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 5
"Rough day" is an understatement." I mumbled, falling onto my bed face-first. I couldn't feel him sit next to me but I knew he was there. When I looked up he was there, laying beside me like he's done for the last 12 years.
"I heard. I'm not gonna press you about tryna replace me but–"
"Who said I'm replacing you?! Ugh, you sound just like mom." I groaned, pulling my pillow over my face.
His chuckle both haunted and soothed me at once. Memories danced across the darkness of my eyelids. I shoved them down, same as always.
"So why'd you do it then?" Leave it to Wyatt to ask the real question.
"I don't know."
"Remove the pillow and try again, ma'am." I could hear his smirk, plain as day.
"You're the worst." Complying with this wasn't easy, even for him but I did it anyway.
"Sapphyra..."
"What?"
"Don't shut me out. We're all each other's got, right?"
"...right." I sank into my comforter a little more. Meanwhile, Wyatt intended to pry the answer from me with a crowbar. The hard line of his mouth said it all.
"Why are you asking something you already know the answer to? If I'm sabotaging anything, it's because of you!" furrowing my brows, I sat up and glared at him.
Wyatt Hart, the love of my life. My high school sweetheart.
The literal skeleton in my closet that I refused to bury.
"Sapph, I'm asking because I need to hear you say it."
"No." I crossed my arms, he wouldn't win this one today.
"Sapphyra! Look at me. Really look at me."
"No..." I whimpered, eyeing the soft gecko patterns on my pink comforter–anywhere but at him.
I couldn't feel his touch but I remembered it. When his warm, calloused fingers would grasp my chin because I was being so goddamn stubborn–I remembered it.
It was here and now, as our gaze locked on each other.
Except the man before me wasn't really a man, not anymore. He was a skeleton wearing Wyatt's clothes, forcing me to gaze into the abyss of darkness where his eyes once sat.
Wyatt died 12 years ago. Right on my 18th birthday...
"Wyatt." I choked on his name, raw hurt clogging my throat.
He died when we planned on eloping-bags already packed to finally leave this decaying city for good.
Wyatt's skeleton sighed, holding out his ethereal arms.
"I'm here. Come here." I fell into my memories of him, letting them free at last. Every birthday party, picnic, exam study session–those were surface level. They still held my sanity.
Our first kiss took my breath away. He saw me, not as a tree to be climbed or a mountain to be conquered but as a woman. His woman. I let him in and I never regret it...until he died.
Until Guy Dynamo failed to save him on that day.
"Shh. You're thinking too hard. Go to sleep."
I scoffed, a bitter smile on my lips. "Sleep is for the weak."
"Don't you have a big day tomorrow?"
My meeting with the president. It's not everyday a girl gets to do that.
But who gives a flying fuck. I buried myself into the pillows, pretending they were his embrace.
"I don't want to sleep yet. You'll be gone when I do." Mentally cursing, I couldn't fight the yawn that escaped me.
"That's not fair. You act like I won't come back to you." He murmured in my hair, half buried into the mattress just to comfort me.
"One day you might not." My eyelids gave up the fight first, falling down like curtains.
"Sleep, baby. It's gonna get better." I could already sense he was slipping away from me. I'm not sure how it worked but when I needed him, Wyatt would come.
I'm sure if I could afford a therapist, they'd probably tell me it's something to do with grief and hallucinations blah-blah-blah.
My phones alarm woke me up with a screeching cat in the morning. At first, I panicked for two reasons.
Wyatt was gone. That one settled quickly, he never did stay past midnight anyway. The time though? It had my blood running cold. 7:20 a.m.
The bus stop is 5 minutes up the street and it takes 30 minutes to get into the Administrative part of the city!
Bread jumps out of the toaster. I grab it with my mouth and run out the door, still shoving my clothes on. I went with a white-sleeved button up blouse and black slacks, pretty professional as far as I'm concerned. It's a little tighter than when I bought it though–but I'll manage.
"Have a great day honey! I love you." My mom called out, waving from the front door as I made a mad dash down to the bus depot.
The bus doors were this close to folding before I shoved my hand in and forced myself through.
"Whoa! Jeez, Sapph, cutting it close there ain't ya? What are you doing up this early anyway?"
"Got an interview Dax! Sorry. Can you take me to–" I lean in, whispering the location to him. His eyes widened but nodded.
"Anything for you Sapphy. I still can't thank you enough for-" I cut him off, slicing my hand back and forth across my throat frantically.
"Er, Uh, nevermind." He blushed, poor old guy. No one paid him any mind but I couldn't be too careful.
Keep your head down. Don't interfere.
I'd helped Dax with his house before...just not all at once like Penny's place. No, I gave him the special wood and bricks he needed by converting some of the stuff in my void.
Penny. Even now I still can't figure out how I did what I did for her place.
The bus came to a stop a few yards away from the front of the President's massive marble mansion. It wasn't a public place so when security stopped me at the gate, it all felt natural.
"Hold it! No trespassers–"
"It's alright." A familiar voice cut off the security guard holding a gun to my head. My body stiffened and I tried my best to still my racing heart.
Guy Dynamo floated down in front of the guard. He didn't speak, just glanced at the man threatening my life with the coldest look I'd seen yet. I'm pretty sure the poor man pissed himself.
Would Guy yell? Give me the cold shoulder for how I treated him? Both things I absolutely deserved.
I don't know what I was expecting but a smirk coupled with an adorable dimple was not it.
"You look good, Cleanup girl."
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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.