Arthur De Peart

Lyra Vale was meant to save her kingdom with a marriage. Instead, she becomes the property of a monster. On the day of her wedding, the infamous Dragon King storms the cathedral and claims her before the entire royal court. Draven Arkael, ruler of the obsidian fortress of Vaelthorn, feared across kingdoms as the last great dragon lord, invokes an ancient blood debt her family can never repay. Now trapped inside a palace carved from black stone and dragon bone, Lyra discovers the truth hidden beneath centuries of legend: the dragons are dying, enemies move in the shadows, and her blood may hold the key to saving an entire race. But Draven is no savior. Cold, ruthless, and haunted by a betrayal that destroyed his family, he binds Lyra to him not out of love, but vengeance. Yet as assassins close in, ancient magic awakens, and a dangerous bond begins to burn between them, Lyra realizes the Dragon King is hiding far more than hatred behind his dark crown. And the closer she gets to the truth... the more impossible it becomes to resist him. In a world of fire, betrayal, and ancient power, one stolen bride may become the beginning of a war that will either destroy the kingdoms, or remake them entirely. BRIDE OF THE DRAGON KING is a dark fantasy romance filled with enemies-to-lovers tension, dragon lore, forced proximity, deadly secrets, forbidden magic, and a slow-burning bond powerful enough to change the fate of the world.

In a city where data is power and truth is a weapon, some secrets are worth killing for. Mara Quinn is a ghost in the system, an underground journalist known only as Cipher, feared by corporations and hunted by those with everything to lose. When she breaches a classified network inside Axiom Industries, she uncovers something no one was meant to see: ORACLE, a predictive AI capable of shaping human behavior on a global scale. She expects retaliation. She doesn't expect Kael Draven. Cold, brilliant, and untouchable, Kael is the architect behind Axiom's empire, and a man who doesn't make threats he can't execute. Instead of silencing Mara, he offers her a choice: work under his watch, or disappear from existence entirely. Trapped inside his glass fortress known as The Spire, Mara is pulled deeper into a world of surveillance, manipulation, and power plays that stretch far beyond anything she imagined. But ORACLE isn't just a tool, it's already been used. Governments have fallen. Empires have shifted. And someone else is pulling the strings. As a rival syndicate closes in and a hidden war erupts across the city, Mara and Kael are forced into an uneasy alliance, one built on intellect, suspicion, and a dangerous, undeniable pull neither of them can ignore. Because in a world where every move is predicted... the only thing more dangerous than control is feeling. And the system is already watching.

Lillian woke in a werecreature universe as a total loser. Good news was that women ruled here and could take multiple mates, yet she still ended up as the one everyone looked down on. Compared to her talented sister at every turn, she watched her first match get stolen and her next four mates reject her without mercy. The first mate was the King of Succubine himself. On their very first meeting, he warned Lillian that he was only staying long enough to recover from his injuries-and that there could never be anything between them. The second mate was a merman. He took one look at her and said he had no interest in a loser like her, tossing her some cash so she could break off their bond herself. The third mate was the progenitor vampire-over a thousand years old. He admitted to admiring her sister instead and made it clear he had no interest in a layabout like Lillian. Lillian cut every bond and chose her own path instead. But as she rose higher and higher, those same men returned, full of regret and begging her to look at them again. The fourth mate was a werewolf Lillian had rescued from an underground fighting ring. She thought he might actually stay-until he revealed himself as royalty. And of course, he wanted to break their bond for more power.

In the final days before the world collapsed, Ivy Brooks died... betrayed by the very people she trusted most. She had fought, struggled, and sacrificed everything just to survive the apocalypse only to be pushed into death along with her three daughters at the very end by her own husband. With her last breath, Ivy made a vow. If she could turn back time...she would never be weak again and of course protect her daughters. This time, she would stand at the top. When Ivy opened her eyes, she found herself back in time with her still rounded belly of her third baby.... Twenty days before the apocalypse. Armed with memories of the future and a mysterious system in her mind, Ivy moved without hesitation. She hoarded supplies, secured weapons, and took control of every resource she could get her hands on. While others laughed, doubted, and wasted time... Ivy was building her empire along with her daughters. In this life, she would not be prey but will be an hunter. With danger closing in and only twenty days to prepare, Ivy must outplay enemies both old and new, uncover the truth behind the system, and carve out her own kingdom in a collapsing world. Because this time...she wasn't just going to survive the apocalypse. She was going to rule it along with a man, a love interest from the past before her marriage collapse. He provided everything Ivy needed. Money especially in change of a marriage with her and when the apocalypse started too....he ruled it with her as well as her daughters.

Caryn lay trapped beneath concrete slabs in the apocalyptic ruins, a steel rebar pinning her down, the pressure unbearable. Her fiancé, Ford, knelt in the narrow gap above her, completely unharmed. "Sorry, babe. It's a new world. Survival of the fittest." He sneered, twisting the cap off their last bottle of purified water. He drank it all, wiped his mouth with a clean hand, and told her she would just waste it. He had manipulated her into signing over her uncle's house-her only defensible shelter-just to sell it for cash. Now, as a violent aftershock made the rubble groan and shift, Ford scrambled away without a single backward glance. For five brutal years of starvation and injury, she had clung to him and her grandmother's antique locket, only to meet her end betrayed and full of agonizing regret. Why had she been so foolish to trade her survival for a lie? A gasp of frigid air flooded her lungs, and her eyes flew open to a smooth, white ceiling. She wasn't in the dusty ruins; she was in her pristine silk bed sheets. She grabbed her phone, her hands trembling as she stared at the date on the screen. It was exactly thirty days before the world would crack apart. She looked at the silver locket in her hand, a diamond-hard rage crystallizing in her chest. This time, she would activate its secret, and she would strip Ford and his family of everything before the apocalypse even began.

Maya Cross woke up in a nightmare-trapped in the body of a sadistic villain who'd tortured five powerful beastmen into submission. Good news? She finally had the power to break their bonds and set them free. Bad news? They were stranded on a dying ship surrounded by Zerg swarms, with zero rescue coming. The first was Caleb, a snake beastman whose red eyes burned with pure hatred. Every time he looked at her, she saw the memory of chains and venom extraction. The second was Finn, an aquatic beastman whose scales she'd ripped off one by one. He could barely stand to be in the same room without his hands shaking with rage. The third was Sage, a griffin beastman she'd tormented so badly he barely went a day without fresh wounds. The fourth was Hunter, a lion beastman she'd mocked relentlessly, calling his beast form hideous and grotesque. The fifth was Jasper, a fox beastman whose face she'd scarred so badly he'd lost his consortium inheritance. "Protect me until I find my father," Maya told them, drawing her own blood, "and I'll give you what you need to break our bond." Caleb laughed bitterly. "Since when do you make deals instead of demands?" "Since we're all dead if we don't work together." But when survival depends on trust, can a torturer become a savior-or will her victims choose revenge over rescue?

Elena died on the operating table, betrayed by her husband, her unborn child already gone. But death? Just her intermission. She woke up in a whole new world-a beastmen's world, where females are rarer than diamonds and the strongest males go mad without a woman's mark to calm them down. And her? Labelled the weakest female alive. An F-rank body with a joke of a status. But hidden inside? Unlimited mental power. Just as she's figuring out this mess, a system pops up with one hell of an offer: Complete the missions. Bond with assigned males. Save this world. Do all that, and you get a one-way ticket back home. for revenge. Sounds simple? Think again. A Wolf General, colder than a blizzard, who should have ended her-ended up letting her mark him. A Fox Prince, all charming smiles and secret schemes, who started playing games only to lose his own heart. A golden Dragon, sunshine-bright and fiercely possessive, who declares her his destined treasure. A shadowy Serpent, too patient and too dangerous, watching her every move from the dark. A Phoenix King, whose love burns so hot he'd reduce empires to cinders for her. They all need her mark. They all want her. And sharing? Not in their vocabulary. Too bad for them- She's not here for love stories. She's here to survive. To climb. To turn their legendary power into her own stepping stones. And one day. To go back and make her betrayers wish they were never born.

I woke up to the stench of rust and rotting flesh, no longer a master botanist who commanded life itself, but a D-class exile dumped on a wasteland planet. Memories that weren't mine flooded in. I was framed by my stepsister, betrayed by my fiancé, and banished by my own family to the Ashfall Peninsula to die. The original girl actually starved to death in despair. The moment I opened my eyes, a scavenger tried to smash my skull with a rusty pipe just to eat me. After I killed him to survive, I discovered a harsher truth: in this universe, plant seeds are classified as A-level strategic resources, completely monopolized by the Imperium. But the universe had a sick sense of humor. A mandatory background scan suddenly triggered a galactic broadcast: I, the exiled trash, was a perfect genetic match for the Imperium's top war hero, General Alexander Orr. The family that ruthlessly erased my existence instantly saw me as a golden ticket. My cheating ex-fiancé was dispatched to drag me back, furious that his "property" was matched with someone else. They all thought I was still that weak, naive girl they could manipulate. But as I held the pure, glowing Life Source Crystals I had secretly extracted from the scrap heap, a cold smile crept onto my face. "I didn't come here to die. I came here to build an empire." I turned my back on the galactic broadcast and stepped into the deadly wilderness.

She died in the apocalypse-betrayed, abandoned, and torn apart by the infected. Then she woke up. Two months before the end of the world. Twenty-two years old again. And on her wrist, a wooden bracelet that her mother had left behind. The bracelet came with a system. A system that eats gold. With enough gold, she can unlock infinite storage for food, water, weapons-anything she needs to survive. The super-hurricane, the floods, the insect plagues, the volcanic winter, the scorching heat... she knows exactly what's coming. While the world sleeps, Joanna shops. She drains her aunt's bank account, maxes out every loan she can find, and buys out half the city. The apocalypse is coming. She'll be ready. But when the chaos begins, the wolves come crawling back-relatives who sold her, friends who betrayed her, a father who abandoned her. They want her food. Her water. Her mercy. Joanna has a different plan. "Why don't you decide who dies first?"

Waking up with a cold, scaly hand wrapped around my throat wasn't the worst part. The worst part was realizing I'd transmigrated into the body of Terra Mason—the most despised woman in the entire Enclave. She drugged high-level beast-men and forced them into life-binding bio-contracts. She locked an aquatic warrior in a dry basement until his organs failed. She treated the most lethal males in the city like broken toys. Zev, the Level 6 serpent who's currently choking me, would rather blow up his own heart than spend another day as my slave. His affection metric? Negative ninety. His trust? Zero. Then my system activates: the Kore AI. It gives me exactly 500 credits, a medical nano-gel, and a recipe for neutralizing the radioactive poison in mutant meat. Real food. In this world, that's worth more than gold. I save Rhys, the dying aquatic male everyone left for dead. I season a slab of purple mutant steak until Sam, a battle-scarred grizzly shifter, groans at the taste—and his trust points finally tick above zero. When my backstabbing ex-best friend tries to steal my males and destroy me, I don't scream or throw a tantrum like the old Terra. I dismantle her with the truth. But earning their trust means more than grilling meat. A scorpion swarm ambushes us at midnight. Sam throws himself between me and a stinger the size of my arm. As he stands over the corpse, fur receding from his claws, he stares at me and whispers, "You were testing me." Yes. I was. Because in this world, the weak don't survive. And I refuse to be weak again. Four beast-men. Four contracts. One system. And a whole lot of steak. Let this dystopian wasteland know—I'm not the monster they remember. I'm worse. I'm the one who's going to feed them until they'd kill for me.

The sensation of falling wasn't like flying; it was heavy, violent, and smelled of burning flesh. Above us, on the crumbling balcony of the Sears manor, Duke Cato Sears turned his back, shielding his cousin Bianca from the smoke as he walked away, leaving my sister Blossom and me to drop into the abyss. As the darkness slammed shut like an iron door, I realized my entire life had been a cruel script written by the people I called family. In my first life, I was the sacrificial lamb of the Dawson manor, sold to a man who eventually watched me die without blinking. My sister Blossom had pushed me into Cato's arms to avoid his rumors, only to laugh when the fire finally consumed us both. My father had measured my value like a piece of livestock, and my step-grandmother didn't even acknowledge my existence while I was being led to the slaughter. I died in that fire, feeling the heat scorch my skin and the weight of a hatred so potent it tasted like bile. I spent twenty years being the weak, manipulated shadow of a girl, only to end up as nothing more than a phantom scorch mark on a "hero's" estate. I couldn't understand why my own blood treated my life like a game they could discard. The injustice of it all burned hotter than the flames that took my last breath. Then, I sat up, sucking in air that tasted of lavender and air conditioning, not smoke. I was back in my bedroom, three days before the engagement ball that ruined my life. Blossom stood at the door, her "sweet" mask slipping as she tried to manipulate me into the Duke's path again. She thought she was the only one who had come back, but she didn't realize that this time, I was going to let her have exactly what she wanted: the Duke, the bankruptcy, and the living hell that awaited her in that house.

I died in the apocalypse, only to wake up as Kenzie Banks, a bankrupt high-society monster in an interstellar beast-world. But before I could even process my new reality, a cold AI voice informed me of my impending death. "Your contract beast-husbands possess the legal right to execute you at the end of the two-month trial period." I rushed to the basement and saw the horrific truth. The original Kenzie had starved them, whipped them with thermal blades, sent their brothers to die as cannon fodder, and framed the youngest to rot in a maximum-security prison. Now, these lethal, broken men were methodically planning to rip my organs out the second the contract dissolved. To make matters worse, she had squandered her fortune on a man who despised her, leaving me two million credits in debt and facing imminent exile to the deadly wastelands. I had survived rotting zombies on Earth, only to be trapped in a weak, universally hated body, doomed to be butchered by the very people I was supposed to call family. Why did I have to pay the ultimate price for a psychotic woman's deadly sins? I refused to just sit around and wait for my execution. Tapping into my apocalyptic subspace inventory, I hauled out military-grade rations, healed their bleeding wounds, and slammed a legally binding divorce contract on the table. If I wanted to survive this sixty-day countdown, I had to turn my executioners into my loyal allies-starting with breaking the husband she framed out of prison.