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The Godblood Bride: Mending the Cursed Dragon Lord novel by Maui

Blurb

I was forced to replace my sister and marry Lord Gideon Carlisle, a crippled Dragon Lord rumored to be a monster whose brides always ended up dead.

But the real danger wasn’t my terrifying husband. It was Audrey, the fragile, innocent girl he took in and fiercely protected.

She lured me to a cliff, confessed to murdering his first two brides, and tried to shove me into the abyss.

When her clumsy attack failed and she nearly fell herself, Gideon’s shadow guard rushed in to save her. But he only saw the aftermath.

Audrey immediately burst into tears, pointing a shaking finger at me.

“It was her! She pushed me! She tried to kill me!”

Without hesitation, Gideon chose to believe his precious ward.

He looked at me with cold, golden dragon eyes, condemning his own wife without a trial.

He threatened me with dragon’s flame and locked me in my chambers, while Audrey smiled triumphantly behind his back.

I couldn’t believe a supposedly brilliant Dragon Lord could be so utterly blind, protecting the very monster who had cursed his life while treating me like the villain.

But I wasn’t the weak, original bride who would just accept this injustice and die quietly.

I calmly walked back into his study, pulled out a vial of Truth Serum, and forced it down Audrey’s throat so my blind husband could finally hear the truth.

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The Godblood Bride: Mending the Cursed Dragon Lord Chapter 1

Anya POV:
“For the glory of the Beaumont family, this marriage is your utmost duty, Elsa.”
The hypocritical voice of my ‘father,’ Lord Corbin Beaumont, echoed in the dressing room. His immaculate formal attire, embroidered with the golden dragon’s flame of a true Dragon Lord, mocked the cheap, silver-threaded scales of my substitute wedding dress.
I looked at him through the mirror. Yesterday, I would have cowered. But yesterday, before my dearest sisters Isis and Livia pushed me down the grand staircase, I was just a weak, “dragonless” disappointment.
The agonizing pain of shattered bones hadn’t killed me. Instead, it had broken the ancient seal deep within my soul.
The pure, primordial Dragon God bloodline had awakened, flooding my mind with lost dragon medical arts and a warrior’s unyielding pride. I was no longer the fragile Elsa. My true bloodline name, vibrating in my veins, was Anya.
“Is it my duty, Father?” I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm. I turned, my gaze piercing his cold, blue eyes. “Or was it the duty of your precious, true-born Isis?”
Martha, my trembling maid, gasped from the corner. Corbin’s paternal smile vanished, replaced by a dark scowl. He wasn’t used to being challenged by a waste of a daughter.
“This union with Lord Gideon Carlisle is sanctioned by the Dragon King,” Corbin warned, his voice dropping to a dangerous hiss. “He may be a paralyzed cripple with a damaged dragon soul, but you will serve him. Do you intend to defy the King?”
I took a slow, fluid step toward him. The newly awakened dragon instincts in my blood easily analyzed his stance—full of arrogance, completely open to attack. “Of course not. I will marry the ‘monster’ Lord Carlisle. But I have one condition.”
I let the silence stretch, enjoying the sudden flicker of unease in a Dragon Lord’s eyes.
“From the moment I step into that carriage, I am no longer a Beaumont. Consider the debt of my miserable upbringing repaid in full. A spiritual Parting.”
Corbin’s face cycled from red to white. A Parting was a grave stain on a noble’s honor, but he desperately needed this alliance to appease the King.
“Fine,” he squeezed the word through clenched teeth. “As you wish, you ungrateful wretch.”
“Then we are done,” I stated. I picked up the heavy bridal cloak, ignoring his seething rage, and walked out. The satisfying sound of a shattered dragon crystal goblet echoed behind me.
At the manor’s entrance, a plain, unmarked carriage waited—a final, petty insult. I climbed in, touching the hidden pouch in my sleeve.
Inside were fine bone and silver needles I had hastily crafted using the ancient dragon healing arts now burning in my mind. They were a surgeon’s tools, and a newly awakened warrior’s weapons.
The carriage lurched forward toward the dragon’s den. Gideon Carlisle, I thought, feeling the blood hum in my veins. I hope you’re ready for your bride.

The Godblood Bride: Mending the Cursed Dragon Lord Chapter 2

Anya POV:
The convoy stopped at a desolate outpost named Dragon’s Claw, a collection of rough stone buildings huddled against the biting wind. I sat alone in my dim room, the faint, acrid scent of crushed herbs lingering in the air.
I was carefully coating the tips of my newly crafted bone needles with a mild paralyzing sap—a low-tier dragon poison formula that had naturally surfaced in my awakened memories.
Martha paced frantically, her whispers a litany of worry, convinced my defiance of Lord Beaumont would turn my life in Carlisle’s castle into a living hell.
I ignored her. I knew the real battlefield lay ahead.
The door burst open, slamming against the stone wall. My two “dear sisters,” Isis and Livia, swept in, flanked by their sneering maids.
Isis, promised to the crown prince Alaric, was a vision in a fiery red riding habit. Her golden hair was perfectly coiled, her lips curved in a look of pure disdain. “Well, well. If it isn’t our little sister, rushing off to her doom.”
Livia, her ever-present shadow, chimed in with a giggle. “Don’t be so harsh, sister. Perhaps the crippled lord has a taste for sickly little things.”
Their maids tittered. Martha shrank into a corner, her face white with terror.
I slowly set down my needle, letting the ancient, arrogant blood of the Dragon God simmer beneath my calm exterior. I forced the soft, harmless smile of the old Elsa onto my face. “Did you two follow me all this way just to say that?”
My calm seemed to enrage Isis. She stalked forward, snatched a cup from the table, and sneered.
It was the inn’s cheapest mead, a drink considered “coarse fare” by dragon-blooded nobles. She flicked her wrist, and the dark, sticky liquid arced through the air, soaking the front of the only decent cloak I owned.
“Oh, dear,” she said, her voice dripping with fake surprise. “My hand slipped.”
I looked at the dark stain, then back at her. They expected tears. They expected the familiar cowering. Instead, I smiled, my newly awakened predatory instincts humming.
“It’s alright, sister,” I said softly. “My hand slips sometimes, too.”
Before she could process my words, my dragon-blood reflexes took over. I took a sharp step forward, my movements fluid and imperceptible, my foot intentionally “catching” on the leg of the table.
I stumbled, sending an entire platter of honey-drenched pastries sailing through the air. It landed with a wet smack squarely on the front of Isis’s pristine, expensive riding habit.
A shriek tore from her throat as the sticky jam and crumbs slid down her bodice.
“You dare!” Livia screamed, her hand flying toward my face.
To my awakened senses, her slap moved in slow motion, clumsier than a newborn hatchling. I sidestepped with effortless grace, my foot hooking neatly around her ankle with calculated precision.
Livia yelped, losing her balance and pitching forward, crashing directly into Isis who was desperately scraping the mess off her dress.
They went down in a tangle of flailing limbs and furious curses, their perfect hair undone, their dignity in tatters. Their maids just stared, mouths agape, too shocked by this “accident” to help.
I walked over to them, looking down at their sprawled forms. My voice was gentle, but the latent, icy pressure of my true bloodline leaked into my tone. “Are you alright, sisters? You should be more careful.”
My gaze fell on a small object on the floor, knocked loose in the scuffle. A brooch, fashioned with a single, small red dragon crystal. It was the only thing my mother had left me. I picked it up, letting a fraction of my dormant power touch the stone. It instantly flared with a warm, inner fire.
“And another thing,” I said, pinning the glowing brooch back onto my dress. “My things? You don’t get to touch them anymore. Every bit of suffering you inflicted… I will collect that debt. In full.”
They stared up at me, breathless, a primal, inexplicable fear dawning in their eyes. The oppressive aura rolling off me was not the weak Elsa they knew.
“We’re leaving,” I said to the petrified Martha.
By the time a frantic Lord Beaumont arrived, all he found were his two precious daughters—one hysterical, the other shivering with a terror she couldn’t explain—and an empty road stretching toward the mountains.
In the carriage, Martha finally found her voice, looking at me with awe and terror. “My lady…”
I ignored her, turning the dragon crystal brooch over in my fingers. Lord Beaumont must be furious, realizing the “lamb” he’d sent to the slaughter had suddenly grown fangs. But his real worry would be the lack of an official welcoming party from the groom—a profound insult in dragon society.
I, on the other hand, didn’t care. If Gideon Carlisle wouldn’t come for his bride, then his bride would march right into his lair. I was getting into that castle, armed with my ancestors’ arts, one way or another.

The Godblood Bride: Mending the Cursed Dragon Lord Chapter 3

Anya POV:
We finally reached the lands of Gideon Carlisle.
In the distance, perched atop a volcanic peak, Goldspire Castle clawed at the sky like a dormant beast. Its black rock walls were embedded with massive, raw dragon crystals that pulsed with a cold, faint light under the bruised sky.
But our progress was halted at the border of the domain. A massive, black dragon crystal, taller than a man, served as a boundary stone. Carved into its polished surface was the Carlisle crest: a roaring golden dragon.
The castle’s drawbridge was raised, the portcullis down. A line of guards in black, heavy plate armor stood like statues before the gate, their leader, a knight captain, watching our approach with an expression of pure indifference.
The Beaumont steward in charge of my escort trotted forward to parley. He returned moments later, his face pale. “They refuse us entry,” he stammered. “They say the lord gave no order for the bride’s arrival today.”
It was a calculated humiliation. A small crowd of locals had already gathered at a distance, their whispers buzzing like flies as they pointed at our sad little procession.
“How can they do this?” Martha wailed from inside the carriage. “It’s an insult! It’s against all custom!”
I pushed open the door and stepped out. Every eye turned to me. I wore the cloak Isis had stained, but my back was ramrod straight. I allowed a fraction of my true, ancient dragon aura to seep into the air. Instantly, the whispering crowd fell dead silent, an inexplicable dread chilling their spines.
I walked to the front of our party, directly facing the knight captain. He loomed over me, his gaze like ice from behind his helmet’s slit. But in the face of his hostility, my blood only sang with absolute arrogance.
“I am Elsa Beaumont,” I announced, my voice not loud, but carrying a piercing clarity that demanded submission. “Your future lady.”
The captain let out a short, harsh laugh. “The lady of this castle will be welcomed by our lord himself. You, woman of unknown purpose, will leave this land immediately.”
The insult was deliberate, meant to strip me of all legitimacy.
I smiled. “I am not here in the name of House Beaumont. I am here by the will of the Dragon King’s Command.”
From the folds of my cloak, I produced a scroll. It was made of cured dragon hide, tough and pale, and sealed with the royal wax imprint of a fiery dragon. As my fingers touched the seal, my own dormant power hummed in faint, dismissive recognition of the royal magic.
“The command is here,” I declared, holding it high for all to see. “To see this seal is to see the King. Lord Carlisle is a vassal to the Dragon King. Does he mean to defy his sovereign and turn away the bride the King himself has sanctioned?”
The Dragon King’s Command was the highest law in the land. Its authority was absolute. A ripple of fear went through the crowd of onlookers; many dropped to their knees.
Even the proud knight captain bent a knee, though his head remained defiantly high. A subtle sheen of sweat appeared on his brow, perhaps sensing the unnatural, terrifying pressure radiating from this supposedly “dragonless” bride.
“We do not defy the King,” the captain said, his voice a low growl. “But our lord’s orders were clear. No one enters without his leave.”
“Then I am not ‘no one,’” I said, taking a step toward the gate. “I am his bride. Now, I command you. Open the gate.”
The castle guards shifted, their eyes flicking between the royal seal in my hand and their unmoving captain.
I turned to my own escort, the Beaumont guards who were looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Your mission was to see me inside this castle. Fulfill your duty.”
Caught between my order and the authority of the royal decree, the Beaumont captain drew his sword with a grimace. “Force the gate! Escort the lady inside!”
A pathetic, short-lived scuffle broke out. My guards made a half-hearted attempt to push forward, met by a solid wall of Carlisle shields.
Just then, a long, deep horn blast echoed from the castle’s depths. The grinding of chains began, and the massive drawbridge started to lower.
The fighting stopped. Everyone stared at the dark, yawning maw of the gatehouse.
From the shadows within, a deep, raspy voice, like stone grinding on metal, carried across the distance. “Let her in.”
I straightened my stained cloak, lifted my chin, and walked alone across the drawbridge. I passed between two lines of guards, their gazes a mixture of awe, resentment, and suspicion. They expected a trembling lamb; instead, they watched a predator casually strolling into a rival’s den.
The great hall was vast and dim, lit only by the faint glow of the dragon crystals embedded in the high walls. At the far end of the hall, shrouded in shadow, was an enormous throne of black obsidian.
A man was sitting on it. Even seated, his presence was immense, radiating a palpable, crushing pressure that made the ancient dragon blood in my veins boil with an intense urge to fight. He wore black, scale-patterned formal wear, and a silver mask covered the left half of his face.
He was not in a wheelchair. His legs were crossed casually, one hand resting on the arm of the throne, fingers tapping a slow, deliberate rhythm.
This was Gideon Carlisle.
Our eyes met across the cavernous space. I saw the eye his mask did not hide. It was not the eye of a man. It was pure, molten gold, the burning, slitted pupil of a dragon.
And as his predatory gaze locked onto mine, I didn’t flinch. Instead, my own eyes reflected the unyielding, ancient arrogance of a Dragon God.

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September 22, 2026
The Jilted Mate’s Rise To Supreme Luna novel by Dong Shengxue

Blurb

I barely survived a brutal Rogue wolf ambush on the highway, an attack designed to ruin my purity right before my high-profile pack wedding.

But the real betrayal came when I returned home. Even after I endured a humiliating public test to prove my scent was completely untainted, my fiancé Deondre and my father still abandoned me.

My step-sister Brandee, the one who secretly paid the mercenaries to attack me, was given my place as the primary Luna.

Deondre tossed a revised contract at my feet, demanding I stay as his unranked concubine.

When I tore the papers to shreds, my own father slapped me hard across the face, stripping me of my name and banishing me from the pack entirely.

“You will end up as a nameless Rogue in the dirt!” Deondre sneered.

I stood bleeding on the front steps, my heart entirely dead to the family that had just thrown me away like garbage over a fabricated rumor.

I couldn’t understand how blood and sacred vows could be discarded so easily, leaving me to face the wasteland alone.

But before I could leave the estate, a fleet of twelve armored black SUVs surrounded the gates.

Hillery Zimmerman, the Supreme Alpha of the continent and the most feared warlord alive, stepped out of the shadows.

He crushed my ex-fiancé to his knees with a single wave of his aura, wiped the blood from my lip, and asked me to be his only Luna.}

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The Jilted Mate’s Rise To Supreme Luna Chapter 1

Ember’s POV

Seven days until I’m bound to Deondre Langley.

The Bowers needed Langley’s border troops. Langley needed our mineral corridor. I was the thing caught in the middle. My father hadn’t even asked me.

I’d made my peace with it.

Aunt Martha was the only one who grieved it with me. She let me take her up to the Sanctuary, where Elder Silas Thorne handed me pine boughs and sweetgrass. I laid the offerings into the brazier the way I’d been taught, listened to a few words of blessing, and helped her back down the hill. The armored SUV was waiting at the gate. I climbed in. The door shut, and the heater seeped into my fingertips.

The engine pressed low against my ears. Then the rear tire blew.

The sound was sharper than a gunshot. The car lurched right, the seatbelt cut into my shoulder, and my head cracked against the side window. White light burst behind my eyes. The tires screamed on the asphalt, gravel spraying, nothing outside but spinning gray and dead grass. The SUV finally stopped on the shoulder, hood smoking.

The driver drew his gun and screamed at me not to move. Out of the dust, three Rogue wolves came walking out of the dead brushwood. Too big. Too thin. Gray coats crusted with mange and dried scabs, jaws split wide to the ear. The stink of rot came through the door seams.

The biggest one hit the hood. Silver-black claws punched through the windshield, glass spraying inward, and it dragged the screaming driver out through the gap. Blood slapped across the seats, copper flooding my throat. The second tore the rear door off, teeth snapping inches from my ear.

I didn’t scream. My right hand found the silver dagger. When it lunged into the cabin, I put the blade into the soft hollow under its jaw. Silver hissed against wolf flesh, and the stench of scorched fur filled my nose and mouth. It yelped, pulled back, and went down twitching in the dirt.

I climbed out the other door and hit the gravel with my shoulder. My dress ripped. My knees split open, the pain sharp and bright. I pushed myself up and ran for the abandoned pump station fifty yards off. Behind me the third wolf howled and came, claws hammering the ground, closer with every stride.

I squeezed through the broken metal partition, pulled my wolf sense in tight, held my heartbeat down, back pressed to a rusted pipe, both hands locked on the hilt. Its muzzle pushed through the gap. Hot, wet breath steamed against the metal, drool hitting the ground inches from my boot. My muscles ached and shook.

Then, as it took a step toward my shadow, an overwhelming Alpha pressure came down.

The air went heavy all at once. The rogue froze, whined, and ran with its tail tucked.

I slumped against the pipe, gasping, sweat soaked through my collar. Through a gap in the wall I could hear the sirens closing in, blue light sweeping the wreckage of the pump station in slow pulses.

Between the flashes, a figure in a black cloak crossed the waste ground behind the station. Tall, wide-shouldered, moving fast, like a shadow cut out of a storm. I narrowed my eyes, trying to make him out, and he was already gone into the gray dead grass, leaving only a trace of cedar and blizzard in the air.

“Ember!”

Brandee’s voice came from the highway, sweet enough to rot teeth. I stayed flat against the rusted wall. The Langley convoy sat on the shoulder, silver falcon emblems cold under the headlights. Deondre got out, his uniform knife-creased. Brandee had her arm through his, rose perfume heavy enough to fight the wind. There was red clay on her heels.

I never expected that all of this had anything to do with Brandee.

They walked a few steps toward the pump station. Deondre frowned and scanned the waste ground, hand resting on the holster at his hip. Brandee went up on her toes, peering, her gaze skipping right over the Rogue’s corpse and never quite reaching the pipe where I was hidden.

I didn’t make a sound. My fingers tightened on the dagger, blood running off my knee onto the broken brick at my feet.

Where the cloaked figure had vanished, there was nothing but dead grass bending in the wind.

The Jilted Mate’s Rise To Supreme Luna Chapter 2

Hillery’s POV

Morning frost still clung to Zimmerman territory, and the Old Wastes Highway was the shortest line through the gray buffer zone. I should have been at the northern outpost by nightfall, dealing personally with the smuggled cargo my border patrol had seized.

But taking a shortcut never actually saves time.

The intelligence was clear enough: the eldest Bowers daughter would be bound to Deondre Langley in seven days. I hadn’t planned to remember the name. Until this moment.

“Alpha. Smoke ahead.” Arlin sat in the passenger seat, and the armored car was slowing on the gravel. I looked up and saw a column of black smoke cutting straight up at the end of the dead grass, like someone had scored a burn mark across the horizon.

The convoy slowed. I lowered the window and let the cold in. It carried rust, scorched rubber, and something deeper.

Blood. A lot of it. Fresh.

Then the bond moved.

That thread, the one that had always been there, the one it had taken me years to learn to ignore, jerked hard inside my chest. My wolf was awake instantly. It reached down the other end of the bond and rolled a low sound in its throat. It knew her. My fated mate.

I pressed my hand to my chest, knuckles white. The sigils under my collar burned.

“Alpha?” Arlin looked over, his face tightening in a heartbeat. He’d known me too long not to know what that expression meant on me.

“Coordinates.” My voice came out rough. “Hers.”

“Whose—”

“Ember Bowers.”

I didn’t wait for his second sentence. The door was open, my boots were in the gravel and the cracked dirt. The other end of the bond was shaking hard. Fear, sharp and cold, mixed with adrenaline. Then pain — knees, shoulder, palm burned on an iron pipe. Every place she was hurt drove into me like a needle.

She was running.

My wolf was snarling. Hunt. Go. Now.

I shut my eyes and forced it down. Something else came through the bond: her heartbeat, held very low. Not panic. Cold. The feel of fingers locked around something — metal, silver, a bloody hilt. She’d killed the first one. The recoil came back through my own hand, as if I’d held the blade myself.

When the third wolf closed in, I let the pressure out.

The Alpha command hit the waste ground through the bond and landed as precisely as a hand on a beast’s scruff. It froze, whined, and ran with its tail tucked. But Ember’s reaction tightened my chest. She didn’t relax. Her heart went from terror to alertness, then quickly into something colder, as if someone had turned her whole body’s temperature down a few degrees.

She knew someone had helped her. She didn’t know who. She had no intention of finding out.

“Alpha.” Arlin’s voice came from behind me, pitched low. “Langley’s people are here.”

I turned. Blue lights flickered at the end of the highway. The Langley convoy sat on the shoulder, silver falcon emblems cold under the headlights. Deondre Langley got out, uniform knife-creased, and scanned toward the pump station.

Deondre walked right past the pipe she was hiding in. Less than ten yards. He didn’t see her. Brandee followed him, her gaze crossing the broken wall of the pump station, pausing one second, sliding away. Her nose wrinkled slightly, as if she’d caught something, but the rose perfume and the scorched dirt of the wastes covered too much.

Interesting. His wife-to-be was hiding in a ruin, covered in blood, and he was standing in the sunlight with a hand over his nose, offended by the smell.

“Arlin.”

“Here.”

“The Rogue that got away ran east. Cut it off. Alive.”

“Yes.” Arlin typed the order into his tablet, and Black Guard squads swept around the flank.

Ember came out of the pump station. Brandee saw her first. That carefully arranged expression froze for half a second, then folded into concern, and she ran for her. Deondre turned, took in the ruined dress and the blood, stayed three steps back, and covered his nose.

The three of them exchanged a few words. From half a waste ground away, all I saw was Ember standing straight, Deondre’s lips moving, Brandee gesturing beside him. Then Ember walked around them, toward the highway. Deondre reached for her shoulder. She spun, dagger tip at his throat. He went still. Brandee stepped back twice.

Ember put the dagger away and kept walking. Deondre stood there a few seconds, straightened his collar, and turned back toward the convoy. Brandee followed, glanced over her shoulder, then got into the car. The blue lights died. The convoy turned and headed for the estate.

Down the bond, Ember’s heartbeat settled slowly. She was still walking. Not fast, but not stopping.

I watched her go. At the other end of the bond, her heartbeat knocked against the inside of my ribs, one beat at a time.

“Alpha.” Arlin turned from the front seat. “The Rogue’s contained, in the third squad’s vehicle. What do you want done with it?”

“Bring it to the underground cells.”

“Yes.”

I took one last look at her back. She was moving fast across the waste ground, the blood on her knees darkening the gravel, and she didn’t stop. I leaned back into my seat, palm still pressed to my chest, the heat of the sigils slowly fading.

“Back to command.”

The Jilted Mate’s Rise To Supreme Luna Chapter 3

Ember’s POV

I walked out of the pump station with the blood on my knees soaked dark brown through the inside of my skirt. Deondre stood a dozen yards off, his pressed uniform like a clean flag planted in the waste. Brandee saw me first. Her face froze for half a second, and then she ran over, heels ticking on the gravel.

“Oh my God, Ember!” She stopped in front of me, both hands hovering in the air. “You scared me to death! What did those filthy Rogues do to you?”

Under the rose perfume: the red clay of the Old Wastes, cheap tobacco, and the rotting sweetness of Rogue breath. The red clay was on her heels.

I looked at her and said nothing.

Deondre turned, took in the ruined dress and the blood on my knees. He stood three steps away and raised a hand to his nose.

“Your scent is contaminated.” His voice was a military report. “Did they touch you?”

There was nothing in his brown eyes but disgust and calculation. This man had promised to protect me. He hadn’t asked how many places I was bleeding.

“Three Rogues. My driver is dead. I killed one and hid in the pump station.” I said it one word at a time. “While you were standing here covering your nose, did it occur to you that I might be in there, bleeding?”

Deondre’s jaw locked. “What kind of attitude is that?”

“Ember, you have to understand his position,” Brandee cut in, her voice soft as syrup, reaching for my arm. I stepped aside.

“If the elders smell this on you, the engagement is—”

“The engagement?” I turned to her. The little smirk was well buried. Not well enough. “You’re that concerned about my engagement.”

“Of course I’m concerned about you!” She pressed a hand to her chest, and her eyes went red on cue. Deondre patted her shoulder.

I looked at the two of them standing together and was suddenly very tired. Seven years. Or longer. I’d told myself all I had to do was be obedient. Aunt Martha said the ceremony would be set within the week. I had already made my peace with signing the contract.

Deondre took a step toward me. “Get in the car. Don’t make a scene here.”

I stepped back.

His hand closed on air. His face changed. The patience he’d been pretending was finally worn through. “Ember. I said get in the car.”

“I don’t need your car.”

“You—”

I pulled the silver dagger from my sleeve. The blade came up at his throat, the tip still carrying rogue blood. Deondre froze, pupils shrinking. Brandee stepped back twice.

“Touch me,” I said, “and find out how fast silver works on an officer.”

He didn’t move. I watched the arrogance crack across his face, one inch at a time, and something underneath it show. Cowardice. I put the dagger away and turned for the highway.

Blood ran down my leg, leaving dark marks on the gravel with every step. Behind me, the Langley convoy started its engines, tires grinding the shoulder, the sound fading out.

I walked the highway a long time. By the time the sky went dark, the estate had come up at the end of the road. The iron gate stood open, the gatehouse light on. I stood on the gravel and looked at the familiar door.

The crescent birthmark above my collarbone burned, once. Faint, like a fingertip brushing it.

I pressed my hand over it and looked back. The highway was empty. Nothing there.

I pushed the door open and went in. Warm light spilled out of the foyer, mixed with woodsmoke and the kind of quiet that had been held down all day. Everyone was there. My father by the fireplace, Agatha on the sofa, Deondre and Brandee leaning in the archway like two statues waiting for me to come home.

The door slammed shut behind me.

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September 22, 2026
The Healer Bride: Awakening the Ruined Dragon King novel by Zana Kheiron

Blurb

I was the eldest daughter of the Reynolds family, but in a world that worshipped dragon power, I was born completely “Dragonless.”
After ten years of being engaged to Prince Krishna, the King suddenly decreed that my fiancé would marry my half-sister Deena instead.
As for me, my father ruthlessly discarded me.
I was ordered to marry Lord Boyce Carlisle, a crippled, dying warlord with a shattered Dragon Core and failing organs.
I was being sent to a desolate border fortress just to be a dying man’s nursemaid, and then his widow.
Deena flaunted her triumphant smile, whispering maliciously in my ear.
“This is the fate a ‘Dragonless’ deserves. You’re being sent there to be buried with him.”
My father didn’t even look at me, treating my death sentence as a highly profitable political trade.
The suffocating despair and humiliation drove me to tie a silk sash to the ceiling beam and kick the chair away.
Why should I be thrown away like trash?
Why did my mother and I have to die in obscurity while they celebrated their royal wedding?
But as the noose tightened, a violent torrent of memories flooded my mind.
I remembered my past life as a top surgeon on Earth who spent thirty years snatching lives back from the jaws of death.
I didn’t die.
I cut myself down, wiped away my tears, and looked at my hands.
I would heal this dying warlord, and use him to drag every single one of them to hell.

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The Healer Bride: Awakening the Ruined Dragon King Chapter 1

Aspen POV:

The Royal Messenger stood in the center of House Reynolds’ grand hall, slowly unfurling a heavy parchment scroll embroidered with the King’s golden dragon claw sigil.

“By royal decree of His Grace, King Gamaliel Carlisle.” The messenger’s voice boomed off the high vaulted ceilings, cutting through the suffocating silence. “The betrothal between Prince Krishna Carlisle and Lady Aspen of House Reynolds is hereby dissolved.”

A collective, theatrical gasp rippled through the assembled family and retainers.

“In its stead,” the messenger continued with formal gravity, “a new union is declared. Prince Krishna shall take to wife Lady Deena of House Reynolds. Furthermore, in recognition of House Reynolds’ enduring loyalty, His Grace grants Lady Aspen Reynolds in marriage to Lord Boyce Carlisle of Blackwood Keep.”

Boyce Carlisle.

The name dropped over the grand hall like a suffocating winter frost.

Once the kingdom’s invincible War God, blessed with the purest Dragonflame lineage, Boyce was now nothing more than a ruined legend.

His Dragon Core had been violently shattered in the northern abyssal wars, his rank stripped, his vitality drained.

He had been left to rot in the desolate wasteland of Blackwood Keep—a crippled, paralyzed “corpse” who couldn’t even speak, let alone summon dragonflame.

Every single eye in the hall locked onto me, waiting.

Everyone in the capital knew that Prince Krishna had been my entire world since childhood.

I had loved him with a devotion bordering on madness, carving his name into my heart and enduring years of ridicule for his sake.

They had all gathered today expecting a spectacle.

They expected me to fall to my knees, claw at my chest, scream in hysterical agony, and beg my father not to trade my beloved prince away for a living corpse.

My stepmother, Eleanor, rested a manicured hand over her chest, pretending to be shaken while her eyes glittered with dark, predatory amusement.

Beside her, my half-sister, Deena, wore an exquisite gown of shimmering silver dragon-scale silk.

She took a delicate step forward, her eyes brimming with manufactured tears as she reached out to clasp my hands.

“Oh, Aspen…” Deena whimpered softly, her voice dripping with sickly-sweet poison. “Please don’t hate me! I begged Father and Prince Krishna to reconsider! But the royal bloodline requires a dragon-blessed bride for Krishna… and Lord Boyce is in such desperate need of a gentle caretaker in the frozen north. I will pray for you every day, Aspen.”

Her fingers tightened, her sharp nails deliberately digging into the soft skin of my palm in a private, vicious gesture of triumph.

I looked down at her hands, then slowly lifted my gaze to meet her eyes.

My heartbeat remained slow, even, and calm.

There were no hot tears burning behind my eyelids.

No trembling in my breath.

My silver-gray eyes were cold, unreadable, and as still as a frozen sea.

Deena’s rehearsed expression began to fracture.

The fake tears dried instantly in her eyes as she shrank back from the unsettling stillness in my gaze.

I withdrew my hands from hers without a single drop of hesitation and turned directly to the royal envoy.

“I accept the King’s arrangement.”

My voice was clear, ringing with effortless composure through the silent hall.

The messenger blinked, his mouth parting slightly, completely taken aback by my absolute lack of resistance.

Sitting upon the high seat, my father, Elder Fredrick Reynolds, narrowed his eyes, his knuckles tightening around his gilded cane.

He had stationed guards at every exit, fully expecting another humiliating display of madness from the daughter he considered a disgrace.

“Aspen,” Fredrick’s voice rumbled down, cold and completely devoid of paternal warmth. “Three days ago, you brought shame upon this house by trying to hang yourself over a broken betrothal. I will not tolerate any more tantrums. You will accept this decree with dignity.”

I turned toward him, offering a shallow, flawlessly executed curtsy.

“You need not worry, Father,” I replied, my voice smooth and devoid of any sorrow. “Since it is His Grace’s royal will, we should not delay. Please prepare the dowry that rightfully belongs to the firstborn daughter of House Reynolds—including every ledger, estate deed, and manuscript left behind by my late mother.”

Eleanor’s breath hitched in sharp disbelief.

Fredrick’s jaw tightened, unsettled by how easily I had taken control of the room. “You shall have your mother’s chest, Aspen. See to it that you leave for Blackwood Keep by dawn.”

“Gladly, Father,” I said, a faint, razor-thin smile touching the corner of my lips.

Without sparing another glance at Deena’s pale, confused face or the whispering crowd of retainers, I turned on my heel and walked out of the grand hall with steady, measured strides.

They believed they were banishing a broken, lovesick girl to rot in an icy wasteland beside a dying beast.

They had no idea that they had just set me free—and placed the most lethal weapon in the kingdom directly into my hands.

I returned to my room and closed the door, shutting out their world.

Reaching into the drawer, I pulled out a small, weathered wooden box.

It had belonged to my mother—the only thing of value she had left me.

I lifted the lid.

Inside, several thick, leather-bound journals lay quietly among dried herbs.

Boyce Carlisle.

The ruined lord.

I knew nothing about him, but that didn’t matter.

He was the first piece on my new chessboard.

The Healer Bride: Awakening the Ruined Dragon King Chapter 2

Aspen POV:

The heavy oak door to my chambers was kicked open without so much as a warning knock.

Deena swept into the room like a gilded peacock, her silk gown shimmering with radiant Dragonflame embroidery.

It was the ceremonial gown crafted for her upcoming royal engagement feast—a celebration that was supposed to have been mine.

Two handmaidens scurried behind her, balancing velvet-lined jewel cases laden with royal rubies and enchanted dragon-gold.

I didn’t look up from my desk.

My fingers remained steady as I traced the fine botanical sketches in my mother’s worn leather journal, cataloging the neurotoxic and restorative properties of high-altitude mountain moss.

I treated Deena’s arrival as nothing more than a passing, filthy draft of wind.

My absolute indifference was a sharper slap than any shouted curse.

Deena’s smug smile tightened into a brittle grimace.

Striding across the room, her clawed hand shot out, snatching the leather journal from under my fingers and hurling it violently onto the stone floor.

“Still playing with dirt and dried weeds?” Deena sneered, kicking the book against the baseboard. “A No-Dragon should learn how to beg at a real master’s feet, not grub around like a peasant in the mud.”

I stayed still for a moment, then slowly bent down.

I retrieved the book and gently brushed the dust from its weathered cover, keeping my face entirely blank.

My silence only fed her twisted arrogance.

Deena tilted her chin up, deliberately stroking the magnificent teardrop ruby resting against her collarbone.

“A gift delivered from Prince Krishna himself,” she purred, her voice dripping with vanity. “He calls it The Dragon’s Blood. He told me its fire only belongs on skin as pure and noble as mine.”

She took two steps closer, leaning down until her breath felt hot and cloying against my ear.

“Do you want to know what else my sweet prince said about you, Aspen?” she whispered viciously. “He said you were a bore. A cold, defective No-Dragon whose very touch felt like handling dry clay. He said keeping you by his side made him feel like he was dragging a rock.”

I slowly closed the leather journal, setting it back on the desk.

Seeing that I still didn’t shed a tear, Deena’s eyes flashed with venomous frustration.

Needing a heavier blade to draw blood, her lips curved into a wicked, deliberate sneer.

“Then again, this whole pathetic, dirt-scrabbling existence makes sense,” Deena said, flicking her golden curls. “You’re the spitting image of that dead wretch you called a mother.”

My pulse stopped.

The air inside the room turned instantly frigid.

“She was nothing but a lowborn apothecary slave who used cheap herbal aphrodisiacs to crawl into Father’s bed,” Deena hissed, stepping closer and jabbing a sharp finger toward my chest. “A worthless parasite without a single drop of dragon blood! The moment Father took my mother, your mother was thrown into the freezing courtyard like discarded garbage, coughing up her own lungs until she died alone in the dark. That’s the blood in your veins, Aspen. A lineage of beggars destined to rot!”

The entire world fell into a dead, suffocating silence.

Before Deena could even draw her next breath, my arm moved like a striking viper.

My fingers clamped around her throat with crushing force.

With a single, violent motion, I drove her backward.

Her back slammed against the heavy stone wall with a sickening crack, shaking the candle sconces above us.

Deena’s eyes bulged in instant terror.

Her breath choked off into a strangled, wet wheeze as her hands frantically clawed at my wrist.

But my grip was forged of unrelenting steel; she couldn’t move my fingers a fraction of an inch.

I leaned in close, my silver-gray eyes locking onto hers with a lethal, absolute killing intent.

“Deena Reynolds,” I whispered. My voice was quiet, smooth, and colder than the frozen peaks of Blackwood Keep. “You can take my former betrothed. You can parade your stolen jewels. You can play whatever games you want in this house.” I tightened my fingers slightly, feeling the violent tremor racking her entire body. “But if you ever drag my mother’s name through your filthy mouth again…” I leaned an inch closer, each word slicing like a razor blade across her skin, “…I swear on her grave, your grand royal wedding will be the day they bury you in the dirt.”

For the first time in her pampered life, Deena saw true, unhinged danger.

She realized with terrifying certainty that I wasn’t bluffing.

I wouldn’t cry, and I wouldn’t beg.

I would simply end her.

Her face flushed a deep, mottled purple as tears of pure panic streamed down her cheeks.

The two handmaidens dropped the velvet cases in horror, trembling in the doorway, too paralyzed by fear to scream for the guards.

I held her there for three agonizing seconds, letting the cold terror sink deep into her bones, before releasing my grip.

Deena collapsed onto the stone floor like a sack of silk and jewels, clutching her bruised throat, gasping desperately for air in ragged, terrified sobs.

I stood over her, casually smoothing out the cuffs of my dress.

Then, a faint, chilling smile touched my lips.

I stepped over her trembling legs, reached down into one of the open cases scattered across the rug, and picked up a small, crystal jar sealed with gold wax.

It was her prized royal beautifying balm—an expensive concoction of moon-lily oil and crushed pearl that she religiously applied to her neck and face every evening before any grand banquet.

A perfect scheme for vengeance formed in my head.

I weighed the cold crystal in my palm, and then, right before her terrified, tear-filled eyes, I slipped the jar into my pocket.

“Get out of my room,” I said softly.

The spell of pride was utterly broken.

Deena scrambled to her hands and knees, clawing at the doorway before stumbling out into the corridor, her frantic weeping echoing down the stone halls as her maids fled behind her.

The Healer Bride: Awakening the Ruined Dragon King Chapter 3

Aspen POV:

After Deena fled in hysterical terror, a heavy, cold stillness settled over the bedchamber.

The lingering scent of her cloying perfume mixed with the sharp odor of fear.

I walked over to the stone casement, watching her scurry across the torchlit courtyard below, clutching her bruised neck while her maids scrambled behind her.

My hands were still steady—not a single tremor of hesitation, only the cold adrenaline of calculated retribution.

I closed my eyes, and the bitter memories of the past flooded into my mind.

I remembered my mother, Elara Beaumont.

She had been the most brilliant apothecary in the realm, gifted with an unparalleled understanding of biological chemistry and medicinal flora.

But because she was a No-Dragon, high society viewed her as little more than an outcast.

When she met my father, Fredrick Reynolds, he was nothing more than an ambitious merchant upstart who had bought a petty noble title, plagued by a latent, crippling bloodline disease.

It was my mother who spent sleepless nights formulating rare tinctures to purge his condition, single-handedly curing him and paving his ascension to the Council of Elders.

Yet the moment Fredrick secured his wealth and power, he discarded her like an old shoe.

He brought in Eleanor as his concubine, seduced by her claims of diluted dragon lineage—a glorified half-blood pedigree he foolishly believed would elevate him—while banishing my mother, his lawful wife, to a dilapidated pavilion on the outskirts of the estate to cough up blood until she died of a broken heart.

Her dying words to me had been, “Aspen, never trust a Reynolds.”

For years, I had been a blind fool, pouring my entire heart into Prince Krishna in a desperate search for love and belonging—only to walk the exact same tragic path as my mother.

Three days ago, when Fredrick Reynolds marched into this room at Eleanor’s urging, coldly commanding me to yield my betrothal and legitimate status to Deena—his concubine’s daughter—and submit to being sold off to the ruined, paralyzed Boyce Carlisle, the final pillar of my sanity collapsed.

Consumed by grief, betrayal, and unbearable despair, I tied a silk cord around the rafters and hung myself.

Everyone in the manor believed it was a sheer miracle that I opened my eyes three days later.

They had no idea that during those three days of comatose darkness, my soul had crossed the dimensional void into a parallel, hyper-advanced civilization known as the Modern World.

In that world, I grew up as a penniless orphan.

But in a society governed by merit, knowledge, and modern science, I rose through sheer grit, graduating at the absolute top of the nation’s premier medical academy.

I devoted that entire lifetime to clinical surgery, neurotrauma, and advanced pharmacology—saving countless lives and pioneering revolutionary neural regeneration techniques that earned me the legendary title of The Peerless Healer.

I lived that second life to a peaceful old age, closing my eyes on my deathbed—only to wake up in a sudden gasp back in my twenty-year-old body, precisely two days after my suicide.

The weak, weeping girl who begged for Prince Krishna’s scraps of affection died on that cord.

I had returned as a master surgeon and biochemical genius, armed with centuries of cutting-edge clinical mastery that this primitive world of swords and dragons could never comprehend.

I opened my eyes.

Every trace of sorrow was gone, replaced by absolute, glacial resolve.

Walking back to the table, I set down the crystal jar of royal beautifying balm I had taken from Deena.

From the hidden compartment in my mother’s wooden chest, I pulled out a small packet wrapped in oiled paper: Dragon’s Shade powder.

On its own, the crushed herb was harmless.

But when combined with the lunar pearl extract used exclusively in royal court cosmetics and activated by body heat, it triggered a violent, delayed biochemical reaction twelve hours later.

The symptoms were horrifying: an angry, weeping scarlet rash covering the entire face and chest, paired with unbearable agony and itching.

It mimicked a disgusting, incurable pestilence, yet after twelve hours, the compound would metabolize completely and vanish without a trace, leaving no evidence for any physician to find.

Using a fine silver needle, I stirred a precise pinch of the powder into Deena’s cream until the paste was seamlessly smooth.

I knew Deena’s vanity.

With her engagement banquet only three days away, she would order her servants to sneak back and retrieve her prized cream, and she would slather it on religiously.

I could already picture it: Prince Krishna lifting his radiant bride’s veil on their wedding night, only to recoil in sheer revulsion at the hideous, festering rash covering her face.

A razor-thin smile touched my lips.

Consider this the first installment of your debt, little sister.

I set the doctored jar in a visible shadow near the door.

A gentle knock broke the silence, and Penny, my personal handmaiden, slipped into the room carrying a bowl of hot broth.

Her eyes were red and puffy from crying.

“My lady…” Penny’s voice trembled with grief. “The entire manor is whispering. They say… they say the Elder is exiling you to the frozen wasteland of Blackwood Keep. Lord Boyce is a shattered, dying man… it’s too cruel!”

I took the warm bowl and looked into her tear-streaked face.

Penny had been with me since childhood, the only person in this venomous household genuinely loyal to me.

“Penny,” I said softly, my voice firm and reassuring. “I leave for Blackwood Keep at dawn. It is a dangerous, frozen ruin, and you are not obligated to follow me.”

Penny didn’t hesitate.

She dropped to her knees, grasping my hand tightly.

“Wherever you go, my lady, Penny will go. Even if Blackwood Keep is a dragon’s tomb, I will never leave your side.”

Warmth spread through my chest.

“Pack our warmest cloaks and every medical ledger in this room, Penny. We aren’t going there to die. We are going there to take command.”

After Penny left to prepare our trunks, I looked out toward the distant northern mountains.

My next moves were clear: First, give Deena and Krishna an unforgettable wedding catastrophe. Second, establish absolute control over Blackwood Keep. Third, heal Boyce Carlisle.

To the world, he was a living corpse with a shattered Dragon Core.

To the greatest surgeon of two worlds, he was the ultimate clinical challenge—and the sharpest, most terrifying weapon I would ever forge.

👉 CONTINUE READING

September 20, 2026
The Unwanted Northern Heiress Shines Again novel by Yan Huo

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I had managed the Castro estate for three years, supporting my husband, Lord Brian Castro, while he fought on the battlefield.

But the moment he returned victorious, he coldly announced that the King had granted him permission to marry the powerful Dragon Knight, Lady Brittaney Kirk.

“I expect you to show grace, accept this, and prepare the best rooms for her.”

He commanded me like a glorified servant, expecting me to continue running the household for his new bride.

His mother also mocked my Dragonless bloodline, telling me my honor was tied to them and I should be grateful to even stay.

In my last life, I cried and begged him not to abandon me, hoping my devotion would win him back.

But my compliance only allowed them to build their glory on my misery, and my entire family—House Serrano—was slaughtered by assassins in a single night.

Until I died, I didn’t understand why my years of sacrifice were met with such cruel betrayal, or why my brave father and brothers had to die in pools of blood just to pave the way for Brittaney’s rise.

Opening my eyes again, I was back on the night Brian arrogantly announced his new marriage.

This time, I didn’t shed a single tear.

I packed up my massive dowry, gathered my eighty loyal servants, and went straight to the Dragon King to demand a Rejection Ritual.

I would leave them with nothing but an empty shell.

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The Unwanted Northern Heiress Shines Again Chapter 1

Elaine Serrano POV:
“Elaine, take off the ancestral Dragon-bone ring of House Castro. Brittaney is my true Fated Mate, and from today on, you will step down and serve as a lowly personal maid.”

Bang. The heavy oak door of my bedchamber was violently kicked open.

The freezing, ruthless voice of my husband, Lord Brian Castro, shattered the silence of the night.

I sat before the mirror in a delicate silk gown, looking at my own reflection. Just a few moments ago, I had opened my eyes to find myself reborn—brought back in time to the exact night Brian returned from his year-long war, the night I had prepared to offer myself to him as a welcome-home gift.

In my previous life, I was foolish enough to let my love for him blind me. When he shattered my heart with his cruel declaration, I had cried, begged, and eventually swallowed my pride, accepting the humiliation of becoming his lowly personal maid just to stay by his side. But my pathetic compromise only led to a horrifying end: they drained every last copper coin of my dowry, butchered the loyal servants I brought from my homeland, and finally, Brittaney burned me alive in a freezing dungeon with her dragonfire!

Now, looking at the man I had once loved with all my heart, I felt nothing but a sickening wave of pure disgust and a bone-deep thirst for vengeance.

He strode in, but he wasn’t alone. Next to him stood Brittaney Kirk, a tall, striking female Dragon Knight. Brian’s arm was wrapped tightly around her waist. His deep blue eyes, looking at her, burned with a raw, fiery devotion he had never, ever shown me.

“She is the new Lady of this Dragon Court,” Brian declared, his gaze shifting to me with absolute zero warmth.

He paused, clearly waiting for my hysterical breakdown, my tears, and my desperate pleas.

But I simply sat there, my face as calm as a frozen lake.

My utter lack of reaction seemed to irritate him. A flash of annoyance crossed his handsome face. He closed the distance between us in two large strides. His large, calloused hand gripped my jaw with bruising force, forcing me to look up into his eyes filled with pure, unadulterated repulsion.

“Are you deaf, or just too stupid to understand?” he snarled, raking his gaze over my silk gown with a vicious sneer. “Did you really think a cursed Dragonless like you could keep me? Let’s be honest! The only reason I married you was because you used your family’s wealth to force my hand! Look at yourself—a cold-blooded Earthbound who can’t even produce a spark of dragonfire. Hugging you is like hugging a freezing corpse!”

My fingernails dug so fiercely into my palms that warm blood began to drip onto the carpet.

“And don’t look at me with that dead expression!” Brian tightened his grip on my jaw, his voice dripping with venom, deliberately weaponizing my deepest trauma. “What are you now? Your father and brothers were arrogant fools! Their bloodline was so weak their dragonfire was extinguished by the enemy, getting your entire family butchered like pigs! You are a jinx with a broken Dragon Core! Asking you to stay in my castle as a personal maid is an act of profound charity!”

Three years ago, my father and six brothers died in battle. Shortly after, enemy spies infiltrated my homeland and brutally slaughtered my mother and the entire household of the old, the weak, women, and children! Simply because my father and brothers had been the strongest shield against the enemy nation, they annihilated my entire bloodline! Every single person was hacked with seventy-two sword strikes. Even my third brother’s newborn son was butchered and dismembered so horribly his tiny body wasn’t left intact.

Even in a second lifetime, hearing him weaponize my slaughtered family against me again made the maddening urge to kill scream in my veins. If looks could kill, Brian would have been torn into a thousand bloody pieces right then and there. But the phantom sensation of being burned alive by dragonfire flared in my bones, an agonizing reminder of what reckless anger would cost me.

I masked the lethal sharpness in my eyes perfectly. Patience, I told myself. Before I destroy them, I need to take back every single copper coin I own.

“Oh, Brian, please don’t be so harsh on her,” Brittaney sighed, stepping forward to wrap her arms around his waist from behind, deliberately pressing her breasts against his armor. She flashed me a condescending, venomous smile over his shoulder. “Elaine, please don’t be sad. Since you have nowhere to go, you can stay. I loathe doing chores anyway. From now on, you can draw our bathwater, and… oh, you can wash our bedsheets every morning. It will give a fragile, magic-less thing like you a sense of purpose.”

“What is all this screaming?” The harsh voice of my mother-in-law, Lady Icie, echoed from the hallway. She walked into the room, drawn by the commotion. She was wearing the expensive, gold-threaded silk I bought for her, yet when she saw me, her face twisted with absolute disdain.

“Have you no shame, Elaine?” Icie spat. “Brittaney is a true Winged warrior. Her fiery dragon breath cured my illness and brought me immense joy. You just smell of earth and death. It is the Court that feeds you! Brian is merciful enough to let you serve him. Learn to know your place and be grateful!”

Grateful?

When Brian left for war, Icie was dying. I exhausted my massive dowry to hire a Royal Dragon Healer. I, a Dragonless, used my own body heat to keep her warm through freezing nights. Every single bite of food these dragons ate, the chandeliers above their heads, the very castle they were standing in—all bought with my wealth!

And now, they were standing on the bloody corpses of my slaughtered family, calling me a freezing corpse, and demanding I wash their dirty bedsheets?!

In my last life, this injustice had suffocated me. But now, it only brought a bone-chilling, terrifying calm.

I slowly stood up. With agonizing slowness, I slid the heavy, ancestral Dragon-bone ring off my finger. The metal clinked sharply as I dropped it onto the table.

“If that is the Lord’s command,” I lowered my eyes, completely masking the lethal, venomous sharpness hidden in my gaze. “I step down.”

Brittaney’s lips curled into a victorious smirk. Brian let out a long breath of relief, letting go of my jaw and looking at Brittaney with deep affection. My complete surrender fully satisfied his arrogant Dragon pride.

Smoothing the invisible wrinkles on my silk gown, I gave them one last, perfect curtsy befitting a lowly personal maid.

But the moment I turned my back and walked out of the room, a twisted, bloodcurdling sneer finally broke through the fragile mask on my face.

Enjoy your Fated Mate, Brian.

I can’t wait to see your arrogant Dragon pride shatter into bloody pieces. Let’s see how deep your Fated Flame burns when you realize your glorious Dragon Court doesn’t even have moldy scraps to eat… once I cut off every single penny of my money.

The Unwanted Northern Heiress Shines Again Chapter 2

Elaine Serrano POV:
The heavy oak door of my bedchamber clicked shut behind me, but it couldn’t completely muffle the laughter and celebration coming from the main hall. In the dim corridor, my loyal personal maid, Phoebe, stood trembling in the shadows.

Without a word, she hurried to my side, draping a warm shawl over my shivering shoulders, and fell into step behind me as we walked down the freezing stone corridor.

The commotion had already drawn the night staff out of the woodwork. The servants, who used to bow so low their noses nearly touched the floor whenever I passed, now openly lined the hallway, not even bothering to hide their gloating stares or their malicious whispers.

“Did you hear? Lord Brian stripped her title. She’s just a personal maid now,” a scullery maid whispered loudly.

“About time. She’s just a cursed Dragonless jinx anyway,” a guard snickered, his eyes shamelessly raking over my silk gown.

I felt Phoebe shaking with rage behind me, but I didn’t stop. In my past life, these whispers were like knives to my heart. Now, they were just the buzzing of flies destined for the slaughterhouse.

When I finally pushed open the door to my own chambers, the biting cold hit me instantly. The dragon-crystal heater was completely dead. Not a single spark of energy had been provided for the night.

The moment the door clicked shut, sealing us inside, Phoebe finally collapsed to her knees.

“My lady… how could he? How could Lord Brian do this?!” Phoebe sobbed, her fingers digging desperately into the cold floorboards. “He knew how much that night destroyed you! How could he use the slaughter of your family as a weapon to humiliate you in front of everyone?!”

Looking at Phoebe, my childhood companion who shared my deepest trauma, the last trace of patience in my heart vanished.

“Stand up, Phoebe,” I said, my voice dropping to an eerie, frozen whisper. I knelt and gently wiped the tears from her face. “Tears cannot wash away the blood of our families. Brian said House Serrano is nothing but a dead graveyard. Then it is time we show him how the ghosts from that graveyard feast.”

I stood up and walked to the row of massive dowry chests in the corner of the room. They were made of ironwood, unique to the North, and branded with my family’s snow-wolf sigil.

This was everything I had brought from House Serrano. It was also my ticket out of this disgusting cage.

I opened one of the chests and took out a heavy ledger from a smaller box. My mother had left it to me. It recorded all the assets and connections of House Serrano.

By the light of the dragon-crystal lamp, I began to carefully inventory my dowry.

House Serrano. Once the strongest shield of the North, guarding the realm for the Raymond dynasty for generations.

Three years ago, my father and six brothers died on the southern battlefield. Their dragonfire was extinguished when they were heavily surrounded. Shortly after, Veskarian assassins slipped through the broken defense line like ghosts, infiltrating our homeland. My mother, my sister-in-laws, and all the old and weak were brutally slaughtered in pools of their own blood.

The official story was that it was a mad act of revenge by the enemy for my father and brothers’ past victories.

I had believed it. But now, in my second life, I knew it wasn’t that simple.

Brittaney Kirk… her shadow loomed over that tragedy. Back then, it was Brittaney’s elite Winged squadron that was supposed to reinforce my father. But they were mysteriously “delayed.” Their delay cost the lives of my father and brothers, which allowed the assassins to breach the North.

In my past life, I thought it was a tragic accident. But after being burned alive by her dragonfire, a chilling realization crept into my mind: what if she had intentionally let my family die?

A sharp pain shot through my chest. I gripped the edge of the chest, gasping for breath. The fire of vengeance burned in my veins.

But it wasn’t time for that. First, I had to escape this cage.

It wasn’t just these material goods in the ledger. There were also eighty servants who had come with me to the Castro estate. They were born into the service of my house, loyal only to me.

Brian and the Castros all assumed that once I married into their family, these people and properties naturally belonged to them.

They were wrong.

According to the laws of the kingdom, a wife’s dowry belongs to her and her alone, unless she willingly gifts it away.

And the “Rejection Ritual” was the only form of marital dissolution that allowed the female to leave with her entire dowry, no questions asked.

It required the consent of both parties, or… a direct command from the Dragon King himself.

Brian wanted his new bride and his glory. I wanted my freedom and my dignity. We would settle this the old-fashioned way, the dragon way.

I closed the ledger and put it back. The plan was clear in my mind.

The Castros thought they controlled everything, but they didn’t know that my father, Corbin Serrano, had been one of King Aurthur’s most trusted Dragon Lords. He had even saved the King’s life when His Majesty was a boy.

The Castros didn’t know about that favor. But the King would remember.

All I needed was a chance to see him.

“Starting tomorrow morning,” I ordered Phoebe, my tone absolute and merciless. “Send our hidden guards to every Serrano-owned business, farm, and mine. Cease all fund transfers to the Castro estate. Cut off their food supplies, their winter clothing, their weapon shipments, and the Royal Dragon Healer’s fees. Freeze every single copper coin.”

Phoebe’s eyes ignited with a fierce, vengeful fire. “You mean… we cut them off completely?”

“Completely,” I turned to face her. “Since Brittaney loathes the ‘petty chores’ of managing a Dragon Court, let’s see how her glorious dragonfire conjures bread out of thin air.”

“Prepare ink and parchment,” I said, my gaze shifting toward the distant, towering spires of the Dragon Palace. “I am writing to the Dragon King.”

After the last word was written, I blew the ink dry, folded the letter, and sealed it with the Serrano family crest—a snow-wolf forged in blood and iron.

“Find the most reliable messenger among our loyal guards,” I ordered, handing the heavy envelope to Phoebe. “Ride through the night. Deliver this straight to the Dragon Palace.”

The Unwanted Northern Heiress Shines Again Chapter 3

Elaine Serrano POV:
Two days had passed since my letter was dispatched. The Dragon Palace hadn’t replied yet, but I wasn’t anxious. A petition of that magnitude took time.

For the past forty-eight hours, I had barricaded myself in my freezing chambers. Whenever the Castro servants pounded on my door, demanding I come out and scrub the new Lady’s bedsheets, I simply ignored them.

Bang, bang, bang!

The heavy oak door to my quarters shuddered under an impatient fist. Hazel, the personal maid of the dowager, Lady Icie, stood in the hallway with her nose pointed at the ceiling.

“Elaine,” Hazel announced, deliberately dropping my title. “Lady Icie requests your presence in the grand solar. Immediately.”

Phoebe bristled beside me, but I simply gave her a calming glance. I smoothed out the non-existent wrinkles on my elegant, dark velvet gown. I knew exactly why I was being summoned. The financial freeze had finally hit them where it hurt.

When I stepped into the lavish solar, Icie Castro was sitting in the center of a plush chaise lounge. Standing right next to her was Brittaney Kirk, wearing a sheer morning gown, her arms crossed as she glared at me.

“Elaine, my dear child, come sit,” Icie cooed, suppressing her obvious panic and forcing a tone of artificial, sickening affection.

“I heard you froze the estate accounts out of a little… childish jealousy,” Icie began, her tone soft and placating. “I know you feel wronged. But you must understand, you’ve managed this household for three years, and you’ve done it well. Unfreeze the accounts. Pay the Royal Dragon Healer and the merchants for tomorrow’s ceremony. As long as you hold the purse strings, you will always be the true mistress of this Dragon Court in my eyes.”

I watched her perform, my heart cold and detached. In my past life, I had believed these honeyed words, only to be drained dry.

I gave a small, flawless smile, my eyes wide and perfectly innocent.

“Mother, you misunderstand,” I said, my voice soft, respectful, and dripping with absolute compliance. “How could I possibly freeze the accounts out of jealousy? I am merely following Lord Brian’s strict orders.”

Icie frowned. “What orders?”

“Two nights ago, Lord Brian made it very clear that I am stripped of my title and am now nothing but a lowly personal maid,” I explained, blinking gently. “According to the kingdom’s customs, a personal maid has no right to manage the noble finances of a Dragon Court. It would be a severe overstep of my bounds. I wouldn’t dare touch the accounts.”

Icie’s face stiffened. She hadn’t expected me to use Brian’s own vicious words as a shield.

I turned my gaze to Brittaney, offering her a respectful, subservient curtsy. “Since Lady Brittaney is the true Fated Mate and the new Lady of this house, it is only natural that I make way for her. It is my duty as a servant.”

“You…!” Icie switched tactics, her voice rising in panic. “Brittaney is a noble Dragon Knight! She will be busy with her training. How could she have time for these trivial matters? You must continue to manage the household. That is an order!”

“I’m afraid I cannot, Mother,” I refused gently, maintaining my perfect, harmless smile. “If outsiders were to find out that a glorious Dragon Court relies on the dowry of a cursed, magic-less Dragonless to feed its warriors and pay its Healers, wouldn’t that make Lord Brian and Lady Brittaney’s Fated Love a laughingstock across the entire kingdom?”

I paused, letting the humiliation of that truth sink into their arrogant bones.

“I am doing this to protect House Castro’s honor,” I added smoothly. “I have already instructed my stewards to prepare the handover of all estate management. Lady Brittaney, with her powerful dragonfire, will surely have no trouble conjuring bread and paying the merchants for tomorrow’s ceremony, right?”

Brittaney’s face turned ashen in an instant. Her arrogant glare shattered into pure panic. She knew how to swing a sword, but she didn’t have a single copper coin to run a massive estate.

“You… you dare!” Icie shot up from her chaise lounge, the sudden movement causing her to cough violently. She pointed a shaking finger at me, her face purple with rage, completely unable to speak.

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August 25, 2026
The Dragon Lord’s Rejected Wife novel by Escritor apalacio

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For five years, I held House Ward together with my own two hands—a Dragonless wife managing an ancient dragon-blooded estate, counting the days for my husband to come home from the war.

He came home with a pregnant mistress on his arm and a son who wore his eyes.

He petitioned the Dragon King to make her his legal co-consort, and entered their bastard into the bloodline registry as his heir.

His family doted on the boy and treated me like a ghost—until the boy shoved a bowl of scalding soup onto my hand at dinner.

“A Dragonless woman is worthy of a physician’s time?” the matriarch sneered, hugging the grinning child.

So I summoned my own physician. Paid from my own gold. And I smiled.

Because I finally saw the game they were playing.

I handed every key and every ledger to his clueless mistress—the very ledgers that prove House Ward is a gilded, crumbling shell held upright by my dowry alone.

I accepted his co-consort. But I set one condition: the Rejection Ritual. A severance more final than divorce.

They think I’m surrendering.

They don’t know I’ve already lit the fuse.

Let the glittering house burn. I’m done being his wife.

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The Dragon Lord’s Rejected Wife Chapter 1

Delphine Winters POV:
“He’s here!”
The shout echoed through the grand hall of Ward Manor, and my heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat of anticipation.Five years I had lived as a widow in all but name—my husband gone to a war that never sent him home—and today, that long winter was finally over.
I smoothed the front of my silk gown. It was a magnificent creation, the color of a twilight sky, a gift from my mother. Its cost could have fed a village for a year, yet it bore no shimmering scale patterns, no threads of woven dragon-fire. A silent, constant reminder of my status: Delphine Winters, the Dragonless wife, a wealthy merchant’s daughter who had married into the ancient, dragon-blooded House Ward.
The air smelled of dragon’s breath incense and burning oak, a scent unique to the halls of dragon-kin nobility. Across the room, the massive dragon-head fireplace roared, its controlled flames casting a warm glow on the cold stone walls. The firelight danced over the Ward family’s war banner hanging above, the red-gold threads of its dragon sigil proclaiming their heritage as Half-Blood dragons.
My mother-in-law, Eleanor, raised a goblet toward me. The wine inside had been warmed by dragon-fire, a privilege of the nobility. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. I knew she saw me not as a daughter, but as the treasury that kept this house from crumbling.
From the high-backed chair at the head of the room, the family matriarch, Matilda, watched me with a critical gaze, as if I were a piece of furniture that didn’t quite match the decor.
A horn blast from outside shattered the tense quiet. The lord had returned.
My breath caught.
The heavy oak doors swung open. And there he was. Erwin Ward. He stood silhouetted against the fading light, taller and harder than I remembered, the cold edge of the battlefield etched into the lines of his face. He wore the uniform of a Dragon Marshal—the battlefield rank the King had granted him for the northern campaign, worn over his hereditary lordship of House Ward—its dark fabric adorned with the family’s red-gold dragon crest.
Cheers erupted. “Welcome home, Lord Ward!”
I moved through the crowd, my own joy a silent song. Five years of waiting, of holding this house together, were about to be rewarded with his embrace.
His eyes met mine across the hall. But there was no joy in them. No relief. Only a flicker of something complex and evasive. My steps faltered.
He didn’t move toward me. Instead, he stepped aside.
And revealed the person standing behind him.
A woman. Young, dressed in a simple linen dress that was utterly out of place among the silks and velvets of the court.
One of her hands was held tightly in Erwin’s. The other rested protectively on her swollen belly. She was heavily pregnant.
My mind went blank. The cheering of the crowd became a distant, muffled roar, as if I were underwater.
Beside the woman stood a little boy, no older than four or five. His eyes were a perfect, startling copy of Erwin’s.
Erwin cleared his throat, his voice taking on a formal, proclamatory tone I had never heard before. “This is Beryl King,” he announced. “And our firstborn son, Theo.”
My gaze swept the room. Eleanor avoided my eyes. Matilda, however, had a look of grim satisfaction. The other family members were watching me, their faces alight with cruel curiosity.
They all knew.
This welcome wasn’t for me. It was for her.
I was the last to be told, in the most humiliating way possible. I was the punchline to a joke I didn’t even know was being told.
The blood in my veins turned to ice. My body, which the dragon-kin called “cold-blooded” because I had no dragon-fire of my own, finally felt the part.
Erwin looked at me, his lips parting as if to speak. “Delphine, I know this is sudden, but I hope you can…”
I didn’t let him finish.
Slowly, gracefully, I gathered the hem of my skirt. I sank into the most perfect, most distant curtsy I could manage.
“Welcome home, Lord Ward,” I said, my voice as still and dead as a frozen lake. “And welcome to your guests.”
I deliberately called them “guests.” It was the only weapon I had.
Erwin’s brow furrowed. He hadn’t expected this calm.
Beryl flinched, shrinking behind him and looking at me with wide, wet eyes, as if I were the villain in this story.
The boy, Theo, showed no such fear. He peeked out from behind Beryl’s legs and made a face at me.
I turned away from them, my back straight, and walked step by step into the shadows at the edge of the hall. The light was dim there, just like my heart.
I could feel every eye in the room on my back. Pity. Glee. Contempt.
I lifted my chin. My pride would not let me fall apart here. I was a Winters, not some wilting flower to be trampled.
Erwin started to follow, but a sharp look from his mother stopped him. Eleanor then moved to greet Beryl, her voice warm and welcoming, as if she were the true lady of the house.
Watching the farce, the last wisp of warmth I held for this family vanished.
From this day forward, I live only for myself.
And Erwin Ward, along with his entire house, would pay for what they had done today.

The Dragon Lord’s Rejected Wife Chapter 2

Delphine Winters POV:
I stood in the shadows, a ghost at my own husband’s homecoming feast. I watched as Erwin was surrounded by his family, Beryl clinging to his side like a frightened rabbit. The boy, Theo, was already perched on Matilda’s lap, being fed a piece of dragon-flame baked pastry.
That should have been for the child I was never able to bear him—the child we might have had, had he ever truly come home to me.A sharp pain lanced through my chest, but I forced my face to remain a mask of indifference.
Finally, Erwin broke away from the crowd and walked toward me, holding two goblets. They were made of dragon-crystal, shimmering in the firelight, vessels only dragon-kin nobility were permitted to use. He offered one to me.
I didn’t take it. “I’m not thirsty, Lord Ward.”
His face hardened. “Delphine, we need to talk.”
“I think we have nothing to talk about.” I turned to leave.
He grabbed my wrist. His hand was hot, like a brand. “Don’t be like this.”
I looked down at his grip, my voice dripping with ice. “Please let go. Your partner is waiting for you.”
Erwin took a deep breath, his voice low and urgent. “Beryl and Theo will be living here now. I need you to give them the Lakeview Pavilion.”
The Lakeview Pavilion. The most beautiful, spacious residence on the entire estate. By tradition, it was the home of the lady of House Ward. I had lived there for five years. Now he was asking me to give it to another woman.
I laughed. It was a soft, brittle sound. “Of course. It won’t be my place for much longer anyway.”
He stared at me, stunned by my easy agreement, completely missing the meaning behind my words.
I pulled my arm from his grasp, not giving him another glance, and walked toward the corridor that led to my own residence, the Whispering Willow Court. I could feel his gaze burning into my back, but I didn’t turn around. The moment he walked through that door with her, everything between us had turned to ash.
When I reached my rooms, my maids, Clara and Mina, were waiting anxiously.
“My lady,” Clara whispered, her eyes red. “They are too cruel!”
I sank wearily into a chair as Mina poured me a cup of hot tea. “It’s useless to say that now.”
“So we just accept it?” Mina asked, her voice tight with indignation.
“Of course not,” I said, lifting the cup and watching the steam curl into the air. “But not now.”
My plan would require time. Patience. And the perfect moment.
A hurried knock came at the door. It was Erwin’s personal manservant.
“My lady,” the servant panted. “Lady Eleanor has requested Lord Ward’s presence. The lord is… in a temper. But he asked me to inform you that he is coming to your court.”
I raised an eyebrow. Erwin, coming here? Forced by his mother, no doubt.
A few moments later, I heard his heavy footsteps. He hesitated outside my door before finally pushing it open. He had changed out of his uniform and into a casual tunic embroidered with the red-gold dragon of his house. It made him look less like a soldier and more like a man consumed by irritation.
He waved my maids away, leaving us alone.
He didn’t look at me, pacing to the window instead. “My mother sent me to explain.”
“Explain what?” I asked, my voice flat. “How you found ‘true love’ on the battlefield? Or how you can live comfortably on my family’s wealth while supporting a mistress and child elsewhere?”
He spun around, his face a mask of fury at being so accurately called out. “It’s not like that! Beryl…”
He bit back his words, the anger dissolving into a frustrated sigh. “Delphine, I know I owe you. But you can’t deny there’s been no affection between us for a long time.”
“So that’s your excuse for betrayal?” I scoffed.
He had no answer, only pacing the room like a caged beast.
This was all going as I’d predicted. Eleanor, that clever woman, knew where the lifeblood of House Ward truly lay. She was afraid I would cut off the funds in a fit of anger, so she forced her selfish son to come here and offer false comfort.
A pity for them. It was too late. My heart had died the moment I saw that woman.
Erwin finally stopped pacing. He stood before me, reaching for my hand. I pulled it away.
“Delphine,” he said, his voice strained. “Just give me some time. I’ll handle this.”

The Dragon Lord’s Rejected Wife Chapter 3

Delphine Winters POV:
I watched Erwin’s hand freeze in mid-air. A flicker of hurt crossed his face, but it stirred no sympathy in me.
“Handle this?” I repeated, my voice laced with undisguised mockery. “Is your way of handling this to ask me to give the mistress’s residence to your lover?”
His expression turned ugly, a mixture of guilt and impatience. “Delphine, it’s different! Beryl… she saved my life!”
He finally said it. The great, noble reason.
“In the Blackwood of the North,” he began, his voice low and colored with memory, “I was ambushed by enemy dragon-fire. My Dragon Core was nearly shattered. The burns of enemy flame could not be healed by any herb in the borderlands, and my shattered guards lay dead around me. I should have died in that snow. But Beryl—a Dragonless woman with nothing—found me bleeding and burning, and she refused to let me die. She dragged me back from the brink and kept me alive for three months.”
He did not say it, but I understood what he was leaving out: a common herb gatherer could not heal a wound of dragon-fire. What Beryl had saved was his body—the fever, the bleeding, the broken bones of a fallen dragon. The rest, the Dragon Core he said was “nearly” shattered, his own dragon’s constitution must have clawed back from the edge on its own, slowly, over those three months. She had kept him alive long enough for his soul to survive. That was the debt he owed her—not a cure, but a life.
I listened silently. I listened as he described her bravery, her gentleness. I listened to the undisguised love in his voice.
Every word was a shard of ice driving into my heart. And then I realized my heart was already numb. I couldn’t even feel the pain anymore.
“So, to repay her for saving your life, you destroy our five-year marriage? You destroy my five years of waiting?” I asked calmly.
“I’m not destroying it!” he retorted, his voice rising. “I can take her as my second partner! Delphine, among dragon-kin, a lord may take more than one partner—this is permitted!”
“Permitted is not the same as normal.” I cut him off. “It is a rare thing, and a shameful one, and it is not normal. Not for me.”
“It’s not up to you!” His patience finally snapped. He pulled a scroll from his tunic and threw it on the table.
It was bound in black leather, stamped with the golden sigil of the Dragon God. I recognized it. A command from the Dragon King.
“A co-partner must be entered into the bloodline registry—it touches the succession and the inheritance of my house—so I have already petitioned the King and received his permission,” he announced, his voice dripping with condescension, trying to crush me with the weight of royal authority. “By this decree, Beryl King will be a legal co-partner of House Ward, and Theo our registered firstborn.”
I stared at the Dragon King’s Command. It was a death sentence for my love, my dignity.
I started to laugh. I truly laughed, so hard that tears pricked my eyes.
Erwin was bewildered. “What are you laughing at?”
“I’m laughing at myself, for being such a fool.” I stopped, my gaze turning cold. “Erwin Ward, have you forgotten who pulled House Ward back from the brink of bankruptcy five years ago?”
“Who filled your empty vaults with chests of Winters family gold? Whose dowry allowed you to maintain the facade of a Dragon Lord, to afford to even go to that damned war?”
Every question I fired made his face grow paler.
“I bought your family’s honor with my family’s wealth. And what did I get in return? I waited for five years like a widow, only for you to bring home a pregnant mistress and an illegitimate son, and to use a royal command to tell me I must share my husband!”
My voice grew louder, five years of humiliation and rage pouring out of me.
“You are using my money to raise your lover and your bastard, and you expect me to be grateful for the arrangement? Erwin Ward, is your face made of dragon scales?”
He staggered back under the force of my words, his face a mottled mess of red and white. He couldn’t form a single sentence.
“Delphine, I…”
“Get out,” I said, pointing to the door. My voice was quiet, but it held the unshakeable force of a final judgment.
He stared at me, his eyes wide with shock and disbelief. In his mind, I had always been the docile, obedient wife.
We locked eyes, the air crackling with tension.
This was the first time in our five years of marriage that we had truly fought. And it was the first time I had ever told him to get out.
He looked like he wanted to argue, but I just turned my back on him, a gesture of final dismissal.
Another word from him would make me sick.
Finally, he stormed out, slamming the door so hard the windows rattled in their frames.
The room fell into a dead silence. I slowly sank to the floor, a deep chill seeping into my bones.
Clara and Mina rushed in, helping me to my feet.
“My lady, are you alright?”
I shook my head, steadying myself on the table. The Dragon King’s Command lay there like a venomous snake, its golden sigil mocking me. The break was complete. It had already begun.

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August 25, 2026
Reborn As The Cold Alpha’s Secret Mate novel by Liz Nozic

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My fiancé, Caleb Tucker, told me it was the last thing I could do for him.

Then, he sold me to a cruel, greedy old man just to curry favor for his own political ambitions.

I was branded like livestock, treated as nothing more than a vessel and a broodmare for a man I despised.

When I desperately tried to resist this horrifying fate, I was beaten and left to bleed out in the biting cold.

“Seraphina, it’s the last thing you can do for me.”

His words were colder than the winter air as my life drained into the pristine white snow, his handsome face twisted with false regret.

I died a miserable, invisible Omega servant, my blood staining the freezing ice while he secured his future.

Until my last breath, I couldn’t understand how the man I loved could trade my life for a little bit of status, leaving me to die like a discarded piece of trash.

Opening my eyes again, the searing pain of the branding iron was just a ghost on my unbroken skin.

I was back in my cramped servant’s cell in Silvermoon Keep, right on the morning the Matriarch was choosing a breeder for the Alpha heir.

This time, I wouldn’t run. I would willingly offer myself to Gideon Carlisle, the most powerful and cold-hearted Alpha of them all, and use him to secure my survival.

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Reborn As The Cold Alpha’s Secret Mate novel Chapter 1

SERAPHINA’S POV:
“Take off your dress.”
My fingertips trembled slightly, and a flush crept up my neck. Obeying the Matriarch’s command, I untied the rough sash at my waist. The coarse linen pooled at my feet, leaving me in nothing but a thin, white undergarment that barely covered my body.
As I shifted my weight, the fabric rode up, exposing the pale curve of my waist. In the dim morning light, my skin looked like fine porcelain.
Yet, Isadora Carlisle, the Pack’s Matriarch, and her stern lady-in-waiting, Agatha, didn’t even glance at my waist. Their sharp eyes were fixed entirely on my hips, which were noticeably fuller than those of the other Omega servants. Suddenly, their eyes lit up.
“Matriarch, I believe Seraphina is a fine choice,” Agatha said, a calculating smile on her lips. “She has the wide hips of a strong breeder, perfect for bearing pups. Moreover, she’s been trained in your quarters for years. She knows her place and won’t try to bewitch the Alpha heir.”
“Indeed, your eyes are as sharp as ever, Agatha,” Isadora said, a satisfied smile appearing on her well-preserved face. “Seraphina, prepare yourself. You will serve the Alpha heir tonight.”
I was one of her personal servant girls, and the more she looked at me, the more satisfied she seemed. She had made her decision.
I knelt obediently on the cold stone floor, but as I heard her words, a wave of dizziness washed over me.
In my past life, I had knelt in this exact spot. Except then, I was fully dressed. When the Matriarch ordered me to undress for the breeding inspection, I had refused without hesitation. “I already have a mate chosen, Caleb Tucker. I beg for your mercy, Matriarch.”
The Pack usually treated their servants decently. Though displeased, Isadora had granted my release and handed me my freedom papers. I thought I could take my saved coins, return to Caleb, and live a simple life. But instead, Caleb and my family broke my leg and sold me to Jedediah Hicks, a cruel, eighty-year-old merchant, just to curry favor.
And then… the biting snow, the blood, the agonizing death. Just thinking about it made my chest tight with suffocating pain.
My eyelashes fluttered. I quickly pressed my forehead to the floor, forcing my voice to tremble with overwhelming gratitude. “Thank you, Matriarch, for this immense honor!”
Seeing that I didn’t show the desperate, ambitious greed of other foolish Omegas, Isadora’s approval deepened.
“Seraphina, the Alpha heir has been mated for three years but remains childless,” Isadora said, her voice dropping. “If you can give birth to a strong Alpha male pup, he will be the next heir of Silvermoon Keep.”
She paused, watching me. I made sure to widen my eyes just a fraction, projecting the perfect blend of reverence and naive yearning. She nodded, completely satisfied. This was what she wanted: an Omega who would dedicate her life to serving the heir and continuing the Carlisle bloodline.
“You are a maid from my own courtyard. Even the Luna will not dare to look down on you,” Isadora continued, sliding a heavy silver moonstone bracelet from her wrist and placing it onto my arm.
I looked at her with tear-filled eyes. “Thank you for your grace, Matriarch. I swear to serve the Alpha heir with my life and ease your burdens.”
After I bowed one last time, she dismissed me.
Once I stepped out of her quarters, the feigned reverence vanished from my eyes, replaced by a bone-chilling coldness. I caught the envious glares of the other Omega servants in the corridor, and a mocking smile touched my lips.
If I had a choice, I would gladly trade places with them. I had absolutely no desire to be a lowly breeder. I just wanted to survive until I was old enough to leave the Keep and live in peace.
Gideon had been mated for three years. Neither his Luna nor his two chosen females had produced a pup. Either there was something wrong with the Alpha himself, or there was a deadly game of sabotage being played among his mates. Having a pup in that environment would be practically impossible.
Even if I did miraculously get pregnant, given Isadora’s ruthless nature, it was highly likely she would take the pup and dispose of the mother. I could lose my life anyway. If I wasn’t driven into a corner by my past, I would never willingly become a breeder.
But right now, I needed to use Gideon Carlisle’s formidable power as a shield to destroy Caleb and those greedy bastards from my past. To do that, I had to play the long game. And the first hurdle was surviving tonight.
Gideon was a man of strict discipline. If he refused to touch me tonight, I would become the laughingstock of the Keep by morning, and Isadora might just throw me out. Remembering Caleb and the old merchant waiting outside these walls, I took a deep breath. No matter what methods I had to use, I had to make the Alpha heir claim me tonight.
Late into the night, I was led to the Heir’s Quarters. Bathed and dressed in a sheer, whisper-thin silk nightgown, I knelt quietly by the edge of the massive bed.

Reborn As The Cold Alpha’s Secret Mate novel Chapter 2

SERAPHINA’S POV:
The gossamer fabric clung to my curves, and my pale skin glowed faintly in the candlelight. With my naturally cold and timid demeanor, I looked like a fallen moon spirit—a sight meant to entice.
The guards had said the Alpha Heir was still working in his study. I waited for a full two hours before heavy footsteps echoed outside.
The doors swung open. Gideon Carlisle stepped into the room. Earlier today, his mother, Matriarch Isadora, had mentioned sending a servant to his bed, but he clearly hadn’t expected to find me already waiting in his private chambers. His dark brows furrowed slightly.
I looked up at exactly the right moment. My violet eyes were shimmering, carrying a perfect balance of shyness and submission, meeting his gaze directly.
But Gideon just stood there. He looked at me with the same calm indifference one might use to appraise a piece of furniture. There was no lust, no surprise in his eyes—only a cold, almost detached scrutiny.
His oppressive Alpha aura made my chest tighten. Biting my lip, I forced myself to stand. “Alpha Heir… please allow me to help you out of your clothes.”
As I approached him, a flush warming my cheeks, Gideon actually took a step back.
Everyone in the Pack knew he was a man who lived by rules. He visited his Luna, Eleanor, during the full moon, and his other females on strictly scheduled days. I knew that if he accepted me, a breeder Omega, it would mean adding another exhausting obligation to his routine.
Rutting without purpose drained energy, and Gideon was clearly unwilling. Just as he opened his mouth, undoubtedly to dismiss me, a knock came at the door.
Agatha’s voice filtered through. “Alpha Heir, the Matriarch ordered me to bring you the Elk-Blood and Moon-Herb elixir.”
It was a potent Alpha stamina brew. It was Isadora’s way of forcing his hand.
Gideon let out a quiet sigh. It was no secret how obsessed his mother was with getting a grandson, especially since his younger half-brother already had two pups, parading them around the Keep daily to flaunt in front of the Matriarch.
“Leave the elixir, Agatha. Tell my mother I understand,” Gideon replied, his voice deep and resigned.
Agatha’s receding footsteps sounded almost cheerful; she clearly knew her master would never outright defy his mother’s wishes regarding the Pack’s lineage.
Once she was gone, Gideon turned his cold gaze back to me. “Let’s get to bed, then.”
He raised his arms, waiting for me to undress him.
Having served in the Matriarch’s quarters, I was used to this. I stepped forward, my hands moving deftly to remove his heavy outer coat, secretly studying him as I did.
In my past life, I had never dared to look at him. The other maids always whispered about his god-like beauty. Seeing him up close now, the rumors were true. Sharp jawline, eyes like midnight, a physique carved from granite. If I had to endure this to change my fate, at least the man I was serving was breathtaking.
After removing his shirt, I gently untied my own sheer outer robe. It slipped to the floor, leaving me in nothing but a crimson silk camisole embroidered with delicate lace.
The vibrant red contrasted sharply with my milky skin. My chest heaved slightly, the delicate curves of my body fully exposed—a living, breathing painting of temptation.
Any other male in the Pack would have lost their minds and tackled me to the rugs. But Gideon wasn’t a normal man. He barely spared my body a glance, his eyes quickly returning to their icy calm.
Just as I was frantically wondering what my next move should be, he reached out, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me under the heavy furs of the bed.
Under the heavy velvet canopy, I threw my arms around Gideon, pulling him close.
I was actually quite pleased at this moment. Secretly, I slipped a small, specially treated piece of white cloth under the pillows—my proof of the night. Even though, as a designated breeder Omega, I wasn’t strictly required to present proof of consummation to the Matriarch or his official mate, my past life had taught me to always leave a backup plan. Even when serving the Alpha Heir, I couldn’t afford to leave any loopholes for my enemies.

Reborn As The Cold Alpha’s Secret Mate novel Chapter 3

SERAPHINA’S POV:
Gideon didn’t say anything as he positioned himself over me. My smile was still plastered on my face, but a second later, it completely vanished.
His posture was rigid, almost more textbook than a medical manual. Those glacial blue eyes held absolutely zero lust or emotion. It made my entire body stiffen.
Wait… do his mates not require any tenderness at all?
I’ve been given a second chance at life. Is it too much to ask to enjoy this at least a little bit?
With that thought in mind, I put on my most affectionate gaze and reached out to grasp Gideon’s large hands.
This was clearly the first time the Alpha Heir had ever been interrupted during his “duty.” He stopped immediately, looking down at me with a mixture of confusion and growing impatience.
“Alpha Heir,” I forced my voice into a syrupy, sweet register—so high and cloying my throat practically burned. “You work so hard for the Pack all day. Let your servant take care of you tonight. I want to… do it myself. Please, indulge me just this once?”
He stared at me without a word, his dark, stormy eyes making it impossible to guess what he was thinking.
Did I piss him off?
Not daring to delay any further, I gave him a seductive smile of thanks and boldly looped my arms around his neck.
He had clearly never seen such aggressive initiative from an Omega before. He froze for a split second, allowing me to slip into his guard. I could almost hear him thinking: What kind of unruly Omega did the Matriarch send me?
He reached out, pinning my shoulders down to stop my movements, his face darkening as he growled softly, “Insolent!”
A flicker of Alpha satisfaction crossed his face as he saw the mist of tears welling up in my eyes.
I let out a tiny, exaggerated shudder at his bark, stopping my movements instantly and staring up at him like a frightened little deer. But a second later, I brazenly grabbed his hand again.
“What are you doing?” he snapped.
I looked up at him innocently, laughing inwardly. Sure enough, a man’s fingers are always sensitive, and this Alpha Heir is no exception.
I immediately swapped my expression to one of absolute, starry-eyed worship, cooing in my most delicate, breathy voice, “Alpha Heir, the outsiders always say you rely on the Matriarch’s power for your status. But feeling the thick calluses on your knuckles and fingertips… I know you earned all your glory through your own blood, sweat, and battles!”
Being looked at with such sheer adoration clearly stroked his ego. I could see the subtle shift in his demeanor—he felt validated, yet he kept his face stern and scolded, “Speak properly. Do not try to curry favor.”
“Yes~” I purred, dragging the word out with enough twists and turns to make an Alpha’s bones itch.
Looking into my wide, innocent eyes, Gideon seemed to know damn well I was doing it on purpose. Annoyed, but undeniably aroused, he crashed his lips down to silence my mouth.
Seeing that my tactic worked, I immediately took the initiative. I have to admit, the experience turned out much better than I had initially expected.
When it was over, I lay on the massive bed with a hidden look of disgust. If I sleep on this overly ornate, stiff bed all night, I’ll wake up with a sore back. I’m just here to do a job, not to play true love with the Alpha Heir. Whoever wants to suffer this bed can have it.
Thinking of this, I dutifully crawled out from under the covers, dressed myself quickly, and grabbed my proof of the night. I gave Gideon a flawless, respectful bow. “Alpha Heir, I will not disturb your rest any longer. I shall take my leave.”
Without waiting for his response, I turned and walked out.
My swift departure seemed to catch Gideon completely off guard. As I walked away, I knew I had likely shattered whatever preconceived notions he had about me. He probably thought I was just another well-trained Omega sent by his mother, expecting me to be like those ambitious females who always begged to stay the night after the act, or worse, ignored his exhaustion to demand a second round just to secure favor. By leaving gracefully, I had spared him that annoyance, perhaps even earning his silent forgiveness for my earlier “unruly” behavior.
Honestly, I didn’t care at all about Gideon’s attitude toward me. The mission was accomplished, and I just wanted a good night’s sleep.
I hurried back to the modest servant’s quarters assigned to me, scrubbed myself clean with warm water, and collapsed onto my own bed, limbs spread wide like a starfish.
I calculated in my head: With this, I won’t have to worry about failing the Matriarch’s inspection tomorrow. My position in the Pack is secure for now.
I let out a long sigh, my tense nerves finally relaxing, and fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.
That was, until the early hours of the morning, when a maid named Daisy frantically shook me awake.
“Seraphina, wake up! It’s time to go to the main estate and pay your respects to the Luna!”

👉 CONTINUE READING

August 16, 2026
Mr. Billionaire, Your Madness Belongs To Me! by wheat globe

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When Natalie’s hearing returned, betrayal was the devastating truth waiting for her.

She repaid the cheating pair with sharp slaps, then took her sister’s place in an arranged marriage.

Her groom, Nathan, was rumored to be frail, vicious, and unable to satisfy a woman.

Their wedding night, however, demolished every warning when he pinned her against the glass and challenged the rumor himself. Three relentless days proved the gossip laughably wrong.

Later, her groveling ex begged her back. Nathan asked for a knife to deal with the “pest.”

Everyone saw a monster. Natalie alone knew his madness hid a love that burned only for her.

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Mr. Billionaire, Your Madness Belongs To Me! Chapter 1 I’ve Changed My Mind

“You seriously brought your adopted sister home, Ryan? What do you think Natalie will do when she finds out?”

For the first time in a year, Natalie Phillips could hear clearly again. She stood outside the club’s private room when those words reached her. The smile disappeared from her face, and she suddenly couldn’t move.

Caylee Edwards had returned?

“If none of you says anything, Natalie won’t know,” Ryan Edwards replied without concern. “Caylee has been away for more than a year, and she wanted to come home.”

“She didn’t miss home. She missed you.”

Knowing laughter broke out among the people inside.

“Stop talking nonsense. Caylee is my sister.”

“Your sister? Come on, Ryan. I watched her kiss you earlier, and there was nothing sisterly about it. She acted more like your girlfriend!”

Ryan frowned. “She surprised me, and it was over before I had a chance to stop her. Caylee is still young, so she doesn’t always understand where the boundaries are. I’m not going to turn one foolish kiss into a serious issue.”

Then Ryan seemed to remember something, and a warning entered his voice. “Nobody mentions this again. Natalie will arrive soon, so be careful what you say around her.”

Someone cleared his throat before asking in a sober tone, “You’re honestly going to ignore what happened, Ryan? Caylee paid someone to run Natalie over. Natalie nearly lost her life, and she still hasn’t regained her hearing.”

“Caylee was only nineteen at the time,” Ryan responded coldly. “She acted without thinking and made one honest mistake. She was overseas for an entire year, and she has already suffered the consequences. She won’t do it again, so why are we still talking about it?”

One honest mistake?

Disbelief swept through Natalie as she listened from the hallway.

Nothing about his excuse made sense to her.

One year ago, Caylee’s obsession with Ryan had taken a violent turn. His rejection had pushed her over the edge, and she hired someone to strike her with a car. That crash had taken her hearing from her.

Back then, Ryan had been furious beyond reason. His punishment left Caylee so badly injured that she nearly died. Eventually, his parents intervened and arranged for her to be sent overseas.

Throughout the following year, Ryan spent an enormous amount of money bringing specialists from every corner of the world to treat her hearing loss. He even stepped away from his career so he could remain with her throughout the entire recovery.

Months of treatment brought her unbearable pain and exhaustion. Whenever she felt too overwhelmed to continue, Ryan would become teary-eyed. He always pulled her into his arms and whispered that he wanted Caylee dead for destroying her life.

For a long time, she had carried nothing but bitterness over what happened. Still, she had seen Ryan travel anywhere necessary to find the right doctors, and he had never left her side through all those difficult days and nights.

Somewhere in her heart, she had begun to believe that despite everything she had suffered, she had at least found a man who truly treasured her.

Her hand moved to the small velvet box inside her pocket before she even realized what she was doing.

Hidden inside was a custom-made ring for Ryan that she had secretly ordered.

Their wedding had faced one delay after another because of that pointless tragedy.

With her hearing restored, she had believed she could finally marry Ryan and begin the life she had waited so long for. Instead, he had welcomed Caylee home and dismissed everything she had done as though forgiveness should come easily.

What a cruel joke.

While resentment settled in her chest, a sudden vibration came from the phone inside her pocket.

Several minutes passed before Natalie regained enough composure to check the screen. Kathleen Phillips had sent her another lengthy message. Her mother repeated the same request as before and begged her to return to Klimery. She wanted Natalie to replace her stepsister Aimee Phillips in an arranged marriage.

Only an hour had passed since Kathleen sent the first message, yet this was already her second attempt to reach Natalie.

Marriage was supposed to unite the Phillips and the Warren families, but Aimee had somehow escaped rather than honor the arrangement.

Within Klimery, few families could rival the Warrens in wealth or influence. Nathan Warren was the man chosen to marry Aimee, and rumors painted him as someone merciless enough to ruin anyone who crossed him.

Once Nathan learned that the Phillips family planned to abandon the engagement and humiliate him, nothing could stop him from destroying them in a single night.

Out of options, Kathleen finally called Natalie and pleaded, “Natalie, Robert and I don’t know what else to do. Please come back and save our family. I’m begging you.”

Years earlier, Kathleen had married Robert Phillips with Natalie beside her. Never once during all that time had her mother begged her for help.

Although her stepfather had treated them reasonably well, she understood how much effort her mother had spent earning a secure position in that household. Nearly all her mother’s attention had gone toward caring for her husband and Aimee over the years.

For that reason, she had always behaved exactly as Kathleen expected and had done everything possible to avoid causing problems.

Only twice had she ever gone against her mother, and Ryan had been the reason both times.

The first time happened years ago when Natalie left Klimery alone to be with him.

The second happened earlier that day when she refused to take Aimee’s place at the wedding because she still planned to marry him.

Thinking back on her reply to Kathleen brought a weak and bitter smile to Natalie’s face. She had proudly announced that her hearing had returned and that Ryan loved her more than anyone else. Natalie had also promised they would marry soon and insisted that he would help settle the Phillips family’s crisis.

Her faith in Ryan had been absolute.

Pain tightened around Natalie’s heart when she closed her eyes. Her fingers gripped the ring box inside her pocket, while she struggled to keep the ache in her throat from breaking into a sob.

Reality had finally shown itself. The everlasting devotion she trusted and the love that had become the center of her life were nothing more than lies. One painful discovery had torn the entire illusion apart.

Looking back, she could no longer tell which tender moments had been genuine. Had Ryan cared for her because he loved her, because guilt drove him, or simply because he wanted others to believe he was devoted?

After drawing a steady breath, Natalie entered her answer one word at a time. “Mom, I’ve changed my mind. I’ll take Aimee’s place and marry Nathan Warren.”

Mr. Billionaire, Your Madness Belongs To Me! Chapter 2 She Can’t Hear Anything We Say

Once the message went through, Natalie pushed open the private room door.

Every conversation ended at the same time, and the laughter vanished with it.

Dim lights cast a hazy glow across the room. Cigarette smoke, liquor, and heavy perfume had blended into a stale odor that filled the air.

Several sharply dressed men and women occupied the room. Some sat while the others stood, but every one of them looked toward the entrance.

Natalie stopped at the edge of the light. Her long gown followed the graceful lines of her slim body, while the soft glow made her skin appear almost radiant.

Usually, her beautiful eyes shone with warmth and energy. Tonight, however, something dark concealed every emotion behind them.

Ryan sat in the middle of the sofa with a clear view of the entrance. Smoke rose from the cigarette between his fingers and drifted across the sharp angles of his face.

Before anyone else could react, Ryan noticed her and briefly panicked. Then he saw that her hearing aids were missing, and the strain left his body. He rose from the sofa and walked toward her while signing, “Baby, why did you take so long? We’ve all been waiting for you.”

Disgust twisted Natalie’s stomach.

Before she could answer, someone behind her called out, “Well, this looks like quite the party.”

Each word carried a playful sweetness that sounded forced enough to make anyone uncomfortable.

Everyone instinctively turned toward the doorway to see who had interrupted them.

Caylee waited beneath the warm hallway light in a fitted red slip dress. Its high slit revealed nearly the full length of her thigh. Loose waves of hair covered her shoulders, while perfect makeup and bright red lipstick completed her striking appearance.

She rested against the doorframe and slowly surveyed everyone in the room. When her attention reached Ryan, a secretive smile appeared on one side of her mouth.

Something changed in Ryan’s expression. Natalie’s failure to react convinced him that she couldn’t hear anything, and some of his unease faded. After facing Caylee, he spoke quietly. “Why did you come in here? I told you to stay in the room next door.”

Every trace of tension in his voice reached Natalie clearly.

Caylee laughed. “I didn’t want to be so far away from you. I’ll just stay near the doorway for a little while. Natalie won’t know I’m here unless she turns around, and she can’t hear what we’re saying. So why are you acting so nervous?”

Her words helped everyone in the room relax.

Someone muttered in agreement, “Shit, I completely forgot she can’t hear us. She nearly scared me to death!”

“Exactly. For one second, I thought everything was about to come crashing down.”

Soon, everyone stopped caring about what they said around Natalie, and their voices took on a cruel, mocking edge.

Natalie curled both hands into tight fists beside her body. Her fingernails dug so deeply into her palms that the sharp pain became impossible to ignore.

Each word cut into her.

She could hear them.

Every single word.

Caylee’s smile became even more pleased as she lifted her voice. “You can’t hear me, can you, Natalie? That terrible crash failed to kill you, but at least it left you deaf. How tragic.”

“Knock it off,” Ryan snapped in a low, stern voice. He glanced nervously at Natalie and seemed afraid that she might somehow understand what they were saying.

His anger didn’t bother Caylee in the slightest, and her grin only widened.

Leaving the doorway, she walked into the room and stopped directly behind Natalie. Affection filled her eyes when she looked at Ryan, and she made sure everyone could hear her. “Weren’t you just worried that Natalie might learn I’d come back, Ryan? You can relax now. She can’t hear anything we say. I could call her a bitch right in front of her, and she still wouldn’t…”

Before Caylee could finish, Natalie turned around and struck Caylee hard across the face.

Every sound inside the room disappeared at once.

Everyone present could only stare at Natalie in disbelief.

What had just happened? Had Natalie heard Caylee? That was impossible. She had lost her hearing.

Mr. Billionaire, Your Madness Belongs To Me! Chapter 3 Her Head Is Bleeding!

Color quickly spread across Caylee’s cheek in the shape of Natalie’s hand.

Disbelief widened her eyes as she pressed one palm against the burning skin. Several seconds passed before she managed to say, “You… You really had the nerve to slap me!”

When Caylee tried to strike back, Natalie reacted first and caught her wrist before the blow could land.

Before Caylee could pull away, Natalie slapped her across the face again.

Its force snapped Caylee’s head sideways, while her carefully arranged curls tumbled loose and covered part of her face.

Even after being struck twice, Caylee remained frozen in shock and seemed unable to understand what had happened.

Inside the private room, nobody dared make a sound.

Everyone stared at the two women without blinking.

Ryan recovered before the others, though he didn’t move from his place. Alarm briefly crossed his face.

Had Natalie’s hearing returned?

Unease jolted his heart, and his attention shifted toward the liquor cabinet without conscious thought.

Warm light from the wall sconces reflected across the cabinet’s mirrored doors. Moving shadows passed over the glass.

Of course. Natalie must have spotted Caylee’s reflection in the mirror.

Relief allowed Ryan to breathe again. He still sensed that something wasn’t right, but before he could figure it out, Caylee erupted and screamed, “You bitch! I’m going to rip you apart!”

With her nails pointed toward Natalie’s face, Caylee charged at her.

Both women grappled for control and clawed at each other’s hands.

Natalie’s quicker reflexes gave her the advantage. She seized Caylee by the hair and pulled so hard that Caylee screamed in pain.

“That’s enough!” Ryan roared as he rushed between them. He used one arm to force them apart before grabbing Natalie’s wrist. “Stop fighting. Both of you.”

Caylee immediately took advantage of the opening and lifted her hand once more.

Panic tightened Natalie’s stomach, and she twisted her arm in an attempt to escape Ryan’s grasp.

Ryan’s fingers held her like a steel clamp. No matter how hard she fought, she couldn’t free herself.

Natalie opened her mouth and tried to order him to release her, but only a faint and raspy noise left her throat.

Yesterday’s high fever had somehow restored her hearing, yet it had made her voice disappear.

Desperation drove her to keep trying, yet she couldn’t force out even one clear word.

Her wordless struggle finally made Ryan uncertain, and his grip weakened for the briefest moment.

Caylee’s hand was already flying toward Natalie during that instant of hesitation. Natalie instinctively pulled her head aside. The slap failed to land, but Caylee’s pointed nails still scraped across her cheek and left behind a painful sting.

Blood appeared along the fresh scratches on Natalie’s face, and Ryan froze when he saw it. Then rage took over. He released Natalie’s wrist and shoved Caylee backward. “Caylee, what the hell is wrong with you?!”

The sudden push sent Caylee stumbling several steps until her shoulder struck the liquor cabinet behind her.

A loud crash rang out.

Violence from the impact made the cabinet sway. Several expensive imported bottles tipped over and slid from the shelves. Liquor sprayed everywhere before the bottles shattered against the floor.

Through the confusion and shouting, Ryan rushed toward Caylee and shielded her with his body.

Several bottles crashed against Ryan’s back with heavy thuds while splinters of glass scattered across the room.

Nearby, Natalie barely managed to shield her head and face with both arms before a bottle crashed against her shoulder. Fierce pain tore through her immediately. More bottles followed before she could move away.

Only a weak groan escaped her throat.

One of the blows knocked Natalie onto the floor. Freezing liquor soaked her clothes as small pieces of glass rained over her. Blood trickled from the wound near her temple and blended with the alcohol around her.

Natalie curled into herself while numbness spread through one side of her body. Heavy pain throbbed through her shoulder, back, and the bottom of her skull. Her ears buzzed so loudly that the frightened screams around her became difficult to separate.

“Ryan, help me!” Caylee cried as tears streamed down her cheeks. “My foot hurts so badly…”

Despite the pain in his back, Ryan quickly pushed himself off her. “Where are you hurt? Show me what happened!”

“It’s my ankle… It really hurts…” Caylee whimpered. Tears filled her eyes as she pointed to the injury.

Several glass fragments had sliced her ankle and left behind a few narrow lines of blood. The wounds appeared minor, yet Caylee wept as though her life were in danger.

Not far away, Natalie remained sprawled on the floor while darkness repeatedly swept across her vision.

With trembling fingers, she struggled to raise her left arm toward Ryan. Her lips silently shaped his name, but her voice couldn’t produce a sound.

By then, Ryan had already lifted Caylee into his arms and turned toward the exit.

“Ryan, Natalie looks hurt too,” someone called out while pointing toward the floor.

For a moment, Ryan stopped and looked back over his shoulder.

Still cradled against him, Caylee sniffed and pressed her face against his neck. “Ryan, it hurts so much. What if one of my bones is broken?”

Ryan’s brow tightened before he turned away from Natalie. “One of you stay with her. If she isn’t badly injured, take her home. Caylee needs to get to the hospital now because she has a low tolerance for pain.”

The man who had warned him hesitated and seemed ready to object, but he eventually answered, “Fine.”

Without any hesitation, Ryan hurried out of the private room with Caylee in his arms.

Behind him, his friends traded uneasy looks. Several wanted to approach Natalie, but none seemed willing to take the first step.

“Natalie, can you hear me? Are you able to stand?”

“Man, she’s deaf. Calling out to her won’t help. Does anyone here know sign language?”

“Shit, why would I know how to do that?”

At that point, Natalie’s surroundings had begun to blur, and every voice sounded distant and unclear.

Moving lips surrounded her, but she could no longer understand what anyone was saying.

Blood continued flowing from her forehead and spilled into her eyes until a dark red haze covered everything.

Even the simple act of shaking her head required more strength than she had left.

She could feel nothing except cold.

The chill seemed to rise from somewhere deep within her body.

Soon, the room spun around her, and every person nearby faded into a shapeless shadow.

Then someone cried out, “God, her head is bleeding! There’s blood everywhere!”

Her hearing kept disappearing before briefly returning again.

Darkness closed around Natalie and grew heavier with each passing second. Before long, she could barely keep her eyelids open.

“Call an ambulance right now!”

“Damn it, why won’t Ryan answer his phone?”

👉 CONTINUE READING

August 13, 2026
Chosen as the Cursed Alpha’s Seventh Bride by Alibi

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Emilia Taylor was the most unwanted daughter of the Frostridge Pack.
She had no wolf, no status, and no one who truly loved her. After failing to awaken at the age of twenty-two, she was betrayed by her lover, abandoned by her family, and finally sent by her father to the Silver Moon Pack-to become Sebastian Simons’ seventh bride.
Sebastian was the Alpha everyone feared.
Rumor had it that none of his first six wives had met a good end, and every woman who married him eventually became another name on the list of the dead.
Everyone was waiting for Emilia to die.
But they did not know that her failed awakening had not left her with nothing. Instead, she had gained the ability to read minds. She could hear the malice and lies hidden behind every smile.
Everyone’s thoughts were open to her.
Except Sebastian’s.
She could not hear his mind, nor could she see through his secrets.
When a wolfless girl abandoned by everyone meets a cold-blooded Alpha haunted by the mystery of six dead wives, will she become his next victim-or the only one who can break the curse?

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Chosen as the Cursed Alpha’s Seventh Bride Chapter 1

Wolfless But Mind Reader
Emilia’s POV
For a very long time, I had believed that pain was something a person could grow used to, the same way one grew used to winter wind slipping through cracked windows or old scars aching before rain.
In the Frostridge pack, I was not simply disliked. I was considered an error that had somehow survived birth.
My father was Alpha Henry, but being his daughter had never protected me, because my mother had been a witch, and in a pack that worshiped pure wolf blood above almost everything else, my mixed blood became a crime no one needed to prove before punishing me for it.
When I was younger, I used to wonder if they would have treated me differently if my wolf had awakened early, if I had shifted beneath the moon like every other Alpha-blooded child was expected to do, if my claws had been sharp enough and my howl loud enough to make them forget the witch half of me.
But year after year, nothing came.
Hybrid.
Bastard.
Curse.
The words followed me through the halls of the pack house, across the training field. My stepsister Linda was even better at it; she never needed to raise her hand when she could turn an entire room against me with one sweet, pitying glance.
By the time I turned twenty-two, I had already learned how to lower my eyes when elders looked at me with disgust, how to ignore the servants who whispered that I was cursed, and how to pretend my stepmother Dorothy’s gentle smile did not hurt more than open cruelty because it always came before she reminded me, in the softest possible voice, that I should be grateful the pack still allowed me to stay.
The only reason I had not completely collapsed under all of it was Brandon Cole.
He had been my hope for so long that I no longer knew how to separate him from the idea of survival itself.
Brandon was the strongest young warrior in our pack, handsome, admired, and respected in a way I had never been.
“When she comes, Emmy,” he used to whisper, brushing his lips over my scars as if they were something precious instead of proof of every punishment I had endured, “everyone who looked down on you will regret it.”
So I waited.
I waited through my eighteenth birthday, when most wolves shifted for the first time and I felt nothing but silence beneath my skin. I waited through nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one, while the pack’s disappointment hardened into mockery and my father’s eyes grew colder each time he looked at me. I waited until my twenty-second birthday, the final night a werewolf could still awaken before being declared permanently defective.
Tonight was my last chance.
Under the full moon, surrounded by wolves who had gathered less to witness my awakening than to enjoy my final failure, I stood barefoot in the ritual circle and forced myself not to tremble. The silver bowl before me reflected the moonlight, the elder’s chant rose and fell like distant thunder, and somewhere beyond the crowd, Brandon watched me with an expression I wanted desperately to believe was love.
Then the ritual ended.
Nothing happened.
A few wolves laughed.
My stepmother sighed as if my failure had personally inconvenienced her, Linda lowered her eyes to hide the smile pulling at her lips, and my father turned away before the elder even announced what everyone already knew.
That would be the worst pain of the night.
But I was wrong.
As I stepped out of the ritual circle, something sharp split through my skull, and a flood of voices crashed into me all at once.
[What a waste of moonlight.]
[I knew she wouldn’t shift.]
[Brandon must be tired of pretending by now.]
I froze.
No one’s mouth had moved.
The wolves around me were still laughing, whispering, staring, but beneath their spoken words came another layer of sound-clearer, uglier, impossible to ignore.
Their thoughts.
Panic tightened around my throat as I stumbled back, pressing a hand against my temple while the pack’s hidden cruelty poured into me without mercy. Every smile had a second voice. Every pitying glance carried a knife. They had hated me more deeply than I had ever allowed myself to imagine.
I needed Brandon.
I needed the one person who had always made the noise of the pack feel far away.
But as I pushed through the crowd, desperate to find him, a maid passed close enough for her thoughts to slice through the chaos.
[Brandon followed Linda into her room again. Goddess, I swear, if I have to wait for them to finish and then scrub another set of destroyed sheets, I’m going to lose it.]
My body stopped moving.
For one heartbeat, the entire world went silent.
Then my blood turned cold.
I grabbed the maid’s wrist so hard she cried out.
“What did you say?”
Her eyes widened in terror. “Miss Emilia, I didn’t say anything.”
She was telling the truth.
Her lips had not moved.
But I had heard her.
A terrible numbness spread through me as I released the maid and turned toward the pack house. I did not remember crossing the courtyard, climbing the stairs, or passing the servants who stepped out of my way with startled faces and guilty minds. I only remembered the pounding of my heart and the foolish, desperate prayer repeating inside me.
Please be wrong.
Please let this be the one thought I misunderstood.
Please let him still be mine.
When I reached Linda’s door, I already knew.
I pushed the door open.
The scene before me was worse than any nightmare.
The bed creaked rhythmically, obscene sounds spilling.
Brandon-my Brandon-was naked, his body moving over someone sprawled beneath him on the bed. Linda’s long legs wrapped around his waist, her nails raking down his back as she moaned his name.
My sister. My boyfriend.
In that moment, I didn’t feel pain. I felt nothing. Just a hollow, echoing void where my heart should have been.
Then their thoughts crashed into my mind like broken glass.
[God, she’s so much better than Emilia. Tighter. More responsive. How did I waste many years on that frigid wolfless bitch?] Brandon’s voice, clear in my head even as his mouth was occupied elsewhere.
[Look at her standing there like a pathetic little ghost. Does she really think Brandon ever loved her? Please. He’s been mine since the day I decided I wanted him.] Linda’s thoughts dripped with venom and smug satisfaction.
The numbness shattered.
Rage-pure, incandescent fury-flooded through me.
I grabbed the vase from the dresser near the door and hurled it at the wall beside the bed. It exploded with a satisfying crash.
They jerked apart, Linda screaming, Brandon scrambling to cover himself.
“Emilia!” Brandon’s face went white. “This isn’t-I can explain-“
“Explain?” My voice came out low and deadly calm. “Explain how you’ve been fucking my sister for three months while telling me you loved me?”
His jaw dropped. “How did you-“
“Does it matter?” I stepped into the room, my hands clenched into fists.
Linda sat up, not bothering to cover herself, a cruel smile playing on her lips. “Oh, please. Don’t act so surprised, Emilia. Did you really think someone like Brandon would settle for a wolfless freak like you?”
[She’s even more pathetic than I thought. Look at her, about to cry. This is delicious.]
I moved before I could think. My hand connected with Brandon’s cheek with a crack that echoed through the room.

Chosen as the Cursed Alpha’s Seventh Bride Chapter 2

Sent to the Demon
Emilia’s POV
Brandon staggered back, hand flying to his reddening face. “What the fuck-“
The second slap hit even harder.
“That’s for lying to me for a year,” I said, my voice shaking with fury. “For making me believe you cared about me. For being a fucking coward who couldn’t even break up with me before shoving your dick into my sister.”
“You crazy bitch!” Brandon lunged toward me, but I was already moving.
I grabbed Linda’s designer purse from the nightstand and flung it at his head. It connected with a satisfying thud.
“We’re done,” I said coldly. “Don’t ever speak to me again. Don’t look at me. Don’t even breathe in my direction. You disgust me.”
I turned to Linda, whose smirk had finally faltered.
“And you. Congratulations. You’ve won the grand prize-a cheating coward with a small dick and no future. I hope you’re very happy together.”
I didn’t wait for a response. I spun on my heel and walked out, slamming the door behind me hard enough to rattle the frame.
My father’s office was on the first floor. I stormed through the hallways, ignoring the curious stares of lingering guests, my heart hammering against my ribs.
I didn’t bother knocking. I shoved the door open.
Alpha Henry sat behind his desk, Dorothy perched on the edge beside him. They both looked up, startled.
“Emilia,” my father began. “What are you-“
“Did you know?” I demanded, my voice raw from everything I had just swallowed and everything I could no longer pretend not to understand. “Did you know Brandon was cheating on me with Linda?”
Alpha Henry only leaned back in his chair and looked at me with the tired impatience.
“Sit down, Emilia.”
“No.”
My answer was sharper than I expected, and the silence that followed made Dorothy lift her brows.
“Did you know?” I asked again.
This time, my father did not bother to lie.
“Yes.”
The word hit harder than finding Brandon in Linda’s bed.
“You knew,” I whispered.
“Brandon is a talented warrior,” my father said coldly, as if that explained everything. “He is one of the most promising wolves in this generation, and the pack has invested too much in him to waste his future on sentiment.”
For a moment, I could only stare at him, because I had come into this room expecting anger, perhaps even disappointment, but not this calm, practical cruelty that treated my heartbreak as nothing more than poor strategy.
Then he said the thing he had clearly been waiting to say.
“You failed your Awakening.”
The room went still.
“You were given twenty-two years, Emilia,” he continued, his voice hardening with each word. “and yet after all that time, you are still standing here exactly as you began.”
[Wolfless.]
[Useless.]
[Unwanted.]
He did not need to say the words aloud.
I heard them anyway.
“So that’s it?” I asked, my throat tightening around the question. “Because I didn’t shift, Brandon gets to betray me, Linda gets to humiliate me, and you get to pretend none of it matters?”
“Linda has a wolf,” Henry snapped. “Linda has value. Brandon needs a mate who can stand beside him, bear strong heirs, and strengthen this pack. Not you.”
“If I was such a disappointment,” I said slowly, “then why did you have me at all?”
His expression changed. “Watch your tone.”
“No,” I said, and once the word left me, everything I had buried for years began to rise with it. “If you hated my mother so much, why chose her? If you hated what I was, why let me live here for twenty-two years begging for scraps of approval you never planned to give me?”
Dorothy’s face cooled. “That is enough.”
Henry slammed his hand against the desk. The sound cracked through the office.
“I chose this pack.”
That was when I saw the black envelope.
Dorothy picked it up from the desk with graceful fingers and placed it where I could see the silver wax seal pressed into the paper.
The Simons crest.
My blood turned cold before she even spoke.
“Linda received an invitation from the Simons family,” Dorothy said gently, and the sweetness in her voice made my stomach twist. “But after discussing it carefully, your father and I have decided that you will attend in her place.”
For a few seconds, I could not make sense of the words, because the Simons family was not merely powerful or wealthy; they were feared, whispered about, avoided by every family with daughters old enough to marry.
And Alpha Sebastian Simons was the worst of them.
Six brides.
Six funerals.
“You want me to replace Linda,” I said, each word colder than the last, “because you’re afraid he will kill her.”
“No one said that,” Dorothy replied.
But my father’s thoughts moved through my mind with brutal clarity.
[Linda is too valuable to risk.]
“It is a duty,” my father corrected. “The Simons alliance can save Frostridge pack.”
“And if I die?”
Neither of them answered.
They did not need to.
My father’s thoughts answered for them.
[If she dies, we lose nothing.]
For a moment, the office seemed to disappear around me, and all I could feel was the horrible clarity of finally knowing my place in this family, not as a daughter, not even as a shame they wished to hide, but as a body they could send into danger because no one would mourn the loss.
I stepped back.
“No.”
Henry’s eyes narrowed. “Emilia.”
“No,” I repeated, louder this time. “I won’t go.”
His Alpha aura filled the room, heavy enough to press against my bones. “You have spent your entire life receiving this pack’s mercy. Now you will repay it.”
“Mercy?” I laughed, though my chest felt like it was breaking open. “You call this mercy?”
“I call it obedience.”
Then he looked past me.
“Guards.”
The door opened before I could reach it, and two warriors seized my arms from behind with enough force to make pain shoot through my shoulders.
I kicked, twisted, screamed, and when one of them dragged me backward, I sank my teeth into his wrist with every bit of rage I had left.
He cursed, his grip loosened.
For one wild second, I was free.
Then something slammed into the back of my head.
Pain burst white behind my eyes, the floor tilted beneath me, and as darkness began to drag me under, I heard my father’s thoughts one last time, calm and relieved in a way his voice had never been.
[Finally.]
[That problem is taken care of.]
The dark closed in.
And in the last fading corner of my mind, I understood.
No one in Frostridge pack expected me to survive.
They had already abandoned me to death.

Chosen as the Cursed Alpha’s Seventh Bride Chapter 3

Bride Selection
Emilia’s POV
The scent of roses and expensive perfume hit me first.
My eyes fluttered open to find myself staring at an ornate ceiling with intricate moldings. The bed beneath me was obscenely soft.
Where the hell was I?
I sat up too quickly. My head spun, the sedative still clinging to my system. The room around me was massive-easily twice the size of my bedroom back at the Frostridge pack house. Everything screamed wealth: silk curtains, marble floors, a chandelier that looked like it belonged in a palace.
Then I caught sight of myself in the full-length mirror across the room.
They’d dressed me up like a doll.
My hair cascaded down my back in soft waves, and my makeup highlighted my best features. My eyes looked deeper, my lips fuller, and my reflection almost felt unfamiliar.
The navy silk dress fit me perfectly, elegant and flattering, making it impossible to look away.
I looked gorgeous.
I looked like a bride being prepared for slaughter.
Of course they made me pretty. Can’t send damaged goods to the devil himself.
My father had held that elaborate birthday ceremony not out of love, but as a public display-proof that he’d treated both daughters equally. Then he could ship me off to Sebastian Simons with a clear conscience, his reputation intact.
Linda got Brandon. I got a death sentence.
He’d probably started planning this the moment my wolf failed to emerge.
A sharp knock at the door.
“Miss Taylor?” A woman’s voice. “Alpha Sebastian’s selection will begin shortly. Please follow me.”
My stomach dropped. This was really happening.
I opened the door to find a middle-aged woman in a black uniform. She looked me up and down with cold assessment.
The Frostridge pack must really be desperate, her thoughts hit me. Sending a wolfless embarrassment to Alpha Sebastian. Do they think we’re idiots?
The malice in her thoughts made my jaw clench. But I kept my expression calm, following her down a hallway that seemed to stretch forever.
The mansion was even more impressive than my room suggested-a sprawling estate that mixed modern luxury with old-world elegance. We passed floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking manicured gardens, walls lined with what I suspected were original Renaissance paintings.
As we walked through the double doors, the noise hit me.
Not sound-thoughts.
Dozens of them, all at once, crashing into my mind like a tidal wave.
I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. Marrying a notorious demon. My life is over.
He might be violent, but his marriages never last long. Two months tops, then divorce. But that severance package… eighteen million dollars and the status of being a Simons? Worth the risk.
Oh God, she’s gorgeous. If that wolfless bitch gets chosen instead of me, I swear I’ll-
My father’s going to kill me if I don’t get selected. The pack needs this alliance. I have to make him notice me.
The thoughts overlapped, tangled, multiplied. It felt like a thousand bees had nested inside my skull, their buzzing growing louder and louder until I couldn’t tell where one thought ended and another began.
My vision blurred. The hallway tilted.
I pressed a hand against the wall, trying to steady myself, but the thoughts kept coming, relentless and overwhelming.
Why is she touching the wall? Is she going to faint? Pathetic.
The guide’s thoughts cut through the chaos, sharp with disdain.
“Miss Taylor?” Her voice sounded distant, underwater. “Are you quite alright?”
I couldn’t answer. My throat had closed. My lungs refused to expand. The edges of my vision darkened as panic clawed up my chest.
*Breathe, *I commanded myself desperately. Just breathe.
But the voices in my head wouldn’t stop. They grew louder, angrier, more frantic.
A waiting area, with at least thirty women, all dressed to perfection, all wearing varying expressions of fear and determination.
The receiving room doors burst open.
A woman stumbled out, makeup streaked down her face, shoulders shaking with sobs. As she rushed past me, her thoughts slammed into mine with devastating clarity.
I’ve never met such a cruel, heartless Alpha in my life. The way he looked at me-like I was dirt. Like I was nothing. God, I just want to go home. I want to disappear. I want-
She was gone before I could process it, but two more women followed in quick succession, each one crying, each one broadcasting their terror and humiliation directly into my brain.
Monster. He’s a monster.
Those eyes. Those cold, empty eyes. Like a predator deciding whether to kill you now or later.
I’m not pretty enough. I’m not smart enough. I’ll never be enough for someone like him.
I doubled over, pressing my palms against my temples, trying desperately to shut them out. But I couldn’t. The ability was too new, too raw. I had no control.
“Miss Taylor!” The guide’s hand gripped my elbow, steadying me. “You’re next. Pull yourself together.”
I forced my head up, blinking away the spots dancing across my vision.
Two guards flanked the entrance, massive wolves who watched me with undisguised contempt.
*Run, *every instinct screamed. Run now while you still can.
But I’d seen the guards. I’d seen how the estate was locked down tighter than a prison. Even if I made it past them, where would I go? Back to a father who’d drugged and sold me? Back to a sister who’d stolen my boyfriend and laughed about it?
I had nowhere to run. No one to save me.
So I did the only thing I could.
I straightened my spine, lifted my chin, and walked through those doors like I had a choice in any of this.
The receiving room was enormous. But despite its size, the air felt suffocating, pressing down on me from all sides.
And then I saw him.
Sebastian Simons sat in the center of the room on a leather sofa that looked more like a throne. Even seated, his presence dominated the space. Tall. Powerfully built. He radiated the kind of authority that made people instinctively want to kneel.
Dark hair. High cheekbones. A straight nose. Every feature sharp and defined.
His eyes… Green. Piercing. Intense and unforgiving.
Those eyes locked onto mine.
And suddenly, the world went silent.
All the voices-the screaming, buzzing chaos that had been tearing my mind apart-vanished in an instant.
I couldn’t hear his thoughts. Couldn’t sense anything from him except… presence. Weight. Power.
It was the most peaceful silence I’d experienced since this cursed ability had awakened.
And this peace, ironically, came from the very man most likely to kill me.

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August 2, 2026