Best Modern Novels

The camera flashes felt like a firing squad, dragging me back to the night I lost my baby five years ago. My husband, Faron, sat in the front row, his hand on his mistress Kassie’s thigh, utterly ignoring my public humiliation. This was the thirtieth time he’d made me a joke, and it would be the last. For three years, I played the dutiful Blackwell wife, shielding Faron from his endless affairs. At a press conference, a reporter’s question about his yacht booking with Kassie shattered my facade. Faron, smiling at his mistress, completely ignored me. The last filter I viewed him through instantly shattered. Later, Kassie deliberately spilled champagne on me at a gala. Faron, instead of helping, tenderly wiped it from her. She hissed, "Faron said you just lay there. Fucking you is like fucking a dead fish." This venomous taunt, after thirty public betrayals, snapped my sanity. Chained by my mother-in-law's threats, my pain was expected. My silence demanded. But I was finally done. With a cold, empty void, I slammed the folder shut. I dropped the family crest. "Have a wonderful evening, Faron," I said, turning and walking out. I left him and his suffocating charade behind.

Jaclyn woke up in the sterile hospital room after falling down the stairs. The nurse delivered the devastating news: she had bled heavily and lost her baby. But before she could even cry, her trusted cousins, Katelyn and Cherri, locked the door and revealed the horrifying truth. "It wasn't an accident," Katelyn smirked, pinning Jaclyn's arm down. "The lubricant on the top step was a very deliberate choice." They needed her broken and unstable. They had forged her signature, draining her massive trust fund to save their uncle's bankrupt business. What shattered Jaclyn's world was the fresh hickey on Cherri's neck. Her lover, Bradford, had helped plan the entire murder. When Jaclyn tried to scream, they smothered her with a pillow, framing her as a lunatic having a mental breakdown. Two weeks later, when she confronted them, Bradford violently shoved her through a second-story glass window to silence her forever. As she fell to her death, the husband she had spent her life hating—the ruthless billionaire Gaines—burst through the doors. He threw himself forward, his face filled with pure terror, desperately trying to catch her. When her body hit the stone patio, Gaines fell to his knees in her blood, weeping and begging her not to close her eyes. Until her last breath, Jaclyn was consumed by suffocating regret. Why did she trust the monsters who killed her, and hate the only man who truly loved her? Opening her eyes again, she was back in the penthouse, exactly one month into her marriage with Gaines.

I am a top-tier assassin. My ultimate target is Apollo Buck, the ruthless billionaire head of the Ninth Circle, known in the underworld as Thanatos. To infiltrate his impenetrable fortress, I used his dying nephew as bait, disguising myself as a pathetic, terrified janitor with a ghost identity. It worked. But Apollo has a deadly secret: a cursed Wyvern mark that makes him violently despise women. Yet, the moment his skin touched mine, his agonizing pain vanished. Obsessed with this unnatural peace, he dragged me into his heavily guarded estate. But when night fell, the trembling maid vanished. I broke into his exclusive club to slit his throat, only to realize I had walked straight into a trap. The real Thanatos was waiting for me. We engaged in a brutal fight on the roof. His strength was inhuman, and he nearly killed me, slashing my thigh open with a combat knife. How did he anticipate my every move? And why did his murderous rage suddenly falter the second he smelled the cheap mints crushed in my pocket? Bleeding out, I barely managed to scale his electrified fence and crawl back into my oversized maid uniform just as he kicked my bedroom door off its hinges. "Don't shoot! Please!" I sobbed hysterically, perfectly masking my agonizing combat wound as sheer terror. As Apollo grabbed my collar, desperately searching for the assassin who had just fought him, he only saw a fragile, trembling girl. The hunt had just begun.

On the day she married, Alina unknowingly took the place of the Hayes family's daughter and became Kellan's wife, the richest man in town who was rumored to be disfigured. Everyone mocked their doomed marriage, expecting misery and disgrace. Instead, Alina revealed brilliance no one expected-a renowned jewelry master, financial genius, and medical prodigy. The woman the Hayes family ignored was actually the heiress they should have treasured. As regret consumed them and her ex begged for another chance, Kellan stood beside her, now devastatingly handsome. "Alina and I are perfect together. Stay away from my wife."

I was freezing to death in an abandoned cabin, desperately waiting for my fiancé to save me. Instead, my phone flickered with a video from my adopted sister. She was smiling as she confessed that she and my fiancé had orchestrated my kidnapping, and my parents' fatal plane crash, just to steal my family's trust fund. When I called him with my dying breath, he mocked me for faking a PR stunt and hung up. I died in the sub-zero blizzard, consumed by absolute despair. But as a ghost, I watched my greatest business rival, the ruthless billionaire Collins, kick down the doors of my mansion. He didn't just mourn me. He shot my fiancé, trapped my sister, and set the entire place on fire, choosing to burn alive in the inferno just to avenge me. I couldn't understand why the man I had publicly despised for a decade loved me so fiercely, while the people I gave everything to wanted me dead. Opening my eyes again, I was back backstage on the night I won my Oscar, four years ago. My fiancé smiled, holding out his arms to hug me. I pushed him away in disgust, marched straight into the crowded theater, and kissed my billionaire rival on live television. "Let's get married tomorrow." This time, I would use him to burn them all to the ground.

At my million-dollar wedding to the Hoffman heir, the priest was interrupted by a ringing phone. My groom, Elijah, didn't silence it. He answered it right at the altar, yanked his arm from my grasp, and walked out because his "true love" Jalyn needed him. I was left standing alone in front of three hundred elite guests, blinded by mocking camera flashes. My own mother rolled her eyes in disgust, later threatening to freeze my trust fund and sell me to a notorious playboy to recoup her losses. Elijah even had the nerve to call me, demanding I take the blame for the canceled wedding to save his PR, while live news feeds showed him cradling a fragile Jalyn in the hospital. I had spent two years bending over backward to be his perfect bride, only to be discarded like trash. What made it sicker was finding out that Jalyn's sudden "medical emergency" was actually a ruptured cyst caused by having vigorous sex with Elijah right before he walked down the aisle. I refused to let them destroy me. Kicking off my six-inch heels, I stepped down from the altar and walked straight to the back row where Cristian Lowe sat. He was the ruthless iceberg of Wall Street and Elijah's most terrifying rival. I looked up at his sharp jawline and asked the craziest question of my life. "Will you marry me?" He stood up, his dark eyes locking onto mine. "As you wish."