The Curse of Bones
This is a terrifying memory I'd rather never speak of again.
We were just high school students when the town accidentally unearthed a mass grave.
That night, Keegan Wilkerson, the most popular senior, showed up at a party with a trophy: a finger bone he had stolen from the site.
He passed the bone around. Everyone wanted to touch it, just to prove they had the guts.
A day later, Keegan was bedridden with a raging fever, drifting in and out of consciousness. Then he started counting with his eyes closed. "One... two... three..." He counted endlessly.
Soon, everyone who had touched that bone fell ill, in the exact same order.
The doctors called it a rare infection.
But my grandma said it was a curse, and that Wilkerson was already beyond saving.
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Chapter 3
Jenna Santos's POV:
The next morning, Keegan Wilkerson's seat was empty. It was the first thing I noticed.
Ms. Harrison made the announcement: "Keegan is out sick today with a high fever." Her tone was flat, trying to downplay the unsettling absence.
A shiver ran down my spine.
Keegan. The first one to touch the bone.
Whispers rippled through the students. "Did you hear about Keegan?" "They say he has a bad fever, but my mom heard it's way worse."
An atmosphere of fear began to spread through the classroom.
I connected all the dots. Keegan's bravado. The bone. The dream. Mr. Mason's story. The Counter's tally... It wasn't a fever. It was the curse. It had begun.
A lingering sense of anxiety weighed heavily on my chest. I couldn't focus on class at all. Every passing minute felt agonizingly slow. Every tick of the clock brought me one step closer to something horrific.
After school, I decided I had to see him.
I grabbed my backpack and headed straight for Keegan's house.
Keegan's dad, Butler Wilkerson, opened the door. He looked haggard, his eyes bloodshot and entirely drained of energy.
The house was dimly lit, the curtains drawn tight. The air inside was stale and oppressive.
A strange scent lingered in the air. It smelled like rot trying to be masked by some floral fragrance. It made my nose wrinkle. The smell was familiar, yet deeply unnerving.
Keegan was lying in bed. He looked emaciated, his face flushed and his eyes wide but unfocused. He was clearly delirious, muttering something under his breath.
The town doctor stood by the bed, holding a clipboard, looking utterly baffled.
"It's a persistent viral infection," the doctor said. "Accompanied by a high fever. We're doing everything we can."
Butler Wilkerson sighed. "His grandmother wants to try some old home remedies. Herbs, salves..."
The doctor cut him off. "Mr. Wilkerson, we rely on proper medicine, not folk remedies."
The doctor scribbled something on his prescription pad. "Keep him hydrated. Continue the fever reducers. Monitor his temperature." He handed the slip to Butler.
Before leaving, the doctor paused and looked at Keegan's hand. "Did he injure his hand?" he asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.
He had noticed something unusual.
Butler looked at Keegan's hand. "No, not that I know of. Why?" He looked perplexed.
"There are marks. A bit like scratches, or old scars," the doctor replied. "They're very... peculiar." He shook his head, seemingly troubled by the anomaly.
The doctor left, taking his unexplainable discovery with him.
Butler stepped out of the room for a moment.
It was just Keegan and me left in the room. An unspeakable dread hung in the air. As the afternoon wore on, the room grew darker.
Keegan kept muttering—a hoarse, low, and relentless sound.
I leaned in closer to make out the words. But what he was mumbling sent ice water through my veins.
"One... two... three..." he whispered. "Four... five... six..." His voice was slurred, repetitive. He was counting!
Just like in my dream!
My heart was hammering.
"Keegan?" I reached out and grabbed his arm. I shook him gently. I tried to pull him back to reality.
He seemed to gain a brief moment of clarity, looking at me with unfocused eyes. "Jenna," he croaked, "it hurts. In the dream. Like something's pulling at me, pulling at the numbers."
"The dream," he continued, his voice incredibly weak. "I'm in the dark, counting. He makes me count. He tells me I have to finish it."
Finish? Finish what?
I stared at his hand.
His fingers were twitching slightly. He was tapping his fingers lightly, rhythmically against the bedsheets.
He was counting. Even in his delirium.
And then I saw them. Faint, dark scratches on his fingers. They were exactly like the carvings on the bone!
Tiny, shallow lines. Deliberate.
They looked like miniature tally marks.
The curse. It was undeniably real. And it was manifesting right on his flesh.
I was paralyzed with terror, my mouth open but unable to speak.
Butler walked back into the room. Seeing me staring at Keegan's hand, he followed my gaze. His eyes widened as he saw the marks, and all the color drained from his face.
"What is that?" Butler exclaimed. He looked from Keegan's hand to me, clearly terrified.
"Those weren't there before," he insisted. "I swear. If they had been, I would have seen them."
The marks had appeared out of nowhere.
My mind was spinning.
Grandma was right. Mr. Mason was right. It wasn't a virus. It was something ancient. Something evil. Something far beyond the realm of science.
It was the curse of The Counter! It had come. It was really here!
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I was eight months pregnant, waiting on the sofa for my billionaire husband to come home.
But when the heavy oak doors opened, Cayden threw a fake DNA test on the glass table, showing a zero percent probability of paternity.
He accused me of carrying another man's bastard. I cried and begged, swearing I was framed by his childhood friend, Carmella. He didn't listen. Instead, he ordered his massive bodyguards to pin me down while a private doctor forced an abortion pill down my throat.
"The Merritt family does not raise bastards. Get rid of it."
He forced me to sign divorce papers and ordered his men to throw me out into the freezing storm. Before I was dragged away, I desperately told him the truth: I was the anonymous donor who gave him a kidney to save his life three years ago.
He just sneered, saying Carmella had the surgical scar to prove she was the donor, and kicked me out to die.
Lying in the freezing rain, vomiting up the half-dissolved poison to save my baby, I didn't understand how the man I loved could be so completely blind. How could he let that woman steal my kidney, my marriage, and murder his own flesh and blood?
Five years later, I returned to New York not as his pathetic discarded wife, but as a top-tier medical fixer for the global elite.
And my genius five-year-old son has already infiltrated his mansion, ready to tear his empire apart from the inside.
7.9
On Christmas Eve, the snow fell in relentless sheets.
My grandmother and I were cast out into the snow as if we were nothing by my uncle.
My aunt cursed me as a bad luck charm, while my uncle's boot landed fiercely in my chest.
I knelt in the freezing snow, clutching my grandmother's body as it grew cold, my nails digging into my flesh, convinced that death awaited us tonight.
Suddenly, the blinding headlights cut through the night.
A convoy of Rolls-Royce cars, bearing diplomatic plates, silently blocked the entrance to the rundown neighborhood.
The elderly butler strode directly to my grandmother, who had been "blind" for forty years, and knelt on one knee, "Your Highness, forgive us for arriving so late."
8.5
My mate, the Alpha, was planning to replace me. He was terrified of the family curse that took his mother in childbirth, and he decided his human lover, Lila, was a safer bet to carry his heir.
The plan was as cruel as it was calculated. He was throwing me a lavish birthday party, not to celebrate me, but to create a public stage for my rejection. He told his most trusted men he would break our sacred bond and install Lila as his new mate right after.
The humiliation was a constant, public execution. He flaunted Lila at every turn, and for a tiny scrape on her hand, he performed a sacred life-force ritual meant only for a dying mate, a blasphemy that horrified our pack. At a formal dinner, Lila announced she was pregnant, and he fled with her when I demanded the rejection he had planned all along.
Later that night, through the agony of our bond, I felt him kiss her. It was a passionate, claiming kiss that finally shattered my heart. He thought I was too gentle to fight back, a willing sacrifice for the good of the pack.
He was wrong. Using his own rage against him, I twisted the rite and severed our bond myself. The next morning, I signed his papers, took none of his blood money, and walked out of his life forever, leaving him to the future he'd built on a bed of lies.
8.1
Pretty Devil
8.1
Maddy worked at an exclusive underground club, always hidden behind a sleek black mask. One night, a wealthy client approached her with a filthy fantasy , he didn't want to just fuck her. He wanted to be her complete slave.
He took her to his luxury penthouse, while she shoved her soaked pussy onto his face and rode his tongue until she came, then mounted his cock and used him mercilessly, slapping and choking him while denying his orgasm until he begged like a broken whore. Even after she quit the club and started a new corporate job, she kept hooking up with him. One day, she walked into the CEO's office... and froze. Her new boss was the same man.
By day, in his luxurious office, he is the dominant, commanding CEO , barking orders, running the company with iron authority, and no one suspects a thing. By night, he becomes her secret pathetic slave: crawling, getting pegged over his own desk, licking her cum off his floor, and having his cock locked in chastity while she laughs at how easily she owns him.
Pretty Devil is a raw, extremely explicit erotic novel packed with intense femdom, heavy BDSM, humiliation, orgasm denial, pegging, face-sitting, and twisted power exchanges that blur the dangerous line between boss and secret slave.
This book is unapologetically nasty and graphic. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
9.8
I stood at the edge of the freezing pond on the Boone estate, my body trembling with a fear that rattled my bones. Across from me, Amanda Olsen looked immaculate in her cashmere coat, a sharp contrast to the jagged reality I was trying to hold together.
"Why?" I whispered. Amanda just smiled, admitting she killed Grandpa Boone because he actually liked me. She pulled out a thick envelope-divorce papers Cordero had signed that morning. She told me he called me a parasite and was celebrating with her the night I suffered a miscarriage.
Before I could even scream, Amanda lunged and shoved me into the icy water. My heavy wool coat acted like a sponge, dragging me into the artificial abyss. I thrashed and gasped for air, but Amanda just stood on the bank, watching me drown with her hands tucked casually in her pockets.
As my lungs burned and the darkness closed in, I realized I had spent my entire marriage taking their abuse. I was the "foster trash" and the "gold digger" who let them win every single time. I was dying alone, hated by the husband I had tried so hard to love, while my murderer stood victorious on the shore.
I never fought back. I just let them destroy me.
Then, a violent spasm tore through my body. I sat up gasping, sucking in dry, air-conditioned oxygen instead of murky pond water. I wasn't dead. I was back in the opulent master suite, surrounded by red rose petals and wedding decorations.
The digital clock glowed: October 14, 2019. I had gone back five years to the very night my nightmare began.
The bathroom door clicked open, and Cordero stepped out, looking at me with the same cold disgust I remembered. But as I gripped the silk sheets, a new resolve hardened in my chest. This time, I wasn't going to be the victim. This time, the Boone family was going to find out exactly what happens when you push someone too far.