Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 329 short novels in Revenge
"I shouldn't have trusted Kamryn," I said aloud the first night I tried to make sense of what had happened, though no one was there to hear me. "I told you to be careful," Kamryn had said the night she introduced me. "He's legit. He helped half the neighborhood. You need to sleep, Journey." "But he—" I started, and then my throat closed. I always call myself Journey when I speak in my head, like saying my full name keeps me anchored, keeps me human. "You look wrecked," Byron Leone had...
"I need him to answer the phone." I grab the phone with one hand and the world tilts. "My water broke," I whisper, and the pain roars louder than my voice. "Are you sure?" Everest Freeman's voice is flat on the other end. I hear nothing but a breath and then a stranger woman's laugh. "Everest, I'm back." That laugh kills me slower than the knife I will almost feel in the hospital later. "I thought you promised me." The woman, Mercedes Alvarado, sounds calm. "One week after the...
I remember the first time I heard the words that changed my life. "You, go away," she said, standing with that same insolent tilt of chin she'd always had. I lifted my skirt as I stepped into the carriage and smiled at her, calm as a coin. "Sorry. This seat is taken." "What a game," someone nearby breathed. "Isn't it?" I answered, because I had been playing it for ten years. "Lenora, are you sure about this?" one of the ladies asked, voice small. "I'm certain," I said. "I'm...
I remember the cold before I remembered my name. "They said the hour was right," the herald shouted into the winter dark. "Bring the bride into the manor!" I had been chained in the cold cell for more than a year. They dragged me out because today a husband would be crowned—only I was not the bride. "They brought her out," someone called, and a dozen bright-robed cultivators flooded the courtyard like teeth. A white-clad man shoved a sword against my throat and barked, "Take the...
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 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 was told I would not live past eighteen. I was told I carried a curse that would drag everyone close to me into ruin. I am Gillian Robinson, and I lived to learn the meaning of that last sentence. My childhood is a line of missing faces. "My wife won't wake up," my father said once, in a way that meant the rest of the house had already died. Then my mother was gone. Then my older brother drowned. Then my father's business collapsed and the debts came like claws. Then...
I never panicked when the girl on the phone told me my husband was with her. I did not panic because I knew Arden Black would never really leave me. But she said, "He never planned to divorce you. He plans to kill you." 1 "You believe beauty can be heard in a voice?" she asked me on that first call, almost joking. I heard it then. I heard the softness, the calm, the thread of something young and untrained. I heard the wrong kind of sweetness. "Who is Liang—" she began, then...
I learned one thing fast: if someone wants to bury you, give them the shovel and a good watch. "You ready?" Jessie asked, peering at me over her laptop like a nervous conspirator. "I'm always ready," I lied, because I wanted to sound steadier than I felt. My voice was small in the kitchen light. My palms were damp. "What if it backfires?" Josephine asked. She had that soft, scared way of speaking where every sentence begged forgiveness. "It won't," I told them. "Because the photos...
I was born into the Martinez household's oldest line. "I will marry a prince," my father told the court the day I could barely stand. "That is how a house survives," he said, and I believed him because a house must be believed. "Elena," my nurse had once whispered when I was small, pressing a sugar candy into my palm. "Pick a husband who will hold your hand when you are afraid." "I pick him," I told everyone that morning, and the hall laughed and bowed and called it a childish whim....
"My sister will not go." Eaton Foster's voice hummed across the council hall. "You think I don't know that?" I said. "Then I will go." He blinked. "You— you would marry him?" "I will," I said. "I, Genesis Cordova, will marry Cullen Bradley." The hall held its breath. The ministerial eyes on me were knives. My father's face was a storm frozen into a mask. Eaton took a step forward, then halted as if someone had struck him. "Princess— Genesis— you cannot mean it. The general...
I died and the last call I made went straight to his voicemail. I hovered above the snow and watched my body curl into a small, defeated shape in the yard where we had grown up. My phone kept flashing beside me, "Drake Contreras" lighting the screen like an accusation. "He's calling back," I told myself, though there was no breath to make the words mean anything. "It's too late." I didn't want to die that day. The snow had been too soft, the swing's squeak too much like our childhood,...
I opened my eyes to someone bending over me. "Don't move," a voice said. I tried to sit up. My head felt like it had been split. The room wore half-dark like a lamp had been dropped. Silk lay in ruins around me. I smelled wine and smoke and something else — a metal, bitter smell that stuck at the back of my throat. "Where am I?" I croaked. A tall figure in a red coat stood near the screen. The coat had an embroidered qilin that made my chest go cold. "Who—" I began. Footsteps...
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 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...
I saw the message on his phone the way you see a red warning light on a car dashboard—small, sudden, impossible to ignore. "Are you free tonight?" the contact asked. I froze with a fork halfway to my mouth. The contact name was saved as "V-wei," the kind of silly nickname I'd used for the girl from my hometown when I taught her the etiquette routines. Veronique Marques had called me "Caz" and "big sister" since orientation week. She'd been the kid I carried into the team, the one I...
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 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...
"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...
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...
