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Found 329 short novels in Revenge
"I opened my eyes." I sat up so fast the room spun. Light came through heavy curtains. Lavender scent filled the air. I touched my face. Clean. Whole. I was in a bed that did not smell like rot. "Emersyn, you awake?" Brantley Bauer's voice came from the door. "I am," I answered. My throat was raw, but my voice came out steady. I had a name now: Emersyn Bender. It fit the new life that had slid into my chest. "Good. Take it slow." Brantley bowed and left the door open. I swung my...
I learned the truth six months before the college entrance exam. "Grandma saved five thousand for my tuition," Alma told me on the phone. "Don't worry, Davina. As long as Grandma breathes, I'll help you go to school." "I promise I'll study hard," I said. "I won't let you down." "Good girl," she murmured, weak but stubborn. "Don't worry." Then my mother and father said the money was gone. "You're a girl," my mother said that night, chopping vegetables and slamming them into a...
They called me "silly" and they always smiled when they said it. I let them. I learned how to make my face small when the men came through the yard, how to keep my hands busy with the twine for the little yellow flowers. "I like the new sister-in-law," I told myself and chewed the dry bread until it cracked. "Sillynut," my brother snarled from the doorway. "Don't you know when to shut up?" "She makes beautiful rope," I said, pushing the bread into my mouth faster. "She braided one for...
The first breath I remember was thunder. "I was supposed to be dead," I told the maid who wrapped me in blankets in the small room off my father's study. "You were," she whispered, and then she let her hands tremble. "But the midwife said—there's a mark on your face. A tear mole. She said it means—" "That I survived," I finished. I let the word sit like a stone in my mouth. "That I came back." My name is Angelica Barrett. My mother was the daughter of the chancellor. My father is...
"I woke up with someone screaming my name." "Get up, Kaleigh! Don't you dare die on me!" my mother groped at my face like the world might slip away if I stayed quiet. I blinked. My head felt like someone had beaten it with a wooden mallet. Dirt under my nails. A web pressed against my forehead. I tasted iron. "She's breathing! Praise God, she's breathing!" Eleanor Dunlap sobbed and hugged me so hard I almost couldn't breathe. People crowded the yard, faces I did not know and faces I...
I remember the first time I saw the magnolia earrings glinting in the dim room of the Duke's house. They were small, carved in pale stone, as if someone had trapped morning in a pair of buds. "Keep them," the Duke said, and the world tilted. "You must look after them like you would look after a secret," he added, as if the words were the same thing. "I will," I answered, and I meant it from the moment my palms closed around the cool stone. "You're sure you won't be frightened of the...
I still remember the flight number burning on the boarding pass, the storm that pushed us back, and the way the world narrowed to the small, persistent voice in my head that said I would propose at midnight. "I'll be waiting," Ellie said earlier that week. "Don't be late," I told her. "I'll make it worth the wait." The plane touched down at three in the morning. My phone lit up before the cabin lights came on—the caller ID was a name I had not seen for four years: Ellie...
I do not begin with panic. "No," I say, and my voice is level, "keep going. Don't break custom for me." "Keep going?" Quincy Kristensen's fingers, which are cold as carved ivory, close on the silk at my face. He pulls the red veil away like he is tearing a curtain from a stage. "You should not," someone murmurs in the hall, a hush spreading like incense smoke. "Why not?" Quincy asks, and he looks at me as if he has just read a mistake in a ledger. I lift my chin. "Because the...
Part One — You and Only You I was Lydia Blake. Three years of college. Three years of quiet, foolish worship. Three years of collecting courage and excuses and phone numbers that led me here: a rumor on the confession board and a dozen laughing comments tagging the one who had lived in my chest like a crystal idol. "—Isn't that Lydia Blake? @Frederick Fontaine, come see, someone's stealing your girl!" someone posted. I looked at the comments, shut my phone, and let the silence gather...
I woke up to bright white lights and a voice that said, "Sofia, you can breathe now." "Where am I?" I croaked, my throat raw. "You're safe," Drake said, hands steady on my shoulders. "You're home." "You—" I tried to hold the name, but the room blurred. "Drake?" He didn't answer like I expected. He only held me like a man afraid the world would blow me away if he let go. "You're tired," Jaelynn whispered somewhere behind him while someone lifted a towel for me. "You get cleaned....
"I can't breathe," I say, and the snow bites my cheeks. They're shouting. Someone throws an egg. Someone else spits a smear of vegetable on my sleeve. "Shame her! Shame her!" a woman screams. I try to tear the cloth from my mouth. "I'm not—" I can't say the words. My mouth is full of rags. "She wanted my husband!" the woman next to me roars. "She wanted my man!" "Stop!" a man's polished shoe lands at my head. "We won't have such shame here." A dozen hands. A dozen...
The metal cold bit into my wrist and the sound of the handcuff closing was louder than I expected. "Do you ever love me?" he asked, his chin tilted up as if waiting for a verdict. I tapped his cheek with the pads of my fingers like a joke. "No." "Enjoy your prison food then, my dear first-class merit," he murmured, and I laughed in the dark. The next morning, he vanished. "Joaquin Dorsey is gone," Cedric said, and the words slid off the meeting table like a dropped plate. "Guard...
"I am Imani Buck," I said when the front gate split and Calder Byrd, muddy from a campaign, rode in with a woman whose belly rounded like a soft moon. "Who is this?" He dismounted, head bowed as if the dirt could swallow him whole. "Imani," he said, voice small for a man used to shouting over banners, "this is Clementine." Clementine Hartmann stood straight under the arch of the hall, hands folded over herself with the calm of someone who had already learned how to take the stage. Lauren...
I remember the smell of dung and wet straw first, before the rest of the world shaped itself around me. "It smells awful," she said the first time I saw her, and her voice was small but stubborn, like a bird not yet frightened into silence. "Does it always smell like this?" "It smells like horses," I answered. "It smells like work." She tilted her head as if that made everything clearer. "Work can be kind," she said. "If you look carefully." "Do you often look carefully at manure?"...
They read the imperial edict aloud in the main hall, and the chancellor's lady—my stepmother in every meaning but name—rose so fast she sent the tray of incense clattering to the floor. She came at me with a fan in hand and struck my face with the flat of it. "Jaylee Schulze," she spat, "your sister is dead. You will not gloat. You will not pretend to be pleased." I held my cheek where it burned and let the hall watch me collect myself. "Do you think I am pleased?" I asked. "No. I am...
I am a psychologist. My name is Hayes Cline. The woman who stormed into my clinic that afternoon sat without asking, put a cigarette to her mouth with shaking fingers and began carving into the wooden edge of the desk with a pair of scissors. "Mr. Cline," I said, soft as I could. "This is a session. You can't just—" She cut through a sliver of oak and laughed without humor. "I killed him," Antonia Weber said into the smoke. One of my clients sprinted out when she started smashing...
June 9th, day three of the outbreak. The classroom smelled of sweat and fear. Desks had become barricades. Curtains shut out the light. Forty-one faces stared at me like I held the day's only verdict. "I have one sip of water left," Linnea said, voice small. "If anyone really needs—" Belen stood and grabbed the bottle. "Stop fussing," she said. "We don't share with charity cases." I remembered every shove, every insult. I remembered the notes pushed into my bag, the laughs when I...
I stood at the university gate with my palms curled around five hundred yuan. I had worked the afternoon shift at the hotpot place, saved the tip, and thought of Giuseppe Shaw as I folded the bills into my palm. He was there, bent down, voice low and soft. A girl in heels sat on the curb, one ankle twisted, a smear of blood where her heel had rubbed. Her hair hid her face but not the way Giuseppe looked at her — gentle, a tenderness I had never seen reserved for me. I froze. I tucked the...
I killed myself. On New Year’s Eve, when families were together and the city glittered with fake warmth. I thought death would be silence and relief. Instead, I stood beside my own body and a thin man in white and paper asked my name. "What’s your name?" he asked, flipping a long book like a bored librarian. "Gillian Bird," I said. I wanted him to take me away, to file my name and let me be done. I wanted to sleep forever. He looked at the book. He frowned. "You have years left....
1 The world had already decided how my story would end when I crawled out of the mass grave. "They married. Peace returned. The villain was stripped, humiliated, and buried." That was the last line I remembered from the battered book I’d read once in a fever, and that was where people said the story stopped. I did not expect to find him alive. "I can carry him," I said, my voice small to my own ears, but steady. The man between my arms was lighter than I expected, and heavier than my...
