again.
When he finally recovered, they were praised as perfect together-until danger came.
Faced with saving her or her sister, Jacob chose the latter without hesitation. Only in her final moments did Caroline realize his heart was never hers.
Reborn, she made a different choice, choosing power over love.
When Jacob later begged, she looked down coldly. "I have no interest in men who can't stand on their own."
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Chapter 6
The bank loan reached Caroline's account not long after the call ended.
When the notification appeared on her phone screen, a slight curve touched her lips.
Being Braydon's wife really did make things easier.
After putting her phone aside, she returned to finishing her makeup.
Tonight was the auction for the land.
In her past life, Jacob had attended the same auction with only ten million dollars. In the end, he could only purchase the land in the east of the city.
Everyone laughed at him. Alec even mocked, "You spent money on that piece of trash? You really are pathetic."
Nobody believed the land held any value at all.
Later, though, everything changed once the treasure buried beneath that land was discovered.
Jacob's status rose overnight because of it. Meanwhile, the Lloyd family nearly regretted themselves to death.
Caroline remembered another thing even more clearly. At that time, she knelt before Vivian and begged her to put in a good word with Braydon.
The memory filled her with ridicule.
This time, she would secure that land.
By evening, the auction house had already filled with people.
Caroline arrived wearing a black dress that reached her knees. Her hair had been pinned up neatly, exposing her slender neck.
She wasn't wearing any jewelry that night. Still, people looked at her the moment she walked inside.
At nearly the same time, Braydon arrived outside the entrance.
A dark gray suit covered his tall figure while Jared followed beside him.
The entire walk there, Jared kept talking without pause. "We absolutely can't lose the land in the south tonight. I've already checked the competition. Only three companies are bidding against us, and none of them should be difficult to handle."
Braydon gave no response. Instead, his gaze moved across the crowd gathered near the entrance.
And that was when he spotted Caroline, who was supposed to be at home.
The moment Jared noticed where Braydon was looking, his expression changed. "Hold on. Isn't that your wife?"
A bidder paddle rested in Caroline's hand while she lowered her head to look at her phone near the doorway.
Jared rubbed his eyes before looking again. "She came to the auction? Did she mention this to you?"
Braydon gave no response. His attention remained on Caroline while his eyes narrowed slightly.
At that moment, Caroline lifted her head. The instant their eyes met, she paused briefly before walking toward him with calm steps. "Braydon, I didn't expect to run into you here."
Braydon looked at her. "Why are you here?"
"I'm just here to pass the time," Caroline answered casually, waving the paddle in her hand. "I didn't have anything else to do."
Jared leaned closer. "This is an auction house, not a mall. You're treating this as entertainment?"
One of Caroline's brows lifted slightly. "Are you saying I shouldn't be here?"
That question left Jared speechless.
Braydon glanced at her once more before turning away and walking inside without another word.
Jared quickly followed after him while glancing back again. "What's your wife really up to?"
Braydon stayed silent. He wanted the answer himself.
As more guests entered the auction hall, Caroline found a seat that didn't attract attention and set her paddle beside her.
Not long after, another pair entered the hall.
Jacob sat in a wheelchair. Compared to this same time in her previous life, he looked thinner and paler now.
Still, he carried that refined appearance that always made him stand out. At the same time, the cold distance around him made him difficult to approach.
Standing behind him, Vivian pushed the wheelchair forward, wearing a butter-yellow dress. Although a smile rested on her face, it looked somewhat forced.
Watching the two of them, Caroline slowly curved her lips upward.
While pushing Jacob deeper into the hall, Vivian suddenly stopped after spotting Caroline nearby.
"Caroline?" Surprise immediately appeared on her face. "You came too?"
Lifting her gaze toward them, Caroline answered with a small smile, "I did."
Jacob looked at Caroline quietly. Something complicated flickered through his eyes.
He'd genuinely believed Caroline would become his wife. Never once had he expected Vivian to be the one standing beside him instead.
Because of that, the Lloyd family constantly mocked him. To them, he was nothing more than someone who overestimated himself and wasn't worthy of Caroline.
"Carrie, how have you been lately?" Jacob asked softly.
Caroline looked at him calmly while keeping the smile on her face. "I'm doing very well, Mr. Lloyd. Thank you for asking."
The formality in her words made Jacob pause. She called him "Mr. Lloyd." Before this, she'd always addressed him as Jacob.
Vivian failed to notice the shift between them entirely. After glancing around the auction hall, she lowered her voice and moved closer to Caroline. "Do you know anything about today's auction lots? We honestly don't understand this stuff. Jacob's brother only gave us ten million and told us to buy whichever land we could afford."
Caroline repeated, "Only ten million?"
Vivian nodded immediately. "Exactly. What kind of land can we even get with that amount? I heard the southern land is the best one tonight, but there's no way ten million would be enough for it."
Caroline's gaze shifted toward Jacob.
Throughout the conversation, he kept his head lowered without speaking.
Everything matched her previous life perfectly.
Back then, Alec handed Jacob ten million, wanting him to embarrass himself at the auction.
Once Jacob returned empty-handed, Alec would gain another excuse to humiliate him during the next family gathering.
Pulling her attention away from him, Caroline smiled faintly. "The southern land is valuable, but nobody's getting it for only ten million."
Another sigh escaped Vivian's lips. "Then what are we supposed to do? We can't leave without buying anything."
Caroline thought quietly for a brief moment before speaking again. "Actually, the land in the west isn't a bad option. The price should just be a little higher."
"The west?" Vivian looked at her immediately.
"Yes." Caroline gave a small nod. "That land has a decent location. It can't compare to the one in the south, but you wouldn't lose money buying it."
Vivian hesitated slightly. "When you say the price is a little higher, how much higher are you talking about?"
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8.1
She thought patience would earn her love.
She was wrong.
After years of waiting for her best friend to finally see her, she meets the one man she should never want-his older brother. Dark, forbidden, and dangerously perceptive, he sees through every excuse she's ever made for being overlooked.
Now she must choose between a safe fantasy that keeps breaking her heart and a dangerous truth that offers no escape once it begins.
Because the brother who looks at her like that?
He doesn't believe in halfway love.
7.1
The last thing I remembered was the blinding flash of my starship crashing. But instead of a rescue crew, I woke up tied to a wooden post, surrounded by hostile beastmen.
My universal translator kicked in just in time to hear their priestess, Chelsea, declare that I was a cursed demon who ruined their hunt. To save the clan from winter starvation, I was to be burned alive.
The flames were already blistering my legs, and jagged stones hurled by the crowd gashed my forehead. I barely negotiated a three-day reprieve to find them food, venturing into the deadly primeval forest.
I found a massive supply of wild potatoes and even gained the protection of Bronson, a terrifyingly powerful saber-toothed tiger beastman.
But Chelsea wouldn't stop.
She labeled my food as poisonous, tried to sentence me to starve in a penitent's cave, and when my agricultural knowledge proved her wrong, she invoked an ancient law. She incited the tribe's savage warriors to fight over me, turning me into breeding property.
I was a scientist offering them endless food, yet their primitive ignorance and one woman's vicious jealousy kept pushing me toward a brutal end. I was terrified, completely powerless against their monstrous physical strength.
As five ruthless challengers drew their bone axes to claim me, I begged Bronson to leave me and run.
Instead, he pulled me against his scarred chest and kissed me fiercely in front of the entire clan.
"She is my mate," he roared, unleashing a soul-crushing aura. "Anyone who wants her, come at me together."
7.5
For five years, I was locked away in the freezing royal dungeon, starved and used as a bloody plaything by the kingdom's sadistic Cabinet Minister, Brandt Fischer.
He tortured me daily for one twisted reason: I simply looked like someone else.
When he visited my cell to casually announce my father's execution and drag a silver dagger across my neck, he expected me to beg.
Instead, I laughed, sank my teeth directly into his carotid artery, and was violently thrown against a jagged stone wall to my death.
As my skull cracked and my blood stained the moss, I thought about my so-called family. The moment Brandt had demanded me, my father, the Duke, handed me over without a single hesitation to save his own political career.
I was nothing but a disposable pawn, left to rot in the dark while the monsters who ruined my life thrived.
I died suffocating on my own blood and absolute, destructive vengeance.
Then, I opened my eyes.
I was lying in my silk-sheeted bed, reborn as my fifteen-year-old self.
Today was the exact day Lord Daryl Langley, the God of War, would be ambushed and crippled—the event that allowed Brandt to seize ultimate power.
I immediately stole a horse, rode to the palace gates, and threw myself directly in front of Daryl's moving carriage.
"I just didn't want to see a hero die like a slaughtered pig."
I didn't care if I had to shatter my own ankle to hijack his convoy. This time, I was going to save the general, and he would become the blade I use to slaughter them all.
7.6
I woke up to the suffocating smell of copper and sulfur, my fingers wrapped around a blood-soaked leather whip.
Hanging from an obsidian cross in front of me was a boy with silver hair and dead, golden eyes.
His pale chest was torn open to the bone.
I recognized those eyes immediately. I had spent three years describing them on my laptop.
He was Kamari Monroe, the tragic, overpowered protagonist of my own web novel.
And I wasn't just a bystander. I was Benedict Guerrero, the sadistic academy headmaster. The ultimate villain.
A reel of images flashed in my mind: my original ending. Kamari, fully awakened, skinning me alive and burning my soul in a furnace for forty-nine days.
My loyal attack dog, Gideon, stepped forward with a basin of glowing green liquid.
"Headmaster, let me wake him up with this bone-rot acid so you can resume."
If that acid hit Kamari, his hatred would become permanent. My gruesome death would be sealed.
But if I broke character and apologized, the magical world would sense the shift, and Kamari would just think it was a sicker, more twisted trap.
How was I supposed to survive a death sentence I wrote myself?
I couldn't show weakness. I had to play the monster to survive.
Suppressing my terror, I smashed the acid basin, healed his ruined flesh with agonizing dark magic, and lied straight to his face.
"Someone had to be the monster to push you into the fire."
This time, I will rewrite my own fate.
7.5
I thought my best friend Mila and my lover Preston were my only salvation from Essex Langley, the ruthless billionaire who kept me caged in his estate.
I trusted them blindly when they planned my grand escape.
But it was all a cruel setup.
Mila deliberately leaked the plan to Essex's guards to win his favor, and Preston only wanted my family's shares to pay off his massive debts.
When we were caught in the rose garden, Preston shoved me toward the guards and ran for his life.
"You're insane if you think I actually loved a freak like you!"
I was dragged back into the manor, my ribs cracking under heavy boots.
I bled out on the freezing marble floor, staring into Essex’s unhinged, mad eyes as I took my last agonizing breath.
Until the moment I died, I couldn't accept it.
I had ruined my own life, adopting a hideous punk look with fake tattoos and piercings just to make Essex hate me, all for two people who saw me as nothing but a sacrificial lamb.
Why was my blind rebellion rewarded with such a brutal betrayal?
Opening my eyes again, the white-hot pain was gone.
I was back in the freezing bedroom on my eighteenth birthday, the very night Mila would come to orchestrate my ruin.
I looked at the rebellious, smudged stranger in the mirror.
This time, I calmly washed off the black makeup, took out my lip ring, and put on a pristine white dress.
If fighting the devil got me killed, then in this life, I would tame him and make them all pay.
7.9
Cora Foster was a brilliant archaeologist, but a jagged burn scar across her face made the world treat her like a contagious monster.
During an elite excavation of a Gilded Age crypt, touching an ancient artifact triggered a terrifying memory. She remembered being Seraphina Beaumont, a socialite brutally buried alive by her vain, cruel sister, Isolde.
When the team pried open the crypt's pristine mahogany casket, they cheered, believing the mummified corpse inside was Seraphina. But Cora recognized the onyx hairpin and the angular jawline. It was Isolde. The sister who had stolen her life, mocked her agony, and left her to suffocate in the dark. Her colleagues scoffed at her forensic proof, dismissing her as a scarred, delusional liability.
Worse, the ruthless billionaire funding the expedition, Julian Montgomery, was the spitting image of Alistair—the man Seraphina had deeply loved. Why was Julian staring at her ruined face with such intense, inexplicable recognition? And why did Isolde take Seraphina's most precious silver ring to the grave?
Driven by a century of agonizing grief, Cora secretly pried the tarnished ring from the mummy's stiff, dead fingers and dropped it into her pocket.
"What are you looking at, Foster?"
Julian's deep voice vibrated inches from her ear, his cold, predatory eyes locked directly onto her half-open pocket.