Sapphyra
Sapphyra used to have it all: a super-genius husband, a superhero career, and a dragon side she actually got along with.
Then everything went to hell.
When the world faced a threat she couldn't punch, Sapphyra tried to sacrifice herself so everyone she loved could escape. But Wyatt, her husband with backup plans for his backup plans, refused to let her die. He trapped her inside a digital coma, planning to wake her when the world settled down.
That was 100 years ago.
Now Sapphyra has ripped herself free and woken to a ruined city, a broken world, and a body she barely recognizes. Her powers are locked away. Her dragon side is caged. And the Class System controlling it all? Wyatt put it inside her.
Because of course he did.
It only gets messier. Guy, the charming golden retriever-energy hero she met inside the coma, is real-and so are his feelings for her. Meanwhile, Wyatt separated his mind from his body, so now his consciousness follows Sapphyra around like a brilliant, possessive bad hangover.
And then there's Rupert Domingo, the madman who escaped her digital nightmare and now rules the ruined city like his personal kingdom. He knows what happened while Sapphyra slept, and he'll give her answers...
If she survives his game first.
To win, Sapphyra has to rebuild her city, untangle her powers, face Wyatt's sins, and decide what scares her more: losing herself to grief, or becoming the dragon Rupert is desperate to wake up.
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Chapter 1
The ground quaked twice, once with a step and the second with a thud.
Guy Dynamo had done it again.
One more giant monster slain under his belt as he floated above them triumphantly. What was it this time, a building-sized armadillo with crystal skin? A massive snail with acid-like slime?
It didn't matter to me; I had to clean them up all the same. Still, as I waded amongst the crowd of onlookers circling around him–i wondered.
What must it be like to be a superhero every day? And I do mean every day. I couldn't remember the last time the news hadn't covered Guy Dynamo saving the day.
I waved at him, catching his attention.
"Ah! Cleanup Girl! It's good to see you again." He smiled at me, teeth so white that he's actually blinded people before.
"Hey Guy. And I told you-" I pointed at my name badge," you can call me Sapphyra."
He waved his meaty palm, dismissing me.
"Nonsense. We're professionals, aren't we? It's not good to be too casual, you know."
"Guy! Can we have your autograph?" A pair of nosy teens wormed their way in. If you couldn't tell they were fans from his face being on their shirts, then something was wrong with you.
You'll never hear me admit it out loud, but I used to be one of those fangirls. I still have one of his signed comics in a box at my mom's place.
"Haha! Of course, ladies, anything for my loyal fans." He said with an air of bravado so thick you could spread it on toast.
I rolled my eyes and chuckled, grabbing my cleaning supplies. I moved somberly, stepping through the crowd to the part no one wanted to pay attention to.
The leftovers. Rubble and debris littered the asphalt before me, some pieces bigger than my body.
And at 7ft 5 inches tall, I was not a small woman.
This place used to be an apartment complex full of retirees. Now? It might as well be a graveyard. Guy Dynamo, for all his amazing abilities–like super speed–only got out a couple of kids. The rest of the older adults were too fragile to move.
But the media wasn't covering that; they never did.
It made my head hurt to think about it, so I chose not to...at least I tried not to.
One quick look around to make sure no one was paying attention to me, and I went to work.
"Vacuum!" I quietly called out, condensing the pressure in the air and pulling into me.
My mouth opened ever so slightly–just enough for a whistle. Air swirled into a vortex, sliding each leftover piece of trash and rubble into me. That handled all the small pieces, anything bigger than half my height had to be broken down first.
Something caught my attention nearby. A soft whimper followed by a sniffle. My clock said 3:30 pm and my job ends at 4:00pm–a stark reminder that I needed to work quickly. In the great metropolis of The City, overtime wasn't an option in my class.
Another whimper? No. A sob. I sighed and wiped my hands on my pants, leaving the pink and black jumpsuit dirtier than when I started.
I should leave it alone. The last time I tried to help anyone I–
The words wouldn't come. Flashes of blood and fire filled my vision, bringing me to my knees. This wasn't the first time my mind rebelled against the notion. Something was there, something in my past tried to stay buried. Blood started dribbling from my nose.
Just my body's reminder to stay in my own world.
"Damn it..." I headed towards the noise, keeping my eye out for any stray monsters. It was rare but sometimes there were followup monsters, smaller and easier to hide but just as deadly as their main counterparts.
Each step into the crumpled ruins of the city made me...ache. I'm not sure with what though. I passed through a park, overgrown with vines and rusted playground equipment. The sob I'd heard earlier was louder now.
"Hello? Does anyone need help?" I called out between cupped hands.
"Help me! Please help me!" A tiny voice called out to my far right. I was there in three quick strides, no longer holding back my size. An apartment held together with a few shaky pillars had started crumbling, leaving a small hole big enough for a tiny person to get through.
Or a child.
"Where are you?"
"I'm here! I can't move my leg! It's stuck!" A small arm, brown and grimy, reached out of the hole.
I frowned, disgruntled with the situation presented before me.
"Ya got a name kid?"
"Penny...Penny Dunbar." She sniffled.
"Hi Penny." I squat down, gently pulling away pieces of the wall with my bare hands. "My name is Sapphyra. I'm the cleaner assigned to this section of the city. Stay still, I'll do my best to get you out, okay?"
"O...okay." She softly responded, holding in sobs.
I wish I was better at comforting people. Wyatt was the comforter. He could heal a drowning man with a glass of water. No, shit, don't go down memory lane now..
Another chunk gone, I could see her there. A massive piece of wall was pinning her leg down beneath the broken ceiling. It was almost poetic, the sun shining down on a child near a park.
"Hey Penny, I can see you! I've got you, any second now."
"Okay." The tears softly fell from her sunken eyes. The poor thing looked like she hadn't eaten in days.
Her eyes widened when she saw me-a giant black lady with pink cotton candy hair and ocean blue eyes-not exactly subtle. It's not the first time I've gotten that reaction.
My mom told me stories about the old days. Kids used to play in parks freely. There were monsters but only those of human design, men parading around in ice cream trucks and candy vans.
Wyatt and I once talked about starting a–fuck! There I go again. What is wrong with me today?
Now we have actual monsters, anything from vampire tigers to zombie wooly mammoths on a daily basis. And after the attacks? People like Penny, those in the poorer districts get left behind. Souls left behind that have to pick up the pieces and move on while the city forgets and cheers for its heroes. They shouldn't have to.
Things like that are why I took this job.
I rip off the chunk holding her down with ease. I tried to give her a reassuring smile, a reminder that she wasn't alone in this.
Gray dust fell onto my nose–the only warning that the ceiling was about to come down.
Muscles tensing–my body moved on its own, arms spread wide to cover Penny.
"Shit-"
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8.9
Just hours after I endured a grueling labor to give Kaelen, my fated mate and the Alpha, two beautiful twins, he walked into the infirmary.
Instead of holding our newborns, his Alpha aura pinned me to the bed as he coldly announced, "I reject you as my mate."
He claimed I reeked of another Alpha. His sister Vanessa threw a stack of photos at my face, showing me at a cafe with a broad-shouldered man. Before I could even explain, Kaelen forced a pen into my trembling hand while I was still bleeding, making me sign away my parental rights. His mother then snatched my newborn son Liam from the crib.
"Take the girl and get out of my territory," Kaelen commanded, leaving me in the freezing room with my severed mate-bond and my crying daughter.
I didn't understand how our sacred bond could be shattered by a single fake photo, or how my fated mate could be so blind and ruthless as to rip my baby from my arms.
Five years later, his precious heir is dying, and Kaelen desperately needs an alliance and a bone marrow donor. But when he finally sees me at a high-society gala, he doesn't find a broken, exiled Omega.
He finds me standing beside that very same "lover"—Dominic, the Alpha of the Silverwood Pack, my older brother. And this time, I am the one holding the blade.
8.4
My mate, Alpha Santino, brought another woman into our home. She was a pregnant Omega, the widow of his fallen Beta, and he swore to protect her above all others.
He gave her my seat of honor, left our bed cold each night to soothe her feigned nightmares, and ignored me completely. I was the Luna of the Blackstone Pack, but I was becoming a ghost in my own life.
The final betrayal happened in my own bedroom. She stood over my vanity and deliberately shattered my mother's sacred moonstone necklace, the last piece of my family I had left.
When Santino burst in, he didn't see my heartbreak. He saw only her fake tears.
"What did you do to her?!" he roared, his voice laced with the Alpha's Command, a sacred power he used to crush my will.
Then, for her, he did the unforgivable. He raised his hand and struck me, his mate.
In that instant, the love I had desperately clung to turned to ice. The man I had sworn my life to had not only betrayed me but had defiled the sacred bond the Goddess herself had blessed.
As the pain of his betrayal ripped through me, something ancient and powerful awakened in my blood. I rose to my feet and spoke the words that would destroy his world and begin mine.
"I, Alessia Bianchi, reject you, Santino Moretti, as my mate."
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.
9.2
Lainey spent her last life destroying herself for Larry, only to become the woman he discarded most cruelly. He never loved her, never wanted her, and made no secret that his first love still owned his heart.
On their wedding day, he abandoned Lainey at the altar for that woman, then later used Lainey as nothing more than a stepping stone for his company's rise. In the end, he even had her kidney ripped from her.
Reborn at the very moment everything began, Lainey called off the wedding without hesitation. But after losing her, Larry begged desperately.
Lainey shot him a cold look, then turned and walked straight into the arms of a powerful, aloof man, who stared down at Larry with pure contempt. "She's my wife now."
7.4
Bridget, a ruthless twenty-first-century Wall Street analyst, woke up violently coughing up murky lake water in a decaying 1978 slum.
She quickly realized she was trapped in the body of a naive, marginalized teenager who had just committed suicide over a boy's cruel rejection.
The original girl had been mercilessly bullied by a fake rich kid named Kurtis and his cruel followers. They had publicly read her desperate love letters out loud, mocking her as a toad trying to eat swan meat, and simply watched as she threw herself into the freezing water. Now, her impoverished mother was left weeping by the bed, facing catastrophic debt and total social ruin in their small town. Everyone expected the surviving girl to wake up begging and crying for the boy who humiliated her.
Instead, a cold, calculating fury took over Bridget's analytical mind.
"I already died in that lake. That stupid girl is never coming back."
How could anyone throw their life away for a pathetic, vain clown wearing a mass-produced fifty-dollar watch? To Bridget, those uncollected love letters weren't symbols of teenage heartbreak. They were toxic assets. They were reputation landmines left out in the open that threatened her new family's survival.
Locking away the dead girl's weak emotions, Bridget forced her freezing, exhausted body out of the clinic bed. She set a hard three-month deadline to drag this family out of tier-one poverty. But first, she was marching straight to the volunteer camp to liquidate those liabilities and completely destroy the people who drove this body to death.
8.6
In my past life, I was the weak Luna everyone despised.
A fake daughter!
A disposable pawn!!
A girl my family happily executed!!!
They forced me to marry my brother to protect the family's reputation. They feared the world will know that their Alpha Son was born Impotent- they made me carry the blame of-
"A HEN THAT CANNOT LAY EGGS!!"
I obeyed them... and it cost me my life!
Their real daughter framed me countless times. My husband who was also my brother and we grew up together never believed me... They called me fake and treated me like a servant. She framed me and made the wolf world see my shame. I died trying to save my life from them.
But I woke up 10 years before my death.
This time, I refused to play their game.
After accepting the marriage to my brother...
I went behind them to meet my mate. The most feared man in our CLAN. His Uncle.
The crippled Lycan lord in disguise who once asked me to marry him.
He thought I had come to reject our bond like my past life but this time. --------I stood before him with a dangerous deal.
"Do you still want to stay the crippled Uncle in the shadows?" I asked, in a serious tone.
He replied. "I don't know what you are saying."
I knelt down placing my hands on his lap."Tomorrow morning they will be here. Do you dare to come claim your mate?"
This Time!!......I' Elena Alvarez, will Light fire to their World.