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 7
Care to explain?" At that moment, those three words spelled doom for me.
"I...you see, what had happened was–" As my brain scrambled to come up with a feasible answer, an alarm went off in Guy's back pocket. Was I saved by the bell?
"Oh boy. New monster alert, uptown this time." Guy mumbled, pocketing his phone quickly. He nods at Rupert and picks me up, bridal style, out of nowhere.
"Hey what the–put me down!"
"Dynamo, what the hell are you doing?" The president's voice was cold and menacing. I'm not sure which of these two I should be more wary of anymore.
"I'm gonna need my Cleanup girl to be close by...you know, for her job. Right?" He looked at me, slyly winking with one corner of his mouth ticked up.
My Cleanup girl? We're gonna circle back to that one later.
"Right, yeah it's probably better for me to be on standby. Safer too, I mean think of the optics–"
"Go. I tire of your infomercial antics." Rupert sighed, waving us off.
I didn't breathe properly until we were outside, amongst the city lights and darkness.
Wait, darkness?
"What happened to the sun? It's so early in the morning!" I gave him a second to respond but he seemed lost in thought, focusing heavily on the gargantuan snake in front of us.
"Oh, sorry, here." He sat me down gently, then motioned towards one of the buildings still standing a few feet away.
"I'd advise hiding over there. I'm about to do my best impression of a pretzel maker." He grinned, giving me another wink as he flew off, delivering a punch into the reptile's nose. Its body recoiled back and snapped forward, smacking into Guy and sending him flying into a newish cafe building.
His jokes were horrible but at least he was sturdy.
"Great, another building for me to clean up...it wasn't even that old."
While Guy was busy keeping the monster occupied–and destroying public property, I stayed in the shadows. I know it's my job to clean up, but after meeting Rupert and listening to the way he raved about me-like I'm some sort of mystery? I couldn't help but think, maybe he was right?
Maybe I could do something more.
Don't interfere.
Chovy's words haunted me, like a record stuck on repeat.
"Darling, move!"
My pulse quickened as I searched for the voice and immediate danger. Whoever it was, they weren't calling out to me but to the person a few feet away from me. My heart ached as I recognized who it was.
Dax, my kind and portly bus driver, was on his hands and knees crawling away from the fight. A woman called out to him from several shops away. I think that's his wife.
I didn't think. Just like with Penny, my body moved on autopilot. Standing next to him now, I helped him walk with his arm over my shoulder and my hand on his waist.
"S-Sapphyra? Where did you come from?"
"I was in the neighborhood. You should hobble a little faster, Dax."
He frowned, all the wrinkles showing at once on his otherwise youthful, plump face.
"Leave me behind." He said, struggling to push away from me.
Someone tossed a car in our direction. I reached up, blocking it from hitting us with a single hand. Was there smoke coming from my ears because I was super pissed off. Dax took a step back, though I'm not sure if it was because of the environment or me.
I grabbed him, tossing him over my shoulder violently. Tiny cracks in the pavement started forming.
Don't interfere. Keep your head down.
Fuck that.
"Sapph, what are you doing? I told you to leave me behind! It's my time to go!"
"Says who?"
"I..." he struggled. "It just is!"
"Is that so? What about your wife then, huh? And your kids? Do they get a say?!" I was yelling, making a scene, but I lost my last fuck when Dax decided to hit the escape button on life.
The ground shook beneath us with each step we took. But it wasn't from the fight.
The shaking was from me. I was just too angry to realize it.
"S-Sapphyra? Stop it. Y-you're just a janitor!"
I grabbed his skull, getting in real close. We were nose to nose so there was no misunderstanding what I said next.
"Yeah but I ain't cleaning up your bullshit Dax. You're gonna live, whether you like it or not."
Meanwhile, back at Rupert's mansion...
President Rupert paced back and forth in his office, eyeing the rising smoke from the direction of the city where Dynamo had fled to. He'd fled with his prize.
And Rupert couldn't stand that. He would bide his time for as long as he could but results must be shown. Changes to the system were just on the brink–if he could just get Sapphyra to agree to a class change.
A cold truth washed over him; he didn't have to wait. He was the goddamn president and if he wanted someone to change a class, by god he'd make them do it.
Rupert pulled up his laptop and pressed away at a few apps. A city map covered in red dots representing every citizen filled his view. But not Sapphyra's, hers was pink. He clicked her dot and entered the command. There was no hesitation when he pressed enter.
But there was certainly a frown at the response he got.
[CLASS CHANGE UNAVAILABLE.]
"What the hell do you mean unavailable?!"
[CLASS PROMOTION IN PROCESS]
He blinked a few times, reading the response over and over again just to be sure.
"That's impossible. Classes don't promote, that's not a thing." He mumbled in awe yet he welcomed the predatory smile that followed.
If he wasn't obsessed with Sapphyra before, he damn sure was now.
Back in the city streets...
"Here ma'am." I gently tossed Dax onto the ground next to his wife. She covered his face in kisses and then slapped the taste out of his mouth.
Good.
"Ow! Darcy, what the hell, woman?!"
"How dare you scare me like that! 20 years we've been married–if you want to die so badly then I'll kill you myself!" she screamed at him through her tears. I tried not to laugh as she took off her shoe and beat him over the head with it a few times.
Then reality hit me.
"Wait...Dax went out there willingly?"
Darcy nodded, stopping her assault. Dax cowered in a shop nearby.
"Yeah, fuggin' idiot of a man. Kept muttering something stupid, he had a blank stare in his eyes earlier...I didn't think nothin' of it at the time but–"
"Darcy." I gently grabbed her by the shoulders, centering her. "What did he say? What was he muttering?"
"Oh that? He kept saying; things are the way they are for a reason. Stupid, defeatist attitude if you ask me..."
She kept talking but I couldn't hear her beyond the roaring in my ears. It felt like the floodgates had opened.
I checked on Dax again, gasping.
He had his head down on the table–a blank look just like Darcy said.
And with jaws wide open, the world-eating snake was coming right for him.
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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.