Reborn: The Unwanted Bride's Daring Comeback
I was lying in a sterile hospital room, dying of cancer, with only a fake infertility report to keep me company.
Right before my heart monitor flatlined, a stranger walked in and handed me a medical file.
He told me that my fiancé, Garret, had zero sperm viability. The baby my adoptive sister, Beryl, was carrying wasn't his.
When Beryl got pregnant years ago, my adoptive parents forced me to break my engagement and take the blame for being barren.
I was discarded by Garret, mocked by Beryl's triumphant smiles, and kicked out of the house.
I was left to rot alone in a hospital bed while they lived the perfect life stolen from me.
My entire existence had been a cage built on a single, disgusting lie.
The anger burned away my despair. Why was I the only one who didn't know?
Why did I let them use me as a maid and a shield for their filthy secrets?
As the darkness swallowed me, I prayed for just one more chance.
I opened my eyes to the sound of my adoptive mother yelling my name.
The calendar on the wall read March 15, 2019—the exact day they forced me to give up Garret.
This time, I didn't cry or beg.
"You want Beryl to have Garret? Fine," I told my shocked adoptive parents. "But I want a cash buyout, and we are legally severing this adoption."
Then, I set my sights on Douglass Ward—the stranger from the hospital room.
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Chapter 4
Two days later, the doorbell rang.
Adelina was in her room, staring at the calendar. March 17th. Her heart jumped into her throat.
"Adelina!" Marlene's voice, artificially sweet, called up the stairs. "Someone's here for you!"
She smoothed the front of her simple sweater, her hands not quite steady. She took a breath, held it, and let it out slowly. Then she walked down the stairs.
A man was standing in the living room, his back to her. He was tall, with broad shoulders that filled out his dark coat. He was shaking Walter's hand.
As he turned, Adelina froze on the bottom step.
It was him.
The face from the hospital. Younger, without the deep lines of grief and exhaustion, but unmistakably the same. The same sharp jaw, the same intense gray eyes, the same mouth that looked like it never smiled.
Douglass Ward.
His gaze passed over Marlene and Walter and settled on her. It was a polite, detached look. The look you give a stranger. "Hello," he said, his voice as low and steady as she remembered. "I'm Douglass Ward."
Her throat was tight. The memory of his hand on hers as she died, the warmth of it, was a phantom sensation in her own palm.
"Hello," she managed to say, her voice barely a whisper.
Marlene jumped in, her voice oozing charm. "Douglass is Elena Ward's stepson! He's come all the way from Washington to meet you. He needs help with his children."
Adelina saw Douglass's brow furrow, just for a second. A flicker of confusion.
His tone was carefully neutral as he corrected her. "My stepmother arranged for me to meet a nanny candidate," he said, his eyes moving from Adelina to a preening Beryl, who was now standing nearby. A flicker of understanding, and then annoyance, crossed his face. "My stepmother told me I was meeting a nanny candidate. This feels... like something else entirely."
Adelina understood instantly. He had no idea. Elena Ward had set this up as a blind date, a marriage interview, but she had told him he was just picking up a nanny.
"Well, it's good to get to know people!" Marlene chirped, trying to smooth over the awkwardness.
Walter slid a folder across the coffee table. "Here," he grunted.
Inside were the legal papers, officially dissolving the adoption. Adelina picked them up, her fingers tracing the notarized seal and Walter's angry scrawl of a signature. He pushed a thick envelope next to it. The money. She didn't bother to count it.
She tucked both into her handbag. A weight she had carried her entire life lifted from her shoulders.
Douglass watched the entire exchange, his face unreadable. He observed the cold, transactional nature of the deal. This wasn't a family sending a daughter off; it was a business closing an account. His initial assessment of the situation shifted. This girl wasn't just leaving home; she was escaping.
Beryl, bored now that the attention wasn't on her, hooked her arm through Garret's, who had just appeared in the doorway. "We're leaving," she announced.
Garret's eyes met Adelina's for a brief, complicated moment. She looked right through him. Her attention was a magnet, pulled only to the tall, quiet man standing in the center of the room.
Douglass noticed her stare. He met her gaze, and for a second, the air crackled. He was the first to look away.
"I'll be in touch about her travel arrangements," he said to Walter, his tone all business.
Marlene followed him to the door, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper Adelina could still hear. "So, what exactly is it you do at the Department of Defense? What's the pay like for a man at your level?"
Douglass's response was short and evasive, but Adelina saw the muscle in his jaw jump. He wasn't just annoyed. He was on alert.
The front door closed, and Adelina was left alone in the living room, her heart pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She had seen him. It was real.
She pulled the legal document from her bag, the crisp paper cool against her skin. A slow smile, the first genuine smile in a lifetime, spread across her face.
Adelina Bell was free.
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9.4
I thought the Burch family gave me a loving home when they took me out of the orphanage.
But when the global deep freeze apocalypse hit, my adoptive parents mercilessly kicked me out of the bunker to freeze to death.
As I lay dying in the snow, covered in horrific purple frostbite, my adoptive sister Kendal walked past me in a pristine designer jacket.
Around her neck was my only childhood possession—an antique gold necklace my adoptive mother had ripped off my neck to give to her.
Kendal gloated, bragging that my pendant held a magical space with infinite supplies and fresh food while the rest of the world starved.
I realized I had spent years emptying my life savings to fund their luxury cars and fake medical emergencies.
They had drained my bank accounts, stolen my bloodline's heirloom, and used my magical lifeline to live like royalty while leaving me to die.
I took my last ragged breath in that blinding blizzard, consumed by a toxic hatred.
Why was I so hopelessly weak? Why did I let them take everything from me?
Opening my eyes again, the painful frostbite scars were gone. My skin was warm.
I grabbed my phone. The screen lit up: November 12.
It was exactly three days before the world ended.
When my adoptive mother called, faking a tearful emergency to demand another thirty thousand dollars, I smiled coldly.
"Just tell me where to send the money, Mom."
This time, I'm taking my space back, and I'm going to drain them dry.
9.7
Some chains are forged in iron.
Others in desire.
Sebastian Kol has existed for six centuries. Cursed to burn alive in his own skin every night he transforms into a beast even he cannot control. He wants one thing. Freedom. And after five centuries of searching, a prophecy finally gives it a name.
Leilani Ravenwood.
She carries the mark of the moon goddess on her skin and a prophecy that brands her as his salvation. Her blood silences his beast, and her touch sets him on fire.
In the worst possible way. And in the best possible way.
Furious at the hold she has over him, Sebastian takes her, strips her of everything, and bends her world until it breaks, determined to own what the goddess dared to use against him. What follows is dark and consuming. A monster who has never met his match, and a woman who proves to be it.
But Leilani Ravenwood does not break easily. And somewhere between the hatred and the hunger, the punishment and the pull, the ancient beast begins to suspect the terrible truth.
The woman born to be his salvation may already be his undoing, his poison and cure wearing the same skin.
And he is running out of reasons to care.
7.2
Elara Vex had everything-a flawless ice core, the title of prodigy, and a place at the pinnacle of the High Tower. But in one brutal night, it was all ripped away. Her mentor tore the core from her chest. Her fiancé drove a sword through her back. Her own sister smiled as she bled out on the cold marble floor.
When Elara wakes, she's years in the past, mere hours before her core is scheduled to be stolen. This time, she won't be anyone's sacrificial lamb. She shatters her own core with forbidden blood magic and forges something far more terrifying in its place-a bottomless, ravenous Chaos Core that devours magic itself.
Now, branded a worthless cripple and cast into the deadly Abyss, Elara is pulled from the darkness by the outcasts of Elysium Academy-a school for heretics, psychopaths, and everything the Tower despises. Under the tutelage of a reclusive principal who knew her murdered mother, Elara will master her forbidden power and uncover the Tower's darkest secrets.
When the Five Academies Ranking Tournament arrives, Seraphina Vex stands in the arena, draped in white saintess robes, ready to claim ultimate glory. She doesn't know that a ghost from her past has clawed her way back from hell. She doesn't know that Elara is coming-and this time, the prodigal sister isn't asking for mercy. She's bringing chaos.
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.
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.
9.8
When I woke up on the muddy bank of the freezing river, I unlocked a brutal, unfiltered preview of my actual future.
For the past six months, I had been the town's ultimate joke, chasing after a city boy who looked at me like a diseased insect. Everyone thought I jumped into the river because he rejected me.
But the nightmare didn't stop there. In the future I foresaw, my entire family was destroyed. My eldest brother was handcuffed and dragged into a squad car. My second brother died in a pool of blood on the asphalt. My parents passed away from sheer grief and humiliation, and our farm was foreclosed.
Meanwhile, Bart Hawkins—my family's sworn enemy, the boy everyone accused of pushing me, but who actually jumped in to save my life—became a billionaire tech mogul. I ended up starving to death in a damp, moldy basement, completely alone.
I finally understood that I was just a pathetic, tragic side character meant to drag my family into hell. My own sister-in-law, Felicie, had been stealing our food and money, laughing at my misery behind my back.
But right now, my mother was still alive, my brothers were safe, and the farm was ours.
When Felicie walked into my bedroom, playing the devoted sister-in-law with a bowl of clear, meatless broth while a stolen roasted chicken thigh leaked grease through her apron pocket, I didn't play along.
"What's in your pocket, Felicie?"
This time, I was going to tear that horrific future apart with my bare hands.