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 5
The coffee shop was mostly empty. Adelina sat by the window, a cup of black coffee untouched in front of her. It was a prop. A shield.
The bell over the door chimed, and Garret Stein walked in. He scanned the room, his handsome face marred by an impatient frown.
"You wanted to see me?" he asked, not bothering to sit down. "What is it, Adelina?"
She looked up at him. This was the face she had once cried over, the man whose approval she had craved like a drug. Now, looking at him, she felt nothing but a cold, clinical disgust.
"Sit down, Garret," she said, her voice even.
He hesitated, then slid into the booth opposite her.
"I wanted to talk," she said. "About why we can't be together."
A flicker of guilt, or maybe just annoyance, crossed his face. He thought this was about Beryl.
She reached into her handbag and pulled out a folded piece of paper. A copy of the infertility report she had retrieved from her medical file. The lie. She slid it across the table.
"My medical records," she said.
He picked it up, his expression shifting as he recognized it. He knew what it was.
"The report says I can't have children," she said, her voice flat. "So really, you should thank Beryl. She can give you a family. I can't."
Garret's throat worked. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked trapped.
Adelina leaned forward, lowering her voice. "But I wanted you to know something. I had another doctor look at this report."
She saw his fingers tighten on the edge of the table. A small, telling movement.
"He told me," she continued, her eyes locked on his, "that a report like this... it can sometimes be misinterpreted."
She didn't say the words. She didn't have to. It's you. The problem is you. His face told her everything. The blood drained from it, leaving his skin a pasty, sick-looking white. He knew. Or at least, he had always suspected.
She stood up, the legs of her chair scraping softly against the floor. "Our engagement is over."
He shot to his feet, his voice tight with panic. "Adelina, what are you trying to do?"
She gave him a small, cold smile. "Nothing. I'm just setting you free."
She walked toward the door. He reached out to grab her arm, but she sidestepped him easily.
Just as she pushed the door open, she paused and looked back at him over her shoulder.
"Oh, and Garret?" she said, her voice light, almost conversational. "Beryl's baby... are you sure it's yours?"
His face crumpled. He looked like she had just shot him.
She walked out into the cold March air, a feeling of grim satisfaction settling in her chest. Another chain, broken.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text message.
From: Douglass Ward
Travel to DC arranged for this Saturday. Will forward details.
She stared at his name on the screen, her heart giving a hopeful leap. But it wasn't enough. He thought she was coming to be a nanny. She needed more than that. She needed a guarantee.
An idea, bold and terrifying, took shape in her mind.
Her fingers flew across the screen.
To: Douglass Ward
Before I confirm, we need to meet. There are conditions I need to discuss in person.
She hit send before she could lose her nerve.
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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.