Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 329 short novels in Revenge
I learned early that keeping my hands busy kept my mouth safe. Sitting under the same old tree at the village entrance, my knife-blunt fingers traced tiny curls on a scrap of wood while the sun baked the road. The woodpile at my feet was almost done—small pieces, little birds waiting to be born from my blade—and the chatter came like clockwork. "Greta, here so early?" Joan called from the path, the red scarf at her throat bobbing. Her smile was all warmth and teeth. I smiled back....
I never wanted the palace. I wanted the cold wind of the northern plain in my face, the clank of armor, the smell of damp earth and hot iron. I wanted a sword that answered when I called it. I wanted to stand where the maps started and the maps also feared. "I know," Tristan said then, smiling with the careless softness that used to unsettle me. "But the court needs you." "I did what I needed far from the court," I answered. "I don't belong behind silk." He lifted a box, the kind with...
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 found out I was pregnant two months before our wedding. "Are you sure?" Dillon asked, holding the test like it was a fragile promise. "It showed two lines," I said, and watched the way his face went soft, like melting butter. "Yes. It's real." He laughed and kept saying the same thing. "This is real? This is real?" "Yes," I said, because I wanted him to hear it again. We went to the hospital the next day, and the doctor confirmed it: heartbeat, tiny moving, not just two lines...
I am a DNA analyst. My name is Journi Perrin, and I have hands that know how to read blood and bone like a map. "Journi," my cousin Claudia Moller said the first day she came to my little lab, "please, I'm begging you. Don't ruin my family." "Family?" I asked, sliding a sample tray across to an assistant. "You mean the one with the seventy‑two year old husband and the five‑year‑old boy?" Claudia put her face close to mine and smiled with practiced softness. "Yes. Karim is kind. He...
I wake up with my forehead pressed to cold porcelain and a hospital-scented panic in my nostrils, and the first thing I hear is a hand on my shoulder and a voice that sounds like the worst echo of my past. "Lucia," a younger version of a man I once trusted says in my ear, "just put the same school on your form. Who cares about two hundred points? Our love is worth more than any score." I push my face up from the rim of the tub—no, not a tub now—a hospital bed—and stare at an old...
They told me grief gets quieter with time. They lied. Ten years after the night that tore my life into two halves, a sound I had sworn I would never hear again woke me at midnight: the marimba ringtone. The old phone in the battered leather trunk that smelled of perfume and dust vibrated like a trapped insect. I stared at it, then at Willem. He had stood, the ritual finished, and gone to the kitchen to warm milk—his way of making ritual into motion, as if movement could keep sorrow from...
I met him five years after my world split in two. "I thought you were dead," I said the first time I saw him in a meeting room light. He blinked once, looked at me like I was a small, amusing interruption, and smiled the kind of polite smile that lives in company brochures. "That kind of pick-up is tired, Miss Kenna. Why don't you skip the drama?" My hand found the hollow behind his ear before I even realized what I was doing. A small bump lived there, a familiar ridge I had traced a...
I remember the heat of the blade. "I did what I had to," Xavier said once, his voice flat as a ledger. "For her." He held the knife like a prize. The metal was hot enough that the handle burned his palm. He pressed it into my chest. I felt nothing where he touched. Nothing but a cold, stunned silence where my heart should have hammered. "You will not scream," he said. "I will do it cleanly." "Xavier—" I tried. The name came out as a prayer, not an accusation. He did not look at...
My name is Ariya Evans. I had a steady job offer—thirty thousand a month, benefits, a room to stay in—and a boss with a face like a calm sea. I thought that was love, or at least luck paying off. Then my father's skull was put on a tray and shoved in front of me. I remember the moment I walked through the glass door of Number Seven Café the way you remember the first cold bite of winter: clear and impossible to ignore. "Welcome," the receptionist said, bored enough to make a statue...
"I remember the village women always with swollen middles." "They looked like expectant mothers," I said, "but there were never babies." "They were all supposed to be pregnant," my grandmother said. "We called them 'the waiting women.'" "Why didn't I meet their children?" I asked. "Where did the babies go?" "You were too young to notice," Grandma Harriet Long said. "Or maybe some things are better not seen." "I grew up mostly with Grandma," I told people later. "My mother rarely...
I was told I would not live past eighteen. I was told I carried a curse that would drag everyone close to me into ruin. I am Gillian Robinson, and I lived to learn the meaning of that last sentence. My childhood is a line of missing faces. "My wife won't wake up," my father said once, in a way that meant the rest of the house had already died. Then my mother was gone. Then my older brother drowned. Then my father's business collapsed and the debts came like claws. Then...
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...
I remember the heat first, then his voice. "He will come for her," Pascal murmured as smoke clawed at the rafters. "She will be afraid." "You mean Catherine?" I coughed, the word scraping out of me like dry leaves. "Yes." His answer was a stone. "She will be afraid." I laughed once, a thin dry sound that might have been a cough. "I won't be," I said. "I was already meant to die." The roof fell in on that promise. The temple collapsed, and his shoulder slid out of my reach like...
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 came back the night Rashid Brown was drunk, and Halo Vasiliev was at his side, wiping his face like she belonged there. The house smelled of liquor and leather, and for a second I had to steady myself against the doorway. "Connie," Halo said, low and careful, like she had rehearsed politeness. I smiled and let it be neither warm nor cold. "Yesterday he told his friends he wanted to get married. That meant you, didn't it?" Halo's pretty face went pale. "No—no. You're his girlfriend,...
I am Leilani Conti. "I am the foot-washer's daughter, the one who knelt before our mistress and called her 'Miss' when the sun was harsh and the soles of my feet were raw," I say, and the memory tastes like cold water. "Kirsten," they told me once, "you are my dog." She spat it like a curse. "Know your place." "You'll be married to a good family one day," she promised in other tones—threats braided into false comfort. "If you step out of line, I'll have you paired with a mangy hound....
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...
1 I eased myself into the inner chamber of the Hall of Clear Rule under the thin moonlight and the roof's shadow. The guard by the door saw me and stepped back without a sound. "I brought a light," I whispered as I struck the tinder. "Keep watch." "Yes, Your Majesty." Zeke Benton bowed and left me standing on the threshold. I lit the foreign incense I'd smuggled from the western traders, the kind that smelled like sun-warmed wood and sea salt. The smoke rose slow and blue in the thin...
I still remember the red dress. "I have an appointment," I told the hostess at the door. She took my card and her eyes widened. "Mr. Grayson has arranged a room. Please follow me, Miss." I followed, clutching a black card like a fragile prize. My hands were shaking. "Are you okay, Miss?" the manager asked when he helped me change my shoes. "I'm fine," I whispered. "Thank you." My phone vibrated behind my palm. I answered with my heart in my throat. "Katharine, Grayson is in...
