Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"I woke up because someone pushed me." I slammed my eyes open and my heart jumped into my throat. My hand met cool sheets, then warm skin. My fingers froze. "Who are you?" I whispered. A man rolled over. He didn't look at me. He breathed like he was sleeping. The room smelled like cigarette smoke and expensive soap. "I—" I stopped. My mouth was dry. I sat up and saw the blanket slip away. I was naked under it. "Oh my God," I said. "What happened last night?" He yawned and...
I remember the exact number on the paper before I remember the way my hand shook holding it. "Seven twenty-eight," I said aloud even though no one else needed to hear it. "You got seven twenty-eight?" The voice next to me sounded small and steady. "Yes." I looked up. Her smile was fragile and terrible and real. "Thank you." She shrugged. "You earned it." I had earned the score with two bodies pulling in the same direction. One of us had always tried to please. The other had learned...
They brought me back because a little corpse had left a throne empty. They thought I would be grateful. They thought I would fit neatly into the role they had carved out. "I am Cataleya Allen," I said the first time I had to answer to a title that had once meant nothing to me. "Not a title," my nurse Janessa Barrett whispered in my ear as I rode into the capital, "a sentence." I laugh now when I remember that—how small the laugh was, how unreliable. The carriage was full of people who...
They say you should never insult a god. I did it at three in the morning while nursing instant noodles and a Netflix hangover. I was bored, single, and fed up with everyone around me celebrating someone else's rings and photos. So I muttered into the dark, loud enough to wake my own echo: "Matchmakers and fate—what a joke. If there's a Matchmaker, he can come find me. I dare him." I meant it as a rant. I didn't expect anything to answer. "Do you like being daring?" a voice asked in my...
I remember the cold metal of the doorknob under my palm and the small, unreasonable hope that tonight—this night—would be the last night I had to beg the world for mercy. I breathed in and opened the door. He stood by the window with his back to me. The city lights cut across his shoulders. Even burned into memory, even in nightmares, I would know that shape. "Aiden?" I tried to make it a question. My voice came out thin. He turned. For a second the room reformed itself around...
I woke to a desert sky so wide it swallowed my breath. "Are you really going to run?" Corbin Collins asked, the guard who had ridden beside me until the road narrowed and the world felt small. "I am," I said, and my voice did not tremble. "Tell those who sent me this far that I will not be their prize." "Serena," he said, and there was pity in his tone that I couldn't bear. "Think of your mother." "Think of my mother?" I laughed. "My mother disappeared so long ago that even the...
I remember the cold first. Snow came down like white paper, slow and stubborn. I remember the white of my fur, the thinness of his sleeves, and the way the world seemed to tune itself to one small foot. "It is enough," I said. He looked up at me from the snow. His face was thinner than I had expected. His knuckles were frozen and cracked. He kept his back straight as if wood still held him up, and his eyes were knives wrapped in ice. "Miss Florence," he said, and his voice was raw....
"I opened the heavy iron gate and the cold sun hit my face." I squinted and saw a black car waiting by the lot—a Bugatti I used to dream about. "Ms. Moretti," a voice said, flat and clean like steel. Evren Belyaev stepped out of the car with a guard at his side. He looked like every poster of a perfect man. His eyes looked like nothing at all. "Mr. Belyaev," I limped forward and bowed, my knee whispering pain through wool and bone. "It's been—" "Two years," he cut in. "Be grateful...
I found the camera when an electric toothbrush wouldn't charge. "I thought the outlet was faulty," I said out loud to the empty apartment, "and then I found that tiny dot." The dot was no bigger than a fingernail. It sat inside the bathroom outlet like a quiet eye. I pulled the charger out, and the world tilted. "I've been watched," I whispered. "All of this time." I remember the smell of detergent from the towels, the faint steam clinging to the mirror, and my knees going soft. I...
I remember the color of the night when the palace told me that the Empress had burned. It was the kind of cold that made breath into thin glass; the hall candles were low and watery. When I slipped into the audience chamber, I found my brother, Emperor Daxton Braun, bent over piles of red ink and seals like a man trying to hold together a map whose rivers were already wrong. "She burned herself?" I asked, because the rumor in my chest wanted to be named. "She burned," he said without...
I did not expect my secret to be something that could eat me. For seven years he had been my guardian, my quiet world. For seven years I had called him "uncle" and kept a small, fierce crush folded tight like a secret coin in my pocket. For seven years I woke to the same face in the morning: Evren Ilyin—impossibly composed, impossibly distant, impossibly beautiful. I told myself I loved his steadiness. I told myself his coolness was safety. Then I discovered he was not exactly...
“Give me the wild vegetables and eggs,” Brittany Brooks snapped, and I hugged my basket harder. “I need them for my mother and my brothers,” I said, and felt my voice wobble. “You fox and her brat don’t deserve food,” Brittany said, and grabbed. I ran. She shoved me. I fell. I remember the cliff, the dark, and the cold. Then a white flash and the sound of a phone I’d just bought in my other life humming in my hand. I opened my eyes to a low thatch ceiling, to a woman wiping...
"You won't leave me, right?" Griffin Alves' voice was small, like someone asking whether the sun would set tonight. I looked at him. His face was all too beautiful and all too dangerous. I had been with him since I was eighteen. I had been his maid, his night-keeper, the hand that smoothed his hair when nightmares tore at him. Four years of being his shadow. Four years of being paid to stay. "Griffin," I said softly, "I've always been here." He laughed a little, swallowed, then said,...
1. "I am a bastard," I said once to myself in the dark when I was five and had not yet learned how shame could be tuned into armor. "That's not a word you should know yet," my mother snapped, cursing the phone in her hand. "Call him again. Call until he comes." "Who's he?" the concierge asked once when she dragged me to a hotel with a nervous laugh and one of her usual schemes. "His name is Dempsey Cao," my mother answered, eyes shining with the fever of someone who'd convinced...
I remember the moment like a bad song stuck on repeat: a teddy-bear interface blinking at me and a stack of scripts that smelled of fate and mildew. “This is your first assignment,” the assistant squealed, its voice too bright for a government node. “After completion, your placement in the Stability Bureau will be decided.” “Start when?” I asked. “Group whatever. I only want merit.” Molly Duffy—my assigned auxiliary, a plush-faced AI in a bureaucratic shell—tilted her head. “You’ll need...
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 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...
"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 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 ripped the veil off and threw it at his polished shoes." "I thought you loved me," I said, and my voice did not sound like mine. "Forbes," I had called him that for years. Forbes West stood there in his wedding suit, flawless, and his eyes were clean of any warmth. "Why?" I asked again. He looked at me like he was reading a script. "Therese, falling from heaven to hell hurts, doesn't it?" I should have hit him. I should have run. Instead I let the world tilt and let the guards...
