Best Stories

PART 1 Some men build fences to keep trouble out. Thomas Hale built his to keep the world out entirely, and after the fever winter of eighty-six nearly took his cattle, his daughter, and what remained of his hope along with it, nobody in Cedar Falls blamed him for it. Ever since the lung sickness…

PART 1 Cold marble pressed through the thin soles of my shoes. I was a bride, but the ceremony felt like an execution. Adrian Cruz didn’t want a wife. He wanted a hostage. He’d married me to destroy my family and dismantle my father’s legacy piece by piece, believing I was a pampered princess, collateral…

PART 1 The rain hammered against the café window like impatient fingers. I wrapped my oversized cardigan tighter around my body — the fabric worn thin from too many washes — and tried to disappear into the cracked leather booth. The coffee in front of me had gone cold an hour ago, but I kept…

PART 1 Gideon Marsh had built a criminal empire with his own two hands, only to lose the lower half of his body to a car bomb planted beneath a vehicle he’d driven a thousand times without incident. Paralyzed from the waist down, bitter, and isolated, he’d dismissed every professional nurse who crossed his threshold…

PART 1 The dress had cost more than my parents’ mortgage. The flowers had come straight from Holland. The groom was in the men’s room, texting his assistant and booking a private jet to Cabo with his personal trainer. I stood alone at the back of the cathedral, a heavy lace veil pinning down what…

PART 1 I was thirty seconds from locking the clinic door when someone started pounding on it. Not knocking. *Pounding.* The kind of desperate sound that makes every instinct scream *run.* My hand froze on the deadbolt. Through the frosted glass, I could make out a shape. Tall. Swaying. The pounding came again, weaker this…

PART 1 Nobody expected the maid to catch Delphine Ashcroft’s wrist. They expected the slap. They expected the sound of skin on skin beneath the crystal chandeliers, the quiet woman in the pale gray uniform stumbling backward, lowering her eyes, apologizing for whatever imaginary offense Delphine had decided she’d committed. Most of all, they expected…

PART 1 The fluorescent lights hummed overhead as I filed another invoice into the cabinet, my fingers moving through familiar motions while my mind wandered elsewhere. Four years I’d worked at Bianke Imports. Four years of maintaining the careful boundary between professional courtesy and the quiet intensity in Massimo Bianke’s eyes whenever they found mine…

PART 1 Every night at 2:14, the most feared man in New York called just to hear me say hello. He fell in love with my voice in the dark. Then he saw my face, and the secret I had been hiding broke something inside him. But before Enzo Salvatore ever knew my name —…