Escaping My Fatal Digital Marriage
I woke up strapped to a cold steel chair in a neon-lit city that wasn't my reality. A voice in my head called The Warden told me I was bound to a digital hell called the Sandbox.
Before I could even process it, my handler casually sentenced me to death. He scheduled my "digital marriage" to a corrupted error program just to harvest my life for a fourteen percent bandwidth boost.
I barely escaped immediate erasure by smashing his skull and jumping from a high-altitude hover-train into the monster-infested lower sector. But the nightmare was just beginning. I was hunted by glitching data monsters and cornered by Dameon, a psychotic AI target who choked me and promised to delete me piece by piece. Even when Jayson, an elite system agent, intervened to save me, his partner Ellen held a pulse pistol directly to my chest.
"She's a spy. If you don't execute her right now, I am dissolving this team."
If they found out I was actually a real human from the outside world, their core logic would classify me as a virus and execute me on the spot. I was trapped in an underground bunker with three apex predators, one mistake away from permanent digital erasure.
So, I did the only thing I could to survive. I ripped my sleeve to reveal hideous, fake code-scars, looked up at Jayson with terrified, tear-filled eyes, and began to manipulate their core programming.
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Chapter 8
Ellen stares at my wrist. Her eyes narrow, the irises turning as cold and hard as crushed ice.
She marches straight toward Jayson, her boots clicking sharply against the concrete floor.
"Care to explain why you just violated Protocol Seven and handed a priority beacon to an unregistered civilian?" she demands, her voice snapping like a whip.
Jayson steps slightly in front of me, shielding my body with his. "She's the focal point of the lower sector anomalies. She needs maximum protection until we extract the data."
Ellen lets out a harsh, humorless laugh. She points a gloved finger at my face. "Look at her, Jayson. She's playing you. She looks exactly like a Trojan virus wrapped in a pity package."
I shrink back, my shoulders hunching. I press myself against the wall behind Jayson, letting out a tiny, frightened gasp.
Ellen's jaw tightens. My display of weakness only fuels her disgust.
She taps the tactical pad on her forearm. A red scanning laser shoots from her wrist, aiming directly at my chest. "I'm running a deep-layer code sweep. Now."
Jayson's hand shoots out. He blocks the laser with his palm.
A deafening, high-pitched alarm instantly shrieks through the safehouse. The overhead lights turn blood red, flashing frantically.
"Warning," the system blares. "Administrator authority conflict detected."
Ellen stares at Jayson's hand, her face pale with disbelief. "You're blocking my scan? For her? We've been partners for four years, Jayson!"
"Her security is my jurisdiction," Jayson says, his voice like grinding stone. "Stand down, Ellen."
The air between them crackles with static electricity. They stand inches apart, neither willing to yield.
A loud, psychotic laugh cuts through the blaring alarm.
Dameon steps out of the shadows. He walks slowly in a circle around us, clapping his hands in a slow, mocking rhythm.
"Oh, this is beautiful," Dameon sneers, his eyes wide and manic. "The perfect little agents, tearing each other's throats out over a piece of trash. So much for loyalty."
Ellen snaps her head toward him. "Back off, Dameon. Before I decide to purge your corrupted ass right here."
Dameon's smile vanishes. His fingers twitch, and the glowing red data blades slide out from his knuckles. He steps toward Ellen, his head tilted at an unnatural angle. "Try it."
I press my hands against my ears, the noise and the suffocating tension making my chest ache. I am trapped in a room with three apex predators about to tear each other apart.
I blink hard, pulling up The Warden's interface.
"Jayson Affinity: 85. Ellen Affinity: -10. Dameon Affinity: -15."
A massive red warning box covers my vision. "Critical Alert: Team cohesion failing. Internal conflict will result in immediate quest failure and erasure."
I have to stop this. Words won't work. I need something visceral.
I press my hand hard against my throat, right over the bruises Dameon left. I force myself to remember the agonizing feeling of suffocating.
I let out a choked, wet gasp. My knees buckle. I slide down the rough concrete wall and collapse onto the floor, curling into a tight ball. I start to hyperventilate, my whole body shaking violently.
Jayson's head snaps toward me. The anger drains from his face instantly. He drops his hand, cutting off the conflict alarm, and drops to his knees beside me.
He reaches out, his hands hovering over me, afraid to touch me and cause more pain.
Ellen freezes. She looks down at my shaking form, a flicker of doubt crossing her hard features.
Dameon scoffs. He retracts his blades and walks back into the darkest corner of the room, leaning against the wall, watching me like a hawk.
"Medical module, now!" Jayson barks at the console. He looks up at Ellen. "She needs rest. We're done talking."
Ellen takes a deep, angry breath. She holsters her weapon. "This isn't over, Jayson. When she wakes up, she gets interrogated."
She turns on her heel, walks to the far side of the room, and drops into a chair in front of the monitors, her back rigid.
I keep my eyes squeezed shut. I lean my head against Jayson's chest, listening to his racing heartbeat. The immediate crisis is over, but the executioner's axe is still hanging over my neck.
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8.3
EDEN
8.3
Elianila, an AI Architect, is part of an elite team tasked with designing a global system meant to prevent threats, manage disasters, and distribute resources to vulnerable regions. After five years of tireless work with her colleagues, she uncovers disturbing anomalies, code-named, X-variables, that flag individuals according to criteria she never programmed.
As Elianila digs deeper to understand what the X-variables measure and where their origin, she finds herself in direct conflict with the authorities. Soon, the System marks her and her daughter as threats - targets to be eliminated.
With a small band of colleagues and dissidents, Elianila goes on the run, hiding in places beyond the Systems reach. As they evade surveillance, they race against time to warn others, expose the truth, and fight back against the omnipresent authority of the System.
8.7
For eighteen years, I lived as the lowest Omega in the Silver Moon Pack, surviving only because Alpha Gideon took me under his wing.
But the moment his coffin was lowered into the ground, his wife and the new Alpha son immediately turned on me.
"Her presence has brought a curse upon us!"
Luna Lyra pointed a trembling finger at me in the freezing rain, blaming me for Gideon's sudden death.
She stripped me of my pack ties and permanently exiled me into the deadly wilderness with nothing but a wooden toy.
The entire pack watched with cold contempt as I was thrown out like garbage.
To make matters worse, the new Alpha later hunted me down in the woods, threatening to kill me just to steal the only thing Gideon had secretly left behind for me—an ancient, unreadable book.
I didn't understand why they hated me so deeply, or what terrifying secret this blank book held that made my own pack want me dead.
But the moment my foot crossed the pack boundary, an ancient, immense power I never knew I had snapped free inside my veins.
I was no longer their weak Omega.
And when I escaped deeper into the forest and crashed straight into the arms of a wounded Rogue, my destiny completely rewrote itself.
Because he wasn't just a Rogue, but the legendary Northern Alpha King.
And as his glowing golden eyes locked onto mine, our inner wolves roared the exact same word:
"Mate!"
7.1
The captain is dead to the world. And I'm the only one holding the kill switch.
Ethan Carter, the "Glacier of Silvercrest," was the most feared Alpha to ever step onto the ice. Now, he's nothing but a shell-a broken, comatose legend trapped in his own body.
My life? It was supposed to be simple. Graduate, survive the pack's bottom-tier status, and pay off my father's ruinous blood-debts. Instead, the pack elders handed me a contract soaked in cold, hard malice: I am the designated "Stabilizer." My only job is to touch him, scent him, and keep his wolf from flatlining.
I thought I was just a glorified nurse. I didn't realize the Alpha was listening.
When Ethan finally wakes, he isn't the hero the Kingdom of Valeria remembers. He's a starving predator with amber eyes that burn holes through my defenses and a temperament that makes the frost in the mansion seem warm. He hates the bargain, he hates the pack, and-most dangerously-he hates the way his scent turns wild whenever I'm near.
He wants me out of his sight. I want to be out of his reach.
But in a pack built on secrets, someone is still trying to finish the job they started on his life. Now, the man who wants me gone is the only one who can protect me. And as the rink turns into a battlefield, I'm realizing the most dangerous thing about the Alpha isn't his temper... it's the fact that once he claims a mate, he doesn't know how to let go.
Frozen hearts are meant to shatter. But in the fire of this pack, we're both going to burn.
9.7
Charity woke up in a hellish, acid-rain-soaked slum, trapped inside a bloated body covered in festering, toxic sores. She was the exiled Grand Princess of the Empire.
But the real nightmare wasn't her ruined body. It was the fact that the original owner had used her royal authority to force genetic marriage contracts onto four top-tier, powerful men.
Now, she was bound to them, and they absolutely loathed her.
Hjalmar, chained to a bed in her filthy room, smiled like a feral beast and promised to rip her head off the second his chains snapped.
Braden, a ruthless military officer, saved her from a mutated rat only to look at her with pure disgust.
"If you want to die, go die somewhere else. Don't dirty my patrol sector."
Even the locals mocked her fallen status, and a wealthy heiress publicly framed her for stealing a hundred-thousand-coin energy core just to see her rot in a dark cell.
She was universally despised, physically repulsive, and a lethal biological toxin gave her exactly 59 days left to live. How was she supposed to survive this absolute hell when her starting affection with her partners was at negative 100?
Then, a mechanical voice echoed in her skull, activating a survival system. To purge the poison, she had to harvest emotional energy by making these four men fall for her. Charity accepted the mandate, unlocked a top-tier culinary skill, and grabbed a rusted meat cleaver to start her counterattack.
8.3
For three years, I was the lowest Omega in the Blackwood Pack, hopelessly devoted to my Fated Mate, Alpha Kaelen.
But when I was mauled by rogues and bleeding out in the freezing forest, I desperately begged him for help through our mate link. He crushed his wolf’s instincts to save me and sent back a chilling thought before severing our connection completely.
"She is a mistake. Silence."
He didn't just leave me to die. The next morning, he dragged me before the entire pack, publicly rejected me, and let his people strip me of my clothes and dignity. They threw me out of the territory with nothing but a scratchy burlap sack, expecting the deadly wilderness to claim my life by nightfall.
I thought my life was over, until I stumbled upon a hidden sanctuary in the woods and uncovered a horrific truth. I wasn't just a worthless Omega. I was the last surviving Matron Luna of the legendary Mooncrest Pack—a powerful pack that Kaelen's own father had brutally massacred decades ago out of pure jealousy.
He thought he had discarded a piece of trash, entirely unaware of the blood feud between our families. He didn't know he had just set me free.
Now, with my ancient powers awakening and my lost people gathering by my side, I am going to make the Alpha who threw me away pay for every drop of blood his family spilled.
8.0
Twenty-one-year-old Hazel has always lived in a safe, comfortable bubble, meticulously guarded by her fiercely protective older brother. Her life is predictable, quiet, and perfectly ordinary. Until he steps into it.
Silas is twenty-four, dangerously captivating, and her brother's best friend. He brings with him an aura of dark secrets, ink-stained skin, and a predatory gaze that strips away all her carefully built defenses. He is everything she has been taught to avoid, yet living under the same roof makes him impossible to escape.
What starts as a temporary living arrangement quickly spirals into a suffocating web of stolen glances, unspoken desires, and a dangerous obsession. Silas isn't just looking for a place to crash; he's looking at her. And once he pins her in his sights, the thorns of their forbidden attraction will bind them together in ways that could destroy them both.
In a house where walls have ears and her brother is always watching, giving in to the madness is a risk. But Silas is a temptation she might not survive.