Beast’s Origins

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.

Literature

Human Origins by Samuel Laing

Werewolf

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Sci-fi

Three short stories about how the world turns into a violent absolutist dictatorship in the name of climate change. "The President", "The Publicist" and "The Rebel" Three short stories about how the world turns into a violent absolutist dictatorship in the name of climate change and how The Archo

Horror

A student on a school camping trip gets possessed by an unknown creature; giving him special abilities and forcing him to do it's bidding ~ thus bringing a devastating threat to the camp and its surroundings. Has an elusive evil truly returned? Can the possessed student find a way to regain full co

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After a failed suicide, 16 year old Artillian Skye wakes up as an armoured soldier. With only a spear in hand, he is thrust in the middle of a battlefield with thousands of soldiers. Somehow he had entered the Gaia domain. A place were spirits, demons and demi gods run rampant in their quests for

Sci-fi

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Literature

Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins by John Fiske