Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 329 short novels in Revenge
I remember the orange bottle first. "Do you know whose bottle this is?" my mother asked in the living room, waving a half-empty orange drink like it was a trophy. "It's Falcon's," my brother said without looking up from his toy. "My private one." "Of course it's Falcon's." Valeria Neal smiled at him as if he were the only sun in the house. "Justine, don't drink his things. You know better." "I was thirsty," I said. "You know better," she repeated, and the words landed like a lid...
I am Elaina Sherman. "I saw them," I told myself like an accusation. "I saw them together." They were the two people who had built the map of my life—Atlas Green and I used to joke that maps led to treasure; Annabelle Chang and Carter Malik were part of my coastline, my safe harbor. Now that coastline had been cut by a jagged reef. "I can't believe she would do this," I said out loud to the empty room, because speaking softened the ache a little. "You have to decide," Atlas told me...
I still remember the first time my body betrayed me on a borrowed bicycle. "You look pale, Lila. Come sit, let me fan you." Dustin Lane waved his cheap palm fan like a man rehearsed in small comforts. He was easy to trust then—retired from the city hospital, back in the mountains with a neat little clinic. He had a white coat, a steady hand, and a voice that sounded like the inside of a safe. That voice made me say things I never planned to say. "Mr. Lane," I said, "it itches there... and...
I don't know why the police arrived right when Gerard and I were at the loudest point of our fight. "You two—what's going on here?" the woman who barged into my apartment asked first. Short hair, neat uniform, face that would be soft in other lights but not now. Her name tag read Juliana Garcia. "I'm telling you, he's trying to kill me," I said. My voice was raw from yelling. "He switched my pills. He gave me things that thin my blood. He wanted me gone." "I only saw you two arguing...
"Happy birthday, Kataleya," my mother said, but her smile never reached her eyes. "I hope your new job goes well." My father stacked a small box beside the cake. "Blow it out," my sister whispered, almost too quiet to hear. I laughed, "I wish I never had to deal with annoying customers again. And I wish that woman who complained about me at work gets the worst year possible." "That's a strange wish," my brother said without looking up from his book, "but okay." They sang. I...
I spent eighteen years inside the stone-cool arms of a monastery. When I walked back into the capital as a princess, the world split along the seam of my return. Some people reached for me like a sun-starved thing, others shrank as if my shadow might bite. My mother, the Empress, apologized at court and promised me one thing in front of everyone: one wish would be granted. I looked until I could no longer keep the smile off my face, pointed through the crowd, and said, "Make Eliot Marino my...
I remember the first time I discovered the message: it was a line on a small glowing screen that called my wife "baby." The room smelled of coffee and the Christmas tree lights were still blinking from the night before. I watched the word "baby" appear and felt a light, ridiculous grin crawl across my face. "Who is 'baby'?" I didn't ask it like a man confronting an enemy. I asked it like a man reading the weather. Violeta looked up from the breakfast table and said, "My friend. She has a...
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...
I flew through three time zones to fold myself into a surprise I had planned for two years: Eliot Beard's birthday. I imagined his laugh, the old way he would cup my face like a child and say, "You always make everything dramatic." I imagined the candlelight and the look in his eyes that could still make me feel dizzy. Instead I found him with another woman in his arms, laughing with his friends, and heard him say, loud and careless, "I was just playing with her. Me? Marry her? Would you...
I woke on the yellowwood bed and blinked at the light. Five girls bowed and leaned in like a single fan when I spoke. "Jordan," I said, and one of them, Jillian, smiled with all her teeth. "Tell spring to water the outer garden." "Miss Jordan is as graceful as a willow," Jillian said. "Flatterer," I replied. "Not at all, miss. The truth." I toyed with the small mirror my father had given me. It was smooth, clearer than the common polished bronze, a foreign thing that showed my...
"Please, please, save my father," I begged, my forehead pressed to the ICU glass. I could see his hand twitch under the blankets. Machines were loud and red. I felt small and empty. "Blakely," Xander Black said behind me, his voice flat as steel. "Look at him." He shoved my head so hard my lips left a smear on the glass. "He used my mother," Xander spat at the old man on the bed. "He lied. He let her drown and blamed her. You think I won't make them pay?" My father tried to...
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...
My name is Lucille Neves. I am writing this in the present because the past will not stay quiet. The day Dyer told me the tumor was in my head, Cormac Ortiz proposed. "You said yes?" he asked, kneeling like it was a joke. I stared at the ring in his palm. My brain refused to follow my heart. "This is my parents' plan," he said after a while. "If you don't agree, forget it." I let my hand fall. I smiled like the girl who had always learned to smile. "If I say yes," I said...
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 ten the first time someone called me anything but "the runt" or "little pest." My name was a sound, a silly syllable adults used when no one else was near: "Janessa," they never said it, so I said "I" and the house listened. "Don't go down there," Wilma warned as she tightened my sleeve. "I want to see her," I whispered. "Don't say that name," Wilma spat. "She killed people." "Who?" I asked, voice small as a mouse. "She," Wilma said, and her face went hard like a rock....
I was eleven when the first trumpet sounded for my family and the first name was carved into the earth. “My daughter,” my mother whispered then, pressing my cheek with a palm that smelled of tea and smoke. “Keep your hands clean. Keep your head clear. We serve because we must.” “I will,” I said, because children promise what they cannot imagine breaking. Years later, I learned how much a promise can be taxed, and how thin a palace’s mercy can be. “You must come in, Hera,” Lucy said...
"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...
The first time I died, my mouth tasted of iron and a thin, sweet wine. "I thought I'd feel fear," I told the empty air of my old bedchamber, once. "I did not." I am Giselle Stephens. I was an empress, and I died as an empress. "Look at us now," Hermione said across the low table, and her voice sounded like it had always sounded ― even when our lives were knives. "Two ghosts sharing a room." She smiled for the first time in years. It was cold and bright and almost reckless. "If we...
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 woke because a child screamed, "Don't eat my sister!" I sat up in a tangle of roots and cold. The moon pinched through the branches. My hands were small, my clothes coarse. I blinked, tasted iron, and remembered nothing of the farm and quiet life I'd planned. "Amelia?" a boy breathed. "Amelia, you're awake." I looked at the boy. He was five, all knobbled knees and trust. He wore torn sleeves and a bravery that did not belong to the place. I realized then my voice could come from this...
