Theshy
ABOUT ME
ABOUT ME
STORY BY Theshy
The Queen Demanded I Chase Her? Then I Let Her Go
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The night Queen Vivienne set fire to the royal summer lodge, she was trying to force my hand—not to save our marriage, but to win a hereditary title for the man she had loved before me. I found her note in the smoke: seven years together, and I still couldn't give her one thing she asked for. By morning, the papers were calling her a heartbroken wife and me a cold king. I could have chased her, apologized, and granted the title. Instead, I began asking who had been inside the lodge when the fire started. If I uncovered the truth, I might keep my crown. I might even save Vivienne. But after seven years of choosing each other in public and losing each other in private, could I still choose the woman who had made a weapon of our marriage?
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When No One Came for My Uncle, I Drove 370 Miles and He Gave Me $23 Million
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My uncle Cal walked out of prison with a paper sack of belongings and nobody waiting for him. My mother said I should leave him there; the family company he once helped run had spent years telling the world he was the only one responsible for its deadliest failure. I drove 370 miles anyway, expecting a thank-you at best and an argument at worst. Instead, before we reached the first town, Cal told me his shares in Mercer Marine Safety were worth $23 million, and he wanted me to have them. A sale of the company was already underway, and my vote could decide whether it went through. I had to figure out why he had chosen me, what my mother had hidden, and whether any inheritance was worth becoming the person my family needed me to be.
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Move-In Day, Dad Made My Roommate's Bed, Denied Me, and I Claimed I Was an Orphan
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My father carried my roommate's boxes, made her bed, and told her he had never seen me before. I stood six feet away with my own mattress still rolled in plastic and listened while he introduced himself as the man who was going to marry her mother. Willa had no idea that the stranger fussing over her sheets was also the father who had missed my birthdays, ignored my calls, and insisted our past was none of her business. So when she asked who he was, I said my father was dead and I was an orphan. It should have been a harmless lie between two girls sharing a dorm room. Then my father asked me to keep it that way. How long could I protect the person who'd become my friend without letting him erase me all over again?
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At the Bottom of Finishing School, I Told the Billionaire to Get Lost
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When my best friend introduced me to her boyfriend's billionaire older brother, he offered to buy the ballroom where I'd spent my whole life learning how to stand up straight. I told him to get lost before the champagne was poured. At Bellwether House, the coastal finishing program that ranked its students on everything from introductions to dinner-table conversation, I'd finished dead last. Celia Hart had graduated at the top. She thought Graham Vale and I might get along. She was wrong about that, at least at first. Graham's company had a polished plan for turning our beloved public ballroom into a private resort, and I had one season to prove the building could survive without him. But when his offer began to look less like a business deal and more like a way to make me choose between the place I loved and the man I couldn't quite dismiss, I had to ask myself one question: if Graham finally backed off, would I want him to stay?
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One Lamp Stayed Lit Until the Late Roses Bloomed
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I asked Julian Ashcombe for two dollars on the coldest morning of the winter, and he looked at me as if I had asked him to hand over the estate. My fingers had gone white around the greenhouse key, and the bus to Bellweather Clinic was due in twelve minutes. Julian had the only cash I could see. Behind him, the Ashcombe family's winter garden glittered with frost, its old roses stubbornly alive beneath a single yellow lamp. I wanted a doctor, not a favor. By evening, I would have to choose whether to tell the truth about the broken heat, even if telling it cost me my home. And by spring, I would know whether Julian could choose me without asking me to forgive what his family had done.
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In His Heart Tomorrow
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My husband stood before six hundred mourners and called me the conscience of the Vale family. Three days earlier, he had told me I would regret defying him when I was under the ground. The papers said I died in the fire at our foundation's archive. They printed my photograph beside tributes from people whose rent, medical bills, and second chances I had helped pay for. I watched the memorial from a borrowed room with a bandaged hand and a name no one knew. Graham believed grief would make my work his again. He didn't know I had survived, or that the files he'd tried to burn were still safe. But returning meant losing the quiet life I might have built in hiding. And it meant facing the one question I had spent years avoiding: if I came back, would I be saving the foundation, or only the man who had taught me to disappear?
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Forced to Play the Villain, but the Saint Was My Fan
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The royal church ordered me to become the monster in its next public miracle. I was a necromancer who fainted at the sight of blood, barely tolerated conversation, and had spent six years trying to grow the sweetest enchanted cabbages in the kingdom. Now the Church of the Dawn wanted me to curse the capital's water supply during the Lantern Rite, so its Saint could appear to defeat me before thousands of witnesses. The Saint, Julian Vale, arrived at my cottage with a stack of my gardening notes and the alarming enthusiasm of a man meeting his favorite author. He also knew the miracle was a lie. If I refused, the Church would destroy my farm and call it justice. If I played along, I might help it bury a much bigger crime. And I still had no idea whether the Saint admired my work enough to trust me.
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June Rainer, Unanswered
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On the second day of my boyfriend's silence, I called him sixteen times. The first calls rang until voicemail; after the ninth, they went straight to it. After the sixteenth, his phone was off. I knew the usual next step: open the game app, check whether he was online, and collect proof that he could talk to strangers but not to me. Instead, I put my phone facedown and went to the apartment we shared to pack. I expected the hardest part to be leaving. I didn't expect Owen to make my silence look like the crime.
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Day Laborer, What Kind of Life Will You Kidnap?
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The first time I kidnapped someone in the kingdom of Veyr, I took a girl from a locked room beneath a monastery and carried her through a drainage tunnel while the bells rang overhead. I didn't want a ransom. I wanted her alive, and I wanted the other people the monastery had marked for its next "voluntary" offering alive, too. After a lifetime of work in worlds that had all let me die at sixty, I'd learned how easily a contract could make cruelty look respectable. But the girl I rescued had a question for me, and the answer would decide whether I could keep her safe: if I was going to build a life by kidnapping people out of theirs, would I ever let anyone choose to stay?
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Love Me Deeply, Then Let Me Love You Deeper
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When I joined a dating show to repair my reputation, the last thing I expected was to fall for the quiet investor who called his work "a few small bets." Noah Reed made me laugh without asking for a kiss, remembered what I said when the cameras were off, and seemed to see the woman beneath the headlines. Then I learned he had a stake in the company shaping our story—and that my most private moments could become the show's biggest selling point. I could protect my career by playing along, or risk everything by refusing to let strangers decide what our relationship meant. But if Noah had helped build the trap, could I ever trust what happened between us?
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