Grinning From the Ashes
By @john1208
I opened the midnight delivery to find a velvet bag of ashes and a letter thanking me for dying. That’s when the memories hit: my husband, Dallion, locking me in a burning manor right after I signed away my shares to his lucrative Gloom-silk monopoly. He thought he got away with murder to be with his mistress, Nyssa. He thought wrong. Now I’m back in my own body, three years before the fire, and I’ve decided to be an absolute menace. Instead of crying, I’m systematically crashing his eerie midnight trade meetings and stealing every single one of his aristocratic clients with a smile and a shameless wink. Aiding my path of destruction is Lord Garrick Fenlow, a rival patriarch who absolutely adores my unhinged behavior. I have zero time for his romantic overtures - this is about vengeance and survival, not love. As Nyssa bleeds her stolen fortune in a rigged underground casino, Dallion’s empire begins to crumble. But the fog of Morrowbeck hides a darker conspiracy. When I realize the trusted mentor helping me unravel Dallion's deals was the one who supplied the match, who can I truly trust to survive?
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The Rust Queen's Quiet Feast
By @john1208
Queen Morwena reigns over Zhal, a kingdom slowly succumbing to the 'Creeping Hush' - a blight that leeches color and sound, leaving behind a silent, rust-colored decay. Forged in a court of silent knives and loveless ambition, Morwena's heart is as barren as her land. Her only focus is finding a cure, a quest that has left a trail of failed alchemists in her dungeons. Now, her guards have captured Kian, a frustratingly serene camp cook who claims the blight is not a curse to be broken, but a hunger to be sated. He offers a pact: he will cook for her, and only her, using forgotten ingredients to coax life back into the land. Wary but desperate, Morwena agrees, only to find his quiet attention and uncanny memory of her smallest preferences a more potent threat to her control than any assassin. But as patches of green return to Zhal, the source of Kian's knowledge becomes a terrifying question. What is the true price of this quiet feast, and is the man defrosting her heart also nourishing the monster that wants to consume her whole?
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Echoes of an Eerie Charade
By @john1208
It began at his family's suffocating engagement gala. To stop his overbearing relatives from forcing him into an arranged marriage, Fennic Vallow - the mist-shrouded city’s most scandalous playboy - dragged me into the spotlight and declared me his lover. I am Virelay Hesk, a cold and calculating relic-keeper who prefers dusty crypts to high society, but I agreed to the charade to access his family's restricted archives. It was meant to be a temporary, emotionless arrangement. But Fennic’s careless facade keeps slipping. For the society photographers, he whispers outrageously dirty jokes in my ear just to break my icy exterior into a genuine laugh. When I fall ill with the mist-fever, he abruptly cancels a lavish getaway with elite models just to sit in my drafty room and spoon-feed me a rare herbal soup. He remembers every tiny, insignificant detail I mention in passing. Worse, when a rival scholar shows interest in me, Fennic's eyes go dead with a terrifying, genuine possessiveness. We are drowning in a bittersweet, unspoken love. But as I finally decode the archives, a chilling truth emerges: the mastermind who meticulously orchestrated this fake romance was my own erased, past self. What horrific future was I trying to prevent?
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