Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 329 short novels in Revenge
"I cut meat for a living," I said, and the knife in my hand flashed like a promise. "I do not belong in a house of silk." "You fuss like you do," my father said, spitting pork fat on his thumb. "But you can act the part for a day." "I won't be a bird in a gilded cage," I told him. "You will do as you're told," Finch Choi warned, and he did not bother to hide the way his voice shook. "You will go to Cooper Carr's house. They'll call you their daughter and you will wait. One year. Do the...
I was supposed to be the proud daughter of a great family—Estrella Larsson, the eldest granddaughter of a chancellor, raised to be admired and married for honor. Instead I became the second household’s shadow: a side consort in the East Palace, expected to keep my head bowed and my mouth closed. "I don't understand why you look like that," Hailey said one afternoon, swatting at a pear. She was my brightest friend in the East Palace—Hailey Kozlov—who loved everything with a reckless, open...
I was twelve the first time the world split open beneath my feet. "Tell me where your parents live," the man with the goat-whisker beard said. His breath smelled like old cigarettes. "I… I don't know," I lied. "Please." "You little liar," he laughed, then hit my face. "You can make dumplings?" "Yes," I said, because the only thing that felt like a rope left in a storm was a memory of flour on my mother's hands. "Make dumplings then," Bowen Clark ordered, and three rifles swung up...
I first stopped loving him on the tenth anniversary of my being born into someone else’s story. "I cooked your favorite beef-and-chili pot," I typed, then deleted it. "You're not coming back this month," his message had said a week ago. I sat in the small kitchen with a bubbling pot that smelled like a promise and a lie both. The dumplings had cooled into greasy lumps that made my stomach churn. I flipped the light on, found the white floral dress I’d worn the night we met, smoothed...
I woke at four a.m. to the phone. "Don't open the door. No one. Whoever comes—don't open it!" Lakelyn Gray's voice, sharp, then a wet, choking scream. Then tearing sounds, crushing sounds, the kind of noises that eat hope. Tearing? I froze. "Lakelyn—don't—" I didn't finish. The line went dead. I looked at my phone. 4:01 a.m. I lay back down. I was tired. I let my eyes close. Then: "CRASH!" The ceiling above me answered with violence. I sat straight up. The clock said nine. I...
I. They handed me a menu at the coffee shop and I almost missed his face. "He never smiles," Juliana warned me on the phone. "He keeps to himself." "I like mysterious," I said. He did not smile that day. He answered ten questions with one word and only ever used "hm," "oh," or "ah." He looked like a statue carved from moonlight—cold, silent, impossible. When he gave me one of those single-word replies, I felt like I had been given a secret. "You're not going to be late for the...
I remember the night the house held its breath for me. "Beatrice," Kaydence hissed, straightening the veil at my throat. "They're all eyes and coins out there. Breathe." "I am breathing," I said, and my voice surprised me by being steady. "Just tell me when the music starts." Outside, the Phoenix Hall swelled with sound—laughs, clinking cups, the hungry chatter of men who paid for beauty and believed themselves civilized. On that night of the Hundred Gifts, every magistrate, every...
On my wedding night I climbed his shoulder and asked, breathless, "What do you think, Gideon?" Gideon Olsson bowed his head in the candlelight and answered softly, "Lesly, it is I who am fortunate." I laughed then, loud and pleased, and almost wept. "Gideon, give me a foot massage," I teased. "Do you remember how you used to soothe my feet when I was a silly girl sold like a trinket?" He knelt like he always had, hands cool against my skin, and for a half-beat the house we had built...
"I warned you to be careful," Quinn said over the phone, his voice low enough to be dangerous and soft enough to make me feel like a child again. "I know," I said. "I'm at the hospital picking up my meds. I'll be home in twenty." "Don't dawdle." I hung up, stepped into the elevator, and the ordinary doors felt like a seam shutting behind me. "Why does it feel like someone's watching?" I told myself. I checked the mirrored walls, the row of buttons, the polite man whose eyes were stuck...
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...
I liked to think I knew how to read people. I had worked five years in administration in Beijing, handled office politics and paperwork, and believed I could tell truth from charm. I thought I married a man who believed in logic and fairness. His name was Alexander Cannon, and I loved him. I loved how he listened, how he consulted me when he bought small things, how he joked with me in that soft, earnest way. I called him my reasoning partner, my little philosopher. But one month after our...
I still remember the exact tilt of Arturo Watts' jaw the first time I saw him that morning. He stepped out of the corner like a photograph come alive—tailored suit, the kind of calm you could measure with a ruler. He inhabited space the way some people inhabit sunrises: all quiet claim and impossible distance. "Long time, Lucia," he said, like it was nothing. I smiled because my training taught me how. "Arturo. Hi. Long time." He raised one eyebrow. "You're getting married." "Yes,"...
I opened my eyes to the banquet room and the polite smiles of both families. I was India Crouch. I thought I knew every corner of the life I was stepping into. I did not. "He's your uncle?" I whispered to Niklas Allen, nodding toward the man who looked too young to be that relation. "He is," Niklas said. "Laurent Payne. He just flew in." "He's beautiful," I joked, "teach me how to look that young." He squinted and put his hands over my eyes. "Don't look at him. Look at...
"Save her first," he said. I heard those words while the lights above me blurred into a single white pain. I heard them while my world went soft and hollow and the room smelled of metal and cold. I heard him choose. "Of course," he told the surgeon. "Save Jaliyah." I lay on the table and I closed my eyes. They took my kidney. They took my blood. They took my baby's life. Weeks later they took my sight too. My name is Annie Xu. I am twenty-one when the city calls me a liar, a...
My name is Everleigh Berry, and my marriage was anything but what my name promised. "I thought I would be happy," I said aloud once, sitting on the edge of my wedding bed with the silk folding over my knees, "but happiness is not what you ordered for me." The palace had given me the title, the clan had given me the bridal clothes, and fate — or whatever clever hand stitched other people's plans together — had given me a husband who treated me like a scene in a play he could exit when...
I said the words as if I could sign away my life like a ledger. "Fine. I'll marry him." Silence fell so clean it cut. Men who had been shouting a half-hour ago froze. The old white-bearded minister closest to the dais turned his face away as if my sentence stained him. "Princess," my father said at last, eyes like tired glass, "don't be foolish." "I am not being foolish," I answered, stepping forward, bowing low because the theater demanded it. "My sister is missing. My little ones...
I have two fathers. "My mother doesn't even know who my real father is," I said once, and someone laughed like it was a joke. "She's been bought," I tell people now, and they look away. My mother, Silvia Sherman, was brought to our mountain valley as if she were cargo. Since before I can remember, both of my fathers—Gerardo Fisher and Basilio Schneider—kept her chained in a broken room with a rusted iron link biting into her neck. "Big Father likes to beat me," I said to no one,...
"I hit send," I say, and my hands keep shaking. "I knew you would," Kori says on the other end of the line, laughing too loud. "You always do." "I don't feel like laughing," I whisper. "Then don't. Just do it." I press the final message, then close my phone. The screen goes black. The hotel room is quiet except for the air conditioner. I pull the blanket up to my chin and remember how it started — a keyboard, a tired voice, a promise to listen. "Why did you leave your window...
I watched the lightning fall and thought I would never stop feeling the cold. "Stop," I ordered, but the word came out hollow. The storm paid me no heed. "You killed her entire clan," someone whispered at my shoulder. "You gave her the thunder sentence?" "Relax," I replied. "She is a nine-tailed fox. She can't die." "But—" the voice stuttered. "She already cut eight of her tails to save you. She bled her heart's blood for you. She's been living on a heart-essence. And you—today you...
I found out I was pregnant in the second year of my marriage. The two pink lines on the test were so impossible that my hands trembled when I filmed the moment I would tell him. I had spent years building a small corner of the internet around food—the little videos where I turned dinner into theater. So when I thought of telling Francisco, I staged it the only way I knew how: with food and a hidden camera. He opened the door with flowers in his hand like he always did. He still folded his...
