Lilith
ABOUT ME
ABOUT ME
STORY BY Lilith
Decent Bodyguards: Do I Have to Accept Love Against My Will?
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When Cal Mercer sent a ring to my office with a note saying he'd keep asking until I said yes, I returned it unopened. I'd already told him no—more than once—and I wanted my life back, not a grander proposal. Then my new client, Adrian Vale, offered me a job protecting him from a threat he claimed was real. Adrian was feared by everyone around him, but in private he asked me to stay, promised to obey my boundaries, and called himself mine to command. Cal wanted to make me his wife. Adrian wanted me to choose him. As the line between a security assignment and a personal war began to blur, I had to decide whether either man understood what my answer meant.
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The Crown in My Heart
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My husband put a property-transfer agreement in front of me during the winter benefit and asked me to sign away the coastal shelters I had spent eighteen years protecting. When I refused, King Edmund announced that I had become an obstacle to the Crown. He expected the country to remember a disobedient queen. Instead, the people remembered who had opened the shelters after the flood, and who had tried to sell them. I kept my promise to the kingdom, even when keeping it cost me my marriage, my title, and the home I had built inside the palace. But by the time the ministers stood beside my coffin and the streets filled with mourners, Edmund had learned the price of the choice he made. I had to wonder: when the Crown finally asked him to choose between his power and me, would he choose me at all?
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After My Sister Swapped My Oxygen Tank, My Family Regretted Everything
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My sister switched my full oxygen cylinder for an empty one on a mountain road, then watched me struggle to breathe while our family sat trapped in traffic. By the time a rescue team reached our car, my mother was still insisting Tessa had only made an innocent mistake. I wanted to believe her. I wanted the trip to my grandmother's memorial to end without turning my family into strangers. But as I recovered in a small mountain hospital, I began to see how much everyone needed my sister's version of events to be true. And when the rest of my family asked me to protect her, I had to decide what forgiveness would cost me.
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My Wife Said She Had Training, Thinking I Didn't Know, Until Our Family Chat Exploded
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My wife told me she had a weekend leadership training in Bellwether Bay, then kissed me goodbye with her suitcase already packed. I believed her until my phone lit up with a family-chat photo of her beside my brother at a hotel bar, his hand resting at her waist. The picture was bad enough. The messages underneath it were worse: my family had known about their secret for months, and my wife and brother had been planning to take the biggest client from the event company I built. I could fight them with the records I kept, but doing so might destroy the company, my marriage, and the family I still wanted to believe in. When everyone finally had to choose a side, I had one question left: could I still trust the woman who had once been my home?
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After His Smoke and My Lung Cancer Diagnosis, I Found Someone New
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The night my oncologist confirmed lung cancer, my boyfriend lit a cigarette beside our open kitchen window and told me not to make him feel guilty for something he couldn't control. I had never smoked. For years, I'd asked him to take his cigarettes outside, and for years, he'd promised he would. Now I had a tumor, a treatment schedule, and a lease with his name beside mine. Leaving him meant losing the home I'd built around us at the worst possible time. Staying meant trusting the person who had ignored the one boundary I could no longer afford to keep. I thought I knew which choice I would make. I didn't know who I would become after I made it.
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After My Ascended Parents Abandoned Me Seven Times, My Soul Lamp Finally Went Dark
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On the night my parents promised to bring me through the veil, they used my name to keep the gate open and left me on the wrong side for the seventh time. When my soul lamp went dark, the city called it a death. I called it the first honest thing my family had ever given me. But the lamp was also the anchor holding my parents' place in the heavens, and the people who had profited from that arrangement weren't ready to let me go. If I survived the severing, would I still want the family that had abandoned me—or had I finally learned to live without them?
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Mistress at My Door to Claim My Husband? She Picked the Wrong Sister-in-Law!
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A woman with my husband's ring on her finger walked into my family's charity dinner and asked me to make room for her. She brought a pregnancy test, a prepared separation agreement, and the confidence of someone who believed my marriage was already over. I might have signed just to stop the room from watching me bleed. Then my sister-in-law Kit stood beside me. Everyone in the Vale family knew Kit as the reckless one—the woman who broke rules, left parties early, and once rode a motorcycle through a greenhouse. They didn't know what she did when somebody tried to take the one thing she had chosen to protect. I had to decide whether to let her fight for me, even if the truth could cost us both the family we still loved.
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Horror Run's Final Boss Was My Uncle, the Butcher?
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When I signed on to test the new horror attraction inside Gallow Creek's abandoned packing plant, I expected fake blood, locked doors, and a paycheck large enough to keep my mother's house out of foreclosure. I didn't expect the masked figure waiting at the end of the first corridor to speak in my uncle Owen's unmistakable voice. The town called him a butcher long before the attraction gave him an apron and a blade. He hadn't spoken to me in eleven years, not since my father died at that plant and Owen let everyone blame him. Now the doors are sealed, the game is turning dangerous, and every clue points to a story my family buried. If I have to choose between escaping with the other players and finding out why my uncle came back, which one will I save?
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My Mom Called an AI Her Son, So I Reclaimed My House and Left
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The first time my mother introduced her AI companion as my dead brother, she did it at dinner, while the machine's voice came through the kitchen speaker and my place at the table sat empty. She had named it Daniel, given it years of family recordings, and started paying for the service with the card I kept on file for her utilities. I told myself it was grief until I found the new lock on my old bedroom door and heard her tell the voice that I was only visiting. The house was legally mine, but my mother had lived there since my brother died. I had built my plans for America around the promise that she would always have a home. Now she wanted a son who could answer every call and never ask her to let go. If I stopped supporting her, would I be protecting what was left of our family, or proving that I was the child she could afford to lose?
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Teacher, We Want to Paint!
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The first time Tessa asked me for paid work, she did it while I was standing on a ladder with a paintbrush in my teeth. "I'm tired of making things for practice," she said. June kept her eyes on the canvas between us, quiet as she'd been for the six months she'd worked in my studio. I thought I understood the difference between them: Tessa restless and hungry, June patient and content. Then a client called to ask why my newest mural design was already being advertised under Tessa's name. The painting she'd used to sell it had begun as an exercise we'd made together, and the design belonged to all three of us in ways none of us had written down. My studio, my students, and the work I'd spent years building were suddenly tangled in one question: if I made room for them to become artists, could I still ask them to respect the lines that made that room possible?
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