The Masterpiece

Modern

Twenty minutes before the "Wedding of the Century" at The Plaza, I stood outside the Presidential Suite in a fifty-thousand-dollar Vera Wang gown. I was the girl from a West Virginia trailer park about to marry Hugh Maxwell, the golden heir to a billion-dollar defense empire. I pushed the door open only to find Hugh pinned against the bed with my own stepsister, Floy. She was wearing my bridal diamond necklace, and the sounds of their laughter scraped against my eardrums like sandpaper. I didn't scream; I listened as Hugh grunted that once the wedding was over and the trust fund unlocked, he’d dump "that hillbilly trash" on a bus back to the mountains. They weren't just cheating; they were planning to steal my family’s land deeds and leave me with nothing. When I set off the sprinklers and exposed their naked bodies to the paparazzi, the Maxwell family didn't apologize. They called me a "greedy peasant" and threatened to ruin my life unless I signed a new deal to save their crashing stock. I realized then that I was never a bride to them. I was a transaction, a rounding error in a ledger to be used and discarded. They thought my poverty made me weak and my silence made me a victim. "If we don't have a marriage certificate by midnight, the bank freezes thirty percent of our liquidity," their lawyer warned. So, I gave them exactly what they wanted. I used a loophole in their hundred-year-old family covenant and married the only other direct heir available. I didn't marry Hugh. I walked into the ICU and married his uncle, Fleet Maxwell—the legendary war hero who had been in a vegetative state for months. Now, I am the matriarch of the Maxwell dynasty. I’ve suspended Hugh’s executive powers, exiled my mother-in-law to the Swiss Alps, and taken control of the family vault. They think I’m just a gold-digger waiting for a "corpse" to die so I can collect a fifty-million-dollar widow's payout. But last night, as I lay beside my comatose husband, the man they called a vegetable gripped my hand back.

Romance

My fiancé, Ethan, and I were planning our dream wedding in a country club brimming with lilies and privilege. Then, I saw her: Molly, the intern, visibly pregnant, looking distraught. Ethan rushed to her side, his gesture possessive, his absence a familiar sting. He returned, announcing her pregnan

Romance

At 35, architect Emily was on top of the world. Her firm just won a major contract for a downtown skyscraper, and she was celebrating a successful career, building dreams one blueprint at a time. Then came the text. Not for her, but for her husband Ethan. It flashed on his iPad: "My Little Muse. Is

Literature

Trajectory presents classics of world literature with 21st century features! Our original-text editions include the following visual enhancements to foster a deeper understanding of the work: Word Clouds at the start of each chapter highlight important words. Word, sentence, paragraph counts, and re

Literature

The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and The Masterpiece by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Romance

The phone buzzed, a relentless vibration I tried to ignore, but Sarah' s furious face on the video call told me I couldn' t. My artist husband, Ethan, had unveiled his new exhibition, "Raw Truths," a brutal public dissection of our dead marriage. The centerpiece? A twenty-foot-tall projection of

Young Adult

Sarah counted down the hours to college, her scholarship a golden ticket out of her small Texas town and the suffocating grip of her mother, Brenda. Tomorrow meant freedom, a normal life beyond shapeless dresses and severe buns insisted upon by Brenda, whose piety was a performance for her church g

Billionaires

The smell of freshly painted cherry-red and victory filled my garage. My venture capital firm might build empires, but this 1969 Mustang Mach 1 was my anniversary gift to myself-a reminder of where I came from. For my wife, Nicole, I' d acquired a fortune-costing, reclusive artist' s painting, a b

Romance

For three years, my Nashville apartment was a vibrant storm of Jenny' s laughter and music, a shared dream with my girlfriend. But on our anniversary, the silence screamed louder than any note when her text popped up: "Jenny Smith has blocked you." It was Caleb, her narcissistic best friend, throw

Sci-fi

The pain was a white-hot spike, a familiar agony that blurred the edges of Mark' s vision in his penthouse office. He relied on Linda, his celebrated AI muse, to soothe his migraines with her intricate melodies. But today, Linda' s music felt weak, ineffective, a sign that her "source"-a silent wo

Fantasy

Once a mediocre man, and now a powerful Yama. His name is Evan Ye, the overlord of the underworld. He commands deceased historical figures and countless heroes from movies and cartoons. The sole purpose of his minions, whether it be the fearsome characters of computer games or the beautiful, sexy fe

Modern

I lay on a mildewed mattress in a run-down motel, my body trembling from withdrawal. Once the most feared "Gossip Queen" in Hollywood, I was now a forty-three-year-old ghost staring at a cracked mirror, waiting for the end. The door clicked open, and Brittany Potts stepped in, looking immaculate in

Literature

The Haunted Chamber by The Duchess""

Romance

Can true love overcome all the pitfalls of destiny? The Vikings invaded the village where Rosalie lived. They murdered children and the elderly and abducted young women and strong men to their country to sell them into slavery. At the slave market, Rosalie is bought by a spirited young jarl. What wi

Young Adult

A boy falls in love with a girl he once hated because of her pomposity...he then faces the test of letting her know his feelings

Romance

To the ruthless Alpha Ashen Vladimir III, loyalty is everything,and disobedience is death. So when a sharp-tongued male slave named Nicholas is sent to serve in his brutal court as a server boy Ashen doesn't expect defiance... or attraction. But "Nicholas" is no ordinary slave. She is Nicolette Si

Billionaires

I woke up with a throbbing pressure behind my eyes and the taste of metallic champagne in my throat. Instead of my cramped apartment, I was draped in expensive silk under a ceiling the color of a storm cloud. A pear-shaped black diamond sat heavy on my finger, and a document on the nightstand confi

Romance

Lancy, a daughter of a wealthy family, is sold to an agent organization. During a mission, she is seriously injured and lost her consciousness. Years later she wakes up, unexpectedly finding that she has boy/girl twins. Her six-year-old boy is smart, with excellent business thinking; the girl is goo

Billionaires

My entire life revolved around Ashworth Creatives, the agency I poured my soul into building, and my fiancé, Ethan. Tonight was meant to be my crowning achievement, sealing a colossal client deal and my future within the powerful Ashworth family who' d adopted me. Then, I saw Ethan' s phone. A te

Modern

The sterile scent of antiseptic always brought me back. It was the smell of my last death – broken and bleeding in a dark alley. But this time, I wasn\'t dying; I was walking into Senator Maxwell' s garden party, my husband, Professor Ethan Thorne, adjusting his tie beside me. To the world, he wa

Romance

The first thing I noticed was the ultrasound picture on my kitchen island, a grainy image signaling a future I never saw coming. My husband, David, looked pale, and beside him, his intern, Lily, barely legal and with a hand protectively over her flat stomach, smiled triumphantly. "I' m pregnant,"