Divine Contract: Marrying My Phantom Prince
Clara was drowning in student debt and barely making rent when she downloaded a fantasy mobile game to escape reality.
Inside the game, an exiled prince named Alex was freezing to death. Pitying him, she spent her last few dollars on microtransactions to fix his shelter and cure his poison.
But the game was far too real.
Every time she paid, the prince reacted. When she complained aloud about going broke, the in-game army suddenly halted, as if the prince had heard her voice.
Then, the terrifying real-world consequences hit.
Clara woke up to find her water glass and a box of Kleenex had vanished from her locked bedroom overnight.
She frantically searched the tiny apartment, her heart pounding in her chest.
She thought she was losing her mind. Had she thrown them out in her sleep? Was there a stalker hiding in her home?
How could physical objects just disappear into thin air behind a deadbolted door?
Until she looked at her nightstand.
Sitting exactly where her missing items used to be was a glowing, weightless crystal cup that defied all logic.
And on her laptop screen, the exiled prince was carefully holding her Kleenex box, offering a mountain of real gold on an altar.
She hadn't just downloaded a mobile game; she had opened a cross-dimensional trade route with a desperate future king.
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Chapter 5
"Halt!" Alex roared, raising his fist.
The column ground to a messy halt. Horses neighed in protest, and soldiers bumped into each other, confusion rippling through the ranks.
Gage Stone, the brash captain of the guard, spurred his horse forward. His face was red from the cold and the wind. "Your Highness, why are we stopping? The storm is getting worse! We need to clear this pass before nightfall!"
Alex ignored him. He turned his sharp gaze on Silas. "You said this pass is prone to rockfalls. How prone?"
Silas glanced at the towering cliffs on either side of them. "Very, Your Highness. The scouts saw fresh scree on the path ahead."
Alex's mind was racing. The voice had said she was going broke. While he didn't grasp the word's full meaning, the tone was a clear signal of cost, of sacrifice. It was a warning. A reluctant, annoyed warning—but a warning nonetheless.
He had to stop the column. But he couldn't tell them the truth. He couldn't say, 'The voice in my head told me to stop.'
He dismounted, his boots crunching on the frozen gravel. He walked over to the cliff face, running his gloved hand over the rock. It was loose. Crumbling.
He gripped a chunk of stone and pulled. It came away in his hand, tumbling to the ground with a dull thud.
"The rock is unstable," Alex announced, turning back to face his men. His voice carried over the wind, leaving no room for argument. "I can feel it. There is a risk of a landslide. We're not moving forward until we know more."
Gage scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. "Your Highness, we've crossed worse terrain than this. A little loose gravel shouldn't—"
"Are you questioning my order, Gage?" Alex's voice dropped to a dangerous whisper. He stepped closer to the captain, his blue eyes locking onto Gage's brown ones. "Do you want to be responsible when the mountain falls on our heads?"
Gage swallowed hard. The look in the prince's eyes was terrifying. It was the look of a man who had already seen the future. "No, Your Highness."
"Then shut up and follow orders," Alex said. He turned to two of his fastest scouts. "You two. Ride ahead. Go five miles into the pass. Check the stability of the cliffs. Report back immediately."
The scouts saluted and spurred their horses, disappearing into the swirling snow.
The men waited. The wind howled. The tension was thick enough to choke on.
Alex stood like a statue, his eyes fixed on the pass. He was gambling everything on a voice that complained about its finances. If the scouts came back and said the path was clear, he would look like a coward. His authority would be shattered.
But if they came back and said the mountain was ready to fall...
Clara watched the little scout icons separate from the main group on her screen. A progress bar popped up.
[Your followers have dispatched scouts to check the road ahead. Warning system active. Estimated time until potential collapse: 2 hours.]
"Two hours?" Clara yawned. "Perfect. Nap time."
She saved the game and closed the laptop. She needed a shower, and she had a book on medieval succession crises that wasn't going to read itself.
She grabbed the book and curled up in her favorite armchair, losing herself in tales of poisoned wine and backstabbing lords. It reminded her of Alex's situation. The exiled prince, betrayed by his family.
She smiled to herself. She was getting way too invested in a video game. But she couldn't help it. There was something about him. He looked so sad, so determined.
When my first paycheck from the gift shop comes in next week, she thought, I'm going to buy him the best armor in the store. He deserves it.
Miles away, in a universe of ice and stone, Alex stood in the freezing wind, waiting for his world to change. He didn't move. He barely breathed.
He was waiting for the truth.
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7.2
Betrayed by her sister. Killed by her husband.
Reborn, Sarah returns with one goal-revenge.
This time, she won't be the fool.
And with the Knox, the most dangerous man by her side...
she'll ruin them all, and take back everything that belongs to her.
Promotional line: They killed me once. This time, I'll destroy them first.
7.7
Not only was I drugged, blinded and assaulted. I was deceived into carrying a baby by a stranger I never knew. Then he appeared and took my child away.
I was sent to a militia by the father of my child. I thought I was rescued but I was recruited to be a weapon for killing. Who was manipulating me, I didn't know. The answers were far from what I knew.
Forced to blend into the world that I could never believe I would be to, a place where brutality reigned, kill or be killed was the only language. I have survived but he has to pay for everything he did to me, because I believed every phase of my life was set by him and him alone. Have I really survived?
Who would have thought, he existed twice in the same world? Do I really know who I should take revenge on? Him or the person I would sacrifice everything for?
Was my mother the one who orchestrated everything? What kind of pawn am I?
7.5
I was the adopted daughter of the wealthy Ruiz family, but the moment their true heir appeared, I was thrown away like trash.
Not long after being kicked out, my adoptive father and uncle hired a hitman to stage a fatal car crash on Mulholland Drive.
Pinned under an overturned Porsche with a shattered leg, I watched the hitman point a suppressed pistol between my eyes.
"The Ruiz family sends their regards."
Before this, my reputation had already been completely destroyed by a director, a pop idol, and a reality TV star, leaving me blacklisted and universally hated.
My adoptive family didn't just want me ruined; they wanted me permanently silenced to tie up loose ends.
The hitman pulled the trigger, and the original Alicia died in despair, tasting only rain and blood.
Until her last breath, she didn't understand.
Why did the family she loved treat her like a disposable object? Why did those three men maliciously frame her and turn the world against her?
Opening my eyes again, the fear was gone, replaced by an ancient, cosmic indifference.
I, the Arbiter, had taken over this deceased vessel.
Moving faster than the human eye, I crushed the hitman's steel gun with my bare hand and turned his soul into dust.
Looking at the memories of those who wronged this girl, I signed a contract for the very reality show they were starring in.
Since I borrowed this body, taking out the trash is a required courtesy.
9.2
When Alma's father stood in front of the bulldozers to protest, the energy company's thugs beat him half to death in the mud.
Instead of arresting the attackers, the police handcuffed her bleeding father and threw him into a cruiser.
"Stay back, kid," the officer barked, shoving Alma away.
Her father was denied bail and framed for assaulting an officer. The corrupt mayor just smiled and told her not to cause a scene. Meanwhile, the company mailed her weeping mother a severance check that barely covered a month of groceries.
Alma was forced to watch her family be completely destroyed by men with money and power.
Kneeling in the cold dirt where her father's blood had spilled, she didn't shed a single tear. The panic in her chest died, replaced by a cold, absolute hatred.
She realized that crying wouldn't do anything. In this world, justice didn't exist for the weak.
Years later, Alma stepped onto a prestigious Ivy League campus, her cheap backpack slung over her shoulder.
She was surrounded by the arrogant children of the very executives who ruined her life.
She lowered her head, hiding her dead eyes, and put on the perfect mask of a timid, helpless charity case.
Undergrad was just a training ground, and these elite kids were just her practice dummies. The hunt was officially on.
9.0
Once a pampered princess, Alaina now clutched a deactivated American Express card, staring out at Central Park. Her family’s fortune was gone, her life, over.
Her family's Hamptons estate, a four-generation legacy, was seized by Dyer Capital. The name hit her: Hardin Dyer, the poor boy she’d once scorned, had returned.
Hardin marched in, serving a divorce agreement. He'd orchestrated her family's downfall for revenge, giving her 24 hours to vacate his property. Penniless, her father faced prison, needing $50 million. Her mother forced her to beg Hardin, who sneered, offering the money for her body. Alaina ripped up the contract.
Hours later, her father had a heart attack. Desperate, she became "Lexi," a club girl enduring humiliation. In the Viper Room, Hardin's lackeys demanded she lick whiskey off his shoe for $10,000. Hardin watched. Outside, her brother Ashton's hand was threatened for a $3 million debt. Spirit shattered, Alaina returned, knelt on broken glass, offering to sign. But Hardin declared her family "dead," offering $10 million for her body, commanding her to use her mouth.
In a furious act of defiance, Alaina threw whiskey in his face, snatched the check, and fled. Yet, when he finally took her, a searing, foreign pain and blood on the sheets revealed a shocking truth: he had never touched her three years ago. Why had he let her believe such a monstrous lie?
7.6
Top DEA agent Kaitlynn Bruce woke up to a heavy, chemical lethargy, only to realize she was trapped in the body of a weak, abused war widow.
Before she could even process her new reality, she heard her sister-in-law counting cash, selling her unconscious body to a local thug for a measly two hundred dollars.
The thug dragged her new seven-year-old son, Cason, into the bedroom.
"Mommy!"
When the boy reached out, the man brutally kicked his small body into a wooden doorframe, leaving him gasping and bleeding on the floor.
Memories flooded Kaitlynn's mind. Her predecessor was a pathetic doormat whose husband's military pension had been bled dry by these greedy in-laws, leaving her children to starve and suffer endless abuse.
But as Kaitlynn looked at the bleeding boy's dark, unnervingly alert eyes, a chilling piece of DEA intelligence clicked in her mind.
Cason Richmond.
The name, the town, the abusive aunt—it all matched the classified files of the "Director of the Hive," the most ruthless and feared cartel puppet master in the criminal underworld.
How could this battered, starving child be destined to become the ultimate monster she used to hunt?
The original widow's tragic death was supposed to be the catalyst that pushed this boy into total darkness.
But Kaitlynn Bruce was not a victim.
Adrenaline burning through the drugs, she cracked the thug's neck with a brass lamp and choked the sister-in-law against the wall.
Looking down at the boy who was supposed to become a global nightmare, she made a vow. She was going to rewrite his script, even if she had to burn the whole world down to do it.