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Found 329 short novels in Revenge
I died once with a white strip of silk around my neck and a crowd of liars laughing just outside the cold palace window. I died, and in that exact quiet moment before the world slipped away, I promised myself two things: I would not go silent, and I would come back. When I opened my eyes again it was more foolish than a miracle and sharper than any vow—I was three years in the past. I lay in my own bed, under a familiar curtain, fingers still smelling faintly of the iron from a...
I will say it clearly from the start: I was the one who told. "I told them she was planning to run," I say to myself at night when the room is quiet. "You told on her?" Greta Nielsen asks one morning, spooning soup into her mouth as if it has nothing to do with me. "Yes." I fold my hands around the bowl. "She would have been caught. It was better." Greta laughs like it's nothing. "You did well. Half a chicken from Cedric, didn't you get that?" "I did." I remember the scent of...
I remember the first thing I saw after death: the inside curve of a lamp, a thin chill through my ribs, and a face I had once trusted smiling as if nothing had happened. "You're awake," the voice said. "Of course I'm awake," I answered. "Would I ever sleep through an opportunity?" He laughed softly. "You look the same, Nova." "I do not." "I know," he said. "That's why you are interesting." I am Nova Crouch. I was made into the bone with a slow, surgical cruelty — a fan cut...
I remember the yellow sweater first. It was the color of early sun and the kind of thing that hushed everyone in our yard when Lillian put it on. “I made this,” she said with the small, exact pride that belonged to her. “It suits me.” I listened and told myself not to care. “Mom, hurry and feed the pigs!” my father called from the yard. “They’re noisy and the matchmaker’s almost here.” “I’ll get Xiao—” Mother started and then stopped. She gestured me quieter, “I’ll put these away. You go...
I woke up to my face throbbing like someone had smeared chili across it. "How bad is it today?" I muttered into the mirror. "Bad enough you'll want to hide," Alfredo Ferrara said over the phone, his voice sharp but worried. "Do you want me to come?" "I'll manage," I lied. "Just bring the pears." "Your father will hate me for bringing pears," he snorted. "But okay. I'm five minutes away." I am Lila Simon. For most of the past three years, my face on glossy posters and on-screen...
I was born the noon my mother died. They said it was proof of fate — a bitter circle sealed by a dying woman and the cold moon. They named me for a broken lotus in a muddy pond: Isabela Fitzpatrick. The name settled on my skin like a bruise. "You give in to him, Isabela. You want power, don't you?" Cason Bowling had said that to me later, red-eyed and trembling like a man who could not imagine himself humbled. "I'll give you a seat in the palace. Be my queen. Call me brother once more,...
I wake up in a candlelit room that should not be mine and know at once that I have been moved — not in body only, but into a life already waiting like a trap. The silk walls smell of herb and ash. A man laughs somewhere beyond the curtain. I am supposed to be YuanYuan, the bedchamber maid of Colton Acosta, Ninth Prince. I am Karina Abe now. I know what happens to YuanYuan. "Who are you?" I ask the man across the thin veil. "You?" His voice runs like silk. "You're the chamber...
I woke up in the third year of our marriage knowing something had changed. The room smelled like the cheap lavender soap I used and the faint cologne Ezio always left on his shirt collar. I lay there and watched the ceiling until the text came—Marcella's name lighting my screen like a tiny accusation. "What are you doing?" his message read, and I did the stupid, hopeful thing: "Thinking of you." Silence, then: "Home?" I looked at the ceiling fan and typed: "Yes. Dinner or eggs? Fried...
They called it a funeral. I called it a marketplace. "Isn't it strange?" one woman whispered, fanning herself with a program. "She looks almost... relieved." "Relieved?" another scoffed. "Relieved that she's rich now? He left everything to her." I kept my face neutral. I kept my hands folded on the black silk in my lap. Black had been the safest choice: invisible on top of all their stares. "I am Kayleigh Hall," I said later, when everyone else had finished their small, sharpened...
I remember the snow because of how it made everything honest. It did not hide footprints; it showed every stamp, every pleading forehead pressed flat into white. When I was small I watched a boy kneel for three days in snow that cut through his sleeves. "He will not stand," I thought then. The boy later became the man who took our house, and my life, and whose name I could not look at without tasting cold. "Lauren." My brother called me that like a bell. "Come. Eat." "Later." I said. I...
I am Leanna Corbett. People know me by the way I write love that hurts and heals; they know me by the pale photos and the quiet interviews. I am the kind of writer whose life reads like a set piece—always measured, always collected. I have made a career of being a vessel: I take other people's pain, braid it into sentences, and sell the ache back to readers. That was my art and my armor. "People call you cold," Quinn Patterson said once at a café, stirring his coffee like it was a medical...
I still remember the rain that day, how it tapped on the subway roof like a small, steady accusation. "Do you want to do something for 520?" I typed, my thumbs clumsy with hope. After nine years, three of them as his girlfriend, I was still the one who asked first. Mateo Kennedy took forever to answer. "What holiday?" he finally replied. I pictured him—brow faintly furrowed, voice always the kind that rolled out like cool water. "It's five two zero. It sounds like 'I love you'—can...
I smelled rot and iron and the small, ridiculous sweetness of a cake at the same time. "Who is she?" I asked, even though I already knew the answer before the car door shut. "Forrest's concern," came the cold voice. "He has no right," I said. "I'm his affianced." "Forrest doesn't owe explanations." The voice was short; Forrest King didn't say more. She looked at me then—Luz Powell—tilted her head, smiled like a girl who had never been to a war, and the whole base went quiet as if...
I woke to the same metallic chair and the same cool rail under my palms. The speaker in the corner sang in that syrupy voice I’d heard all my life. “Dear citizen of the Free World, system notice: you have been awake for thirty minutes. Please enjoy Sweet Dream and avoid unpleasant emotions. Enjoy the pleasures of the Free World.” I rolled my fingertips over the chair’s arm like a man testing a new tool. “Pleasures of the Free World?” I muttered, so quiet no one would think me...
I was twelve years older than him. I told myself, "If only one of us can live, it must be me." I said it out loud in my head so many times that the words became a shield. "Do you want to go catch crickets?" Julissa's child tugged at her skirt and looked at me. He was small, bright-eyed, and when he smiled it was like a crack of sun through winter clouds. "Yes," I said. "Come with me." I did not know why I offered. I only knew a chessboard took my attention, but children and animals broke...
"I told you: wait until I come back and we'll get married." I remember the exact words because I repeated them to myself on the flight home, like a prayer and a promise folded into one. I, Josephine Tucker, had spent three years grinding through five years' worth of work, sleepless nights and borrowed courage, because of that sentence. I came back early to give Boyd Garza a surprise. "I hope you like surprises," I thought as I stepped into the ballroom. The auction lights were low, the...
I was supposed to be preparing for university, but the summer opened like a jagged wound. "My parents are splitting up," I said once, flat and small, when a classmate asked. She blinked and pretended not to hear the rest. She didn't know what it had cost me: my father's drink bottles lined like soldiers on the living room table, my mother throwing herself at someone with the blunt courage of someone hungry for a new life. "Why would Mom do this?" I asked her over and over in my room, even...
I was born in the mountain, and for as long as I can remember my blood tasted dirty to me. "I told you," my grandmother would say, tapping the table with a nail, "that woman was trouble from the start. When she was with child she beat her own belly. Better to chain her than let her loose." "Chain her," my father would grunt, spitting tobacco into the dirt, and the world inside our valley held to that rule like iron. "Why is she chained?" I once asked, when I was small enough to still...
I remember the first time I learned how to bow until my knees hurt. "Grandmother," I said, "will I be happy in the palace?" "Child," Dorothy Corbett answered, "happiness is not promised to those who enter a court. Only purpose." Her hand tightened on mine. "You are our branch's hope." They dressed me in a silk I did not choose. They taught me lines and the soft way to meet eyes and give answers no one could fault. At six I practiced the formal curtsies for a woman who would one day be...
I never expected a holiday to be the fuse that lit the smallest powder keg in my life. "Why didn't you tell me you were coming?" I said when I opened the door and found Magdalena May and Carter Diaz standing on my doorstep with suitcases. Magdalena smiled like everything was ordinary. "Surprise, Joanna. We thought we'd stay for a few days." She stepped inside as if consulting with the layout of my home was her right. I set my bag down on the hall table. "You should have...
