Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 329 short novels in Revenge
I liked to think I knew how to read people. I had worked five years in administration in Beijing, handled office politics and paperwork, and believed I could tell truth from charm. I thought I married a man who believed in logic and fairness. His name was Alexander Cannon, and I loved him. I loved how he listened, how he consulted me when he bought small things, how he joked with me in that soft, earnest way. I called him my reasoning partner, my little philosopher. But one month after our...
I have kept my voice low for so many years that when it finally rose, it surprised even me. "I am Hudson," I would say to the empty room sometimes, and my own name sounded foreign. "I am the crown's son." My mother, Molly Bradford, wore the palace like a carved jade amulet—beautiful, heavy, and not always warm. My father, Gatlin Zimmerman, sat upon the throne and moved like winter light: necessary, distant, and sharp. They loved their youngest like a weather vane loves wind. Her name was...
"I spat blood onto the floor." The taste of iron filled my mouth. I blinked and the room came back: the cold wood, the thin curtain, the dull light of morning. My body pulse-stepped, and a warm current ran through my veins like a small flood. A voice in my head said, "Countdown complete." "Who—" I tried to speak and coughed another thick mouthful of blood. I pressed my palm to my lips. The blood felt real. The pain in my head eased. The ache in my chest was gone. I laughed, a...
"I remember the number of our dorm: 2406," I said softly. "Why that number?" Clementine asked, stirring her tea. "It stuck," I answered. "It stuck like a bruise." "I still can't believe you invited us here," Carly said, looking at me the way she used to look at strangers on a livestream. "What is this, a reunion?" "It is," I said. "And an ending." "An ending?" Victoria's laugh was quick and cold. "Laurel, you always liked dramatic words." "Then listen," I said. "Listen and...
I woke up in a bridal chamber and could not remember two whole years. "You're awake," my maid said, voice trembling. "Master Elliott asked me to bring your tea." I sat very still, the silk at my wrists cold and unfamiliar. "What day is it?" I asked, my voice small. "Fifteenth day of the tenth month, madam," she whispered. "You were wed two weeks ago." Two weeks ago? I had sleep in a storm and a jolt—three days ago I thought I had woken, but this said two years. I clutched the screen...
I had imagined the reunion a thousand different ways. In every one of them, Ace Simmons would meet me with the same fevered eyes, the same breathless promise he had made when he thought I might die at the edge of a battlefield. "One life, one pair," he’d said — the vow tasted like a warm thing I could hold. I thought he had kept it. "You came back," his voice had said as if those two words were all the world. He had held me as if I were the reed of his breath and thought the wound to my ribs...
"Save her first," he said. I heard those words while the lights above me blurred into a single white pain. I heard them while my world went soft and hollow and the room smelled of metal and cold. I heard him choose. "Of course," he told the surgeon. "Save Jaliyah." I lay on the table and I closed my eyes. They took my kidney. They took my blood. They took my baby's life. Weeks later they took my sight too. My name is Annie Xu. I am twenty-one when the city calls me a liar, a...
I remember the winter the arrow found me. "I held you with blood in my hands," he had said then, voice raw and impossible to read. "Kazuko, I thought I'd lost you." "I thought you would wait," I told him later, when the palace was full of lanterns and faces and the court called me Empress. "I thought you would keep your promise." He clasped me as if he could make the promise flesh again. "I waited three years," Benjamin Mikhaylov said, eyes wet. "I planted pear trees for you. I brewed...
I always planned ahead. "I want the rich, the second-generation rich," I said once to Lenore when we were drinking overpriced lattes after work. "You mean Heath?" she asked, amused. "Yes. Heath Dominguez. Perfect type," I said, smiling like a girl who had already folded the future into neat creases. Lenore laughed. "You're ridiculous, Callie." "I have to be practical," I answered. "Girls like us—my family, where I grew up—practical is survival." I am Callie Martinez. I turned...
"I won't let him touch her again," I said, and I meant the words like a child who has learned one very sharp tool. "Leah." My mother's voice was a thin thing when she said my name. "Do not make this worse." "He deserves worse." I flung the cup. "He deserves—" Marcus White laughed. The sound ate the air in the room like a cold wind. It made the palace girls jump and the eunuchs stiffen. The tea drenched his robe, slid from his shoulder in a dark, angry river. He straightened, droplets...
I remember the first time my father brought her into our main hall, a spare, tidy woman with downcast eyes and hands that never stopped worrying at the sleeve of his coat. “Father,” I said, calm as winter water. “Who is this?” Stan Cannon smiled the way men smile when they think a bargain has been made. “Katherine, meet Greta. She’s your sister now.” Greta Cummings blinked like a frightened bird and murmured, “Fa—father, L-lian is afraid.” Her voice was thin. “Lian is weak.” She sank...
I was forty and tired, and I thought I knew the end of my story. "Leanna, please. For our son," Joel Barker said that night in the courtyard as if gentleness could rewrite a life. He was calm, clean-shaven, the kind of man who could fold a lie into a suit and make it look respectable. "I will give you fifty percent of the company," he said. "Take the money. Take the boy. Let us both be done." "I won't let you steal everything," I told him, breath sharp from the years of scraping...
I remember the winter the world felt hard as old wood and thin as paper. I was eighteen when my mother sold me for five silver coins and the cart rumbled me into Elias Longo’s life. “My girl,” my mother had said as she smoothed the cheap cotton of my only new jacket. “Dani says five coins is what it takes. Don’t blame me. It’s the match or nothing.” Her voice cracked like the cold air. I hid my hands in my sleeves. Frost had cracked the skin between my fingers; they stung and itched. I...
I was paid to be someone else for three years. "You remember the rules," Landon said the night I signed. "You stay. You don't speak out of turn. You take what is given." "I remember," I said. I smiled for him, and for Dylan Marshall, who never learned to smile for me. They called me a keepsake, a comfortable habit. Dylan called me whatever he wanted when he was drunk and soft, and when he was sober he was a businessman with a neat desk and a cold throat. He gave me money and a room and...
I remember the wind chime the way a scar remembers a touch. "Why are you crying now?" Fisher asked, leaning over me like a storm about to break. I kept my chin down, watching the silver little bells sway in the window. Their sound was thin, like a laugh from far away. Each tinkle felt like the shape of my life, knocked hollow. "You said my name," I said, but I didn't look at him. He bent lower, his breath warm on my shoulder. "Esperanza," he murmured. "Tell me." My nails drew...
I never meant to marry a beggar. "I will," I said in the incense-smoke light, "trade my lady's ten years of singleness for one man with eight-pack abs, pleasant voice, total devotion, no concubines, who does the housework, answers every need, vows only me, will help me seize power and even cut down an emperor if needed." "A bold prayer," Ainsley Santos whispered, hands folded so her bracelets chimed like small bells. "And you? What do you really want, Daniela?" "I want marriage," I...
I teach high school literature. I always liked the quiet before the bell — the hush of early mornings when the school feels like a library, when the campus breathes slowly and the world seems manageable. I never thought I would be the center of a neighborhood war. I never thought a few slippers and a playlist could change so much. "It starts with slippers," I told someone later, because it did. Simple, quiet gestures can cause enormous ripples. One weekend, after three nights of sleep...
I always thought the worst thing that could happen would be losing someone. I never imagined losing someone and finding a copy in their place. "It’s ready," my mother said, carrying the tray into the kitchen. Her voice was the voice I knew better than any other. The clatter of bowls sounded normal. The light from the window painted the rice white. "You made liver?" I frowned and pushed my chair back. "You know I can't stand liver." She smiled and put a slice on my plate. "Eat. You’re...
I held the thin diagnosis sheet at the hospital gate and watched the sunset bruise the sky. I wanted to call Lucas, but my thumb hovered and then withdrew. His name was the first on my phone. "Bea," his voice came, as always low and steady, kinder than usual. "I have something tonight. I might be late. Eat early, okay?" "Okay," I said. Short and as ordinary as the evening light. He clicked off. The line went dead. My throat closed around the small, heavy secret. I had loved him for...
I remember the first time I realized home could be a stairway that only went up for someone else. "My feet are cold at night," Kaelynn said once, soft and small, like a wish that always seemed to come true for her. "Then ask Mom to buy a warmer blanket," I said, and I meant it as a suggestion. I didn't know then that her words would make me trade a proper room for a storage closet. "Mom," Kaelynn called from the bedroom one evening when I was ten, "Lainey snores. I can't...
