Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 329 short novels in Revenge
I wake up to the smell of roses and makeup, and for a second my head is a bell ringing. "Miss, are you awake?" the makeup artist asks, her voice soft as satin. "Am I... alive?" I whisper, and the room spins like the last page of a nightmare. "I—" I clutch my temple. Blood and glass flash in my mind. The car. The crash. The cold. "No. No, I died." I bite the inside of my cheek until I stop tasting metal. Memory hits like a slap. My father begged me to sign a paper. He told me it...
I was fourteen when I named him. "Call him what you like," my grandfather said, the old man's voice rough with dust and battle. "He's in our house. Let it be a name that fits." I looked at the small thing they had brought home from the border like a found colt. He stood thin and straight, clothes dark and dusty, pear petals caught in his hair like frost. He made the world seem taller. "I'll name him York Dominguez," I said, and the sound was a small joke, but I meant it. "York—like a...
1 "I married Marcus Dupont when we were five." "No—no, you don't," I said, but my voice was the small, stubborn thing it had always been. "My grandfather arranged it," Father said. "It's decided." Marcus's eyes were calm then, like the surface of water. He handed me a tiny silver lock—his long-life lock—and smiled once, like a rare sunburst. I kept that lock for fifteen years as if it were a map. 2 "I will not be quiet forever," I told my sister one afternoon, handing her a cake I had...
I remember the snow that day like a white shout across the world. "Your Majesty, the princess—" Octavio White began, and everyone in the hall shifted like trapped fish. "She must be married before the year turns," my father, Emperor Abraham Elliott, said. "A good match will settle the house." "Good matches are rare, sire," Galen Evans muttered from where the generals clustered. "Even rarer is a man who will meet the princess on equal footing." "It is settled, then," the emperor...
I woke up to blood. "I turned the tap to wash my face," I said once to no one, "and red came out instead of clear." It started like a small absurd joke, the kind that can either make you laugh or make you panic. I laughed in the bathroom mirror, because I had to. My white shirt hung on the chair, my black shoes sat like two dark promises by the door. I reached for the towel I had used the night before and rubbed at my face. The scent that rose was wrong, like iron and old paper. "You...
I am Isabella Christensen. I was born in the wind and dust beyond the border, and I learned war the way others learn prayer. I kept my father's sword and his forty thousand men. I kept their trust. I kept my silence, until the emperor reached for what was mine. He wrote my fate into ink: marry my army to his son. He thought he could strip my command, stitch me into a court gown, and call the bargain stability. "I would rather burn his silk than be bound by it," I told my brother Beau...
I remember the first time I saw her in the light of the palace courtyard. She was a small, bright shape in peach silk, and the whole court seemed to slow to let her pass. "Your Majesty, this is my sister," our mother said, and her smile softened in a way I had not seen in years. "Come, meet your elder sister," she added, as if that could cover ten years of absence and a dozen secret lessons. I stepped forward and held the girl's hand. "You are unexpectedly lovely," I said. "Peach hues...
The door burst open. "Mother, the city has fallen—" a eunuch's thin voice cracked in the hall and then stopped, like someone had cut a chord. "Which prince?" Henley Huber stood up before she could think, mouth pinched by fear and duty. "Eleven, by imperial order." The eunuch's eyes slid past the consorts and landed on me. "Eleven Prince carried out the command." "Where is Prince Seven?" Loretta Simpson's hand closed on the eunuch's sleeve. "Answer me." The heavy doors swung all...
I learned the names of light and sky from other people's mouths. I learned my own name from the lips of the man who bought me twice. "Helene Scholz," I say, and the name tastes like a stolen fruit. "My name is Helene," I tell the old woman who braids my hair in the back room. "What does the sun look like?" She kneels in the lamplight, brushes my hair, and answers without looking up. "Like warm hands on your face. Like gold that does not bite." "Will I ever see it?" I ask. "Not if...
I learned to pretend before I learned to sleep. "Do you know what you are to him?" Matthias McCormick asked me the first time he called me his daughter. "I know enough to keep my place," I said, and bowed. He laughed, a loud sound that filled his study. "Good. Then learn to be exactly what they expect. Learn to be the mirror of some other woman's face, and you will have everything." I was seventeen when I answered the emperor in the great hall. "Nicolas Eaton asks, if you would...
“Hands off my son!” I tore the cloth from my face and lunged forward. “Silence,” Grey Fournier said, his voice flat as a blade. “You are the one who caused all this. Stay where you belong.” They pushed past me like I was a piece of broken furniture. Daisy Muller laughed soft and false behind them. I felt the prayer beads of my old life slip through my fingers. I hit the ground. A woman I did not know grabbed my hair and dragged me out of the hall. I tasted blood. Outside the gate,...
I never expected my birthday to change everything. "You promised a surprise," I said, voice soft in the kitchen light. "You deserve it," Enzo said, smiling like a photograph. "Just wait." The plan was simple and sweet: family, the small crowd that still loved to call our house warm, cake, balloons. He'd always been astonishingly romantic for a man in his forties, and after two broken marriages between us, romance felt like a fragile, cherished currency. "You look beautiful," he told...
I was certain I was the lead of this life. I was the one who took the vows, who climbed the ridge, who lit the lamp for the whole hall. Then my master came back from a short trip and held a hand that was not mine. "This is Kristina," he said without a shadow of hesitation. "She will be your junior sister." I looked at the small hand curled in his palm. I looked at Kristina's bright eyes, at her laugh that sounded like a bell. My throat closed. "You will obey your senior," Ely Albrecht...
I told Jaina one autumn night, "I don't love you anymore." She looked at me like she had been waiting for that sentence for a long time. "Okay," she said simply. "I'll let you go." I thought that was the most generous thing I'd ever heard. I thought she would fight, cry, beg. I thought she would be loud and angry. Instead she was calm, like a person who had already lived through the moment a dozen times in her head. "Why are you so calm?" I asked, because I wanted to see fire, at least...
1 "I drew a name," I said, holding the scrap of paper like it might bite. "Valentin Gonzalez?" "Valentin Gonzalez?" the senior at my side repeated, and his laughter was half a scoff. "You got Professor Gonzalez? That's everyone’s nightmare." "He's old," I said, and felt like I should know more than that. "They said he's... retired. Lives alone." "Exactly," Brecken Reynolds said. "He’s exactly the kind of old professor people avoid. Just go, get the signature, don’t ask questions." He...
"I will not stand for this," I said, and the cup hit the floor. They all froze. The silk curtains barely moved. Greyson Porter looked at the shards like they were proof of my crime and not his. "Emerald." He smiled the way a man smiles when he thinks he has already won. "Sit. Drink your tea." I did not sit. I bent and picked up the broken cup. "This cup remembers how you used it," I said. "It remembers the last thing I tasted, the last breath I never got." "Stop." He leaned forward...
I sat swaying on the scarlet carriage, heavy-lidded and half-asleep, listening to the streets' voices like a tide washing over old hurts. "They married the princess to that monster," someone spat. "No blessing, only spite," another answered. "I would rather be forgotten than traded," I whispered to myself. "You're Jocelyn George," I heard Dorian say once, many days earlier, and that single sound—soft, clipped, unexpected—had lodged like a stone in my chest. My name is Jocelyn...
I woke to a woman's shouting and the smell of cheap perfume and spilled wine. "Open the door! If you've got the gall to sleep with my son, at least have the decency to open up!" she screamed. I blinked at the ceiling, my head pounding in a way that said someone had rearranged my insides overnight. A man—stiff, shirt half unbuttoned—was sprawled on the bed beside me, his face pale and still. My hand found the thin sheet and I curled it around myself. "Who—" I started. "Wake up!" I...
I waited ten years because he once said he would marry me. "You said you'll marry me," I told him that night in the hall full of candles and woven banners, offering the plum wine we had buried together when we first left home. Alonso Garcia smiled, polite and distant, and raised his cup. "Try it, Brianna. It is Mei Blossom wine from the south. Penn brought it back." "I remember," I said. "You buried it with me when we left." I poured a small taste into his cup and watched him lift...
I remember the day he brought the child home as if the sun had gone rude and turned its face away. "Madam, please," the little girl begged on her knees, her hands pressed together like someone asking a temple for mercy. "Please let my mother come in. We will serve you. We will do anything." She was no more than five or six, a sharp little face like a seed, and her eyes—my God—those eyes were the same as Hayes's. They cut through me. Hayes Gustafsson carried the child, pressed her to...
