Mari thought that coming home to a ghost town after her mom's death was bad. It turns out it's worse having to attend her estranged father's wedding and letting her childhood best friend break down the walls she carefully built. ***** Mari Chasey's life is suspended. She returns to her hometown in a cold November day following her mother's death, after years of studying abroad in Europe. Pinewood is sleepy in the bitter cold, the deserted shoreline stretching further than she can reach, but that's okay. Mari is good with temporary things and at not lingering. She's not planning to stay for long, just enough to sort out her mother's affairs without poking at open wounds. Then her father returns. Jack Chasey, former renowned superstar, absent for most of her childhood, is getting married to a woman Mari hardly knows. He gets to begin again, build something new, while Mari grapples with a fractured life and all the scattered pieces of herself. Her mother was supposed to live forever; Jack was mercurial and always at arm's length. But now he's here to stay. Enter Kinney St. James. Once Mari's closest friend, then another person that passed by like a comet, she still knows Mari and all the shards of her. Even the sharper ones. In the stillness of winter, Mari reconnects with the quiet life Jack always wanted for her, the softer parts of her that only Kinney can tap into, and what it truly means to be her mother's daughter. ***** Open Novella Contest -- prompts 24, 29, 46, & 77 [[OPEN NOVELLA CONTEST 2026 ROUND 1 WINNER, SHORTLISTER]] © 2026 caterina george // all rights reserved

When Alistair Melek gave his life to the sea, various degrees of things changed. For starters, his love for bloodshed was amplified. Bolder. He was drawn to the clash of a sword, blood spilling below the floorboards, like a moth drawn to a flame. And this love was damned to spread through his crew as some treacherous disease, claiming any and all who joined. But he knew this was the price he'd pay. The price for the sea itself. So when his crew completes another standard loot and pillage from a merchant ship, he allows his men a bit of fun. He liked to give them an audience, rounding up those who didn't fall victim to the blade during battle, and forcing them to beg for their lives. To prove how much they really wanted to live. Alistair had ruled the sea for some years now. Killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Destroyed hundreds, maybe thousands of vessels. And yet, each feeble human was all the same. There was not one man he threatened that didn't beg for their lives with all they had in them when faced with the wrong end of the sword. Each feeble human was always the same. Or so he thought. And yet, he also thought that this would be a standard job. A treat for his men after a night of good work. But this particular survivor, the one with long white hair and dead-looking eyes... He wasn't a merchant. He couldn't have been. More importantly, there was no hesitancy when Alistair asked the fairly built man whether he wanted to live, and the man replied with a simple no.

Hermione Granger is working on the most important project of her life, if only she knew exactly what it was. It's been six years since the war ended, and Draco Malfoy is a new man with old regrets, if only a particular witch would let him make his amends. After agreeing to a collaboration and fuelling the sparks of friendship, the two realise that everything has its time and place, they just need to find theirs.

⠀ ━━━ ⠀⠀❛ 𝒓𝒖𝒊𝒏 ❜ 〔 A. HOTCHNER 〕✷ ╱ 废墟 ㅤ. . . i was there in the 𝙙𝙖𝙧𝙠 when you 𝙨𝙥𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙙 your first 𝒃𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒅.ᐟ ━━━━━━━━ 𝗜𝗡 𝗪𝗛𝗜𝗖𝗛. . . jason gideon's dying wish comes in the form of an envelope with a single message: "find carson crest. 𝒅𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔." ❪ status : 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒕𝒆 ❫ 𝗖𝗥𝗜𝗠𝗜𝗡𝗔𝗟 𝗠𝗜𝗡𝗗𝗦, PRE-S1 ━ S10 ❪ 𝘢𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘯 𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘦𝘳 x 𝗳𝗲𝗺!𝗼𝗰. ❫ ━━━ © CARDIIAC

Nicolás Velez is done with casual sex. Listen, yes, he might've slept with everyone in his flat within the first week of living in halls and had a respectable run on Grindr, but what eighteen-year-old wouldn't? He's almost twenty-four now, though, and hooking up with people who can't pronounce his name is, as his best mate would say, "not cute, baby girl". Problem: Nikki sucks at dating. With only disasters to show for his efforts, he decides to take a break from it all. That is, until he meets Josephine Rawlins. GENRE: romance, pan man x bi woman TROPES: workplace romance, friends with benefits, mutual pining COMP TITLES: Entergalactic, Take A Hint Dani Brown featured in Wattpad: Black Love featured in Wattpad: BHM Contemporary Lit featured in Wattpad: Pride Community Recommendations featured in lgbtq: Pride Shelf Dec 24 featured in lgbtq: Bisexual and Pansexual featured in Ambassador Recommendations BIPOC Mental Health featured in Ambassadors: Rainbow Fiction featured in Romance: Slow Burn featured in Romance: LGBTQAIP+ Romance featured in Romance: Pride Month featured in Romance: New Beginnings FreeTheLGBT Pride Awards winner 2025 Nano Watt Romance shortlister 2025

''Tell me how it feels,'' he says. "Good," I gasp, my entire body trembling. Deeper. Harder. Perfect. Like we've been doing this for years. His hand finds my jaw, fingers firm as he tilts my head up, making me look at him. And that's it. Waves of heat zip to my toes as my nails scrape down his back. I don't think about what comes next -- him pulling his shirt on and leaving. I don't feel heartbroken when I imagine myself alone in here. It's casual, our intimacy. And it's too late to renegotiate. ***** When Fox hooks up with his new roommate at a masked club, he has no idea their fling is just the beginning. The woman he's living with is the same girl who shared candy with him under a playground slide. 𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙨 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩 𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙨 𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙚𝙧 𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙨 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙞𝙣 STANDALONE NOVEL *ANGSTY EMOTIONAL SLOW BURN *MEN YEARNING Copyright © 2024-present Laurel Montaze (immoralLaurel). This body of work (story, characters, ideas) is available exclusively on Wattpad. If you're viewing it on a different website/platform or under a different username, it has been illegally stolen. Please notify the original author. © All Rights Reserved

When a government-funded project to create supersoldiers goes incredibly wrong, a zombie outbreak unlike any the world has ever seen in books and video games sweeps the United States. ••••• Daytona Pierce lost everything when the LycanZ pathogen spread to her hometown. Despite it being years since the first outbreak, she hasn't given up hope in a cure for humanity. On the contrary, she uses her position as sergeant in the Boston Quarantine Zone to keep up to date on the progress of an antidote. A mission gone horribly wrong sends Daytona on a trek cross-country in hopes of delivering the one person who could save the world: Soren Levisay. Only, more than just her life is on the line and despite her promise, she finds herself lost in the revenant's kiss and unwilling to let go. ••••• This will be written in first person point of view. Based off Prompt 33: And then I pressed my cheek against the asphalt and prayed the dead bodies would cover my scent. Additional, Prompt 5: A soldier always has two options when at a crossroads: to follow orders or to abort the mission. Started: 2/4/22 Ended: 4/29/22 Word Count: 34,238 CONTENT WARNING: contains mature language, blood and gore, and explicit scenes of various types including those of sexual nature © D. C. Bolton 2022

In a blink of an eye, the whole world can change. Evey had always lived a normal life. She was an emergency room nurse, had friends, and had a family that she loved. Her mundane world changes when she watches a man attack and feast on the flesh of another man at a gas station. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated attack. Majority of the population has been infected with an unknown airborne virus. Not only does it cause people to foam at the mouth and bleed from the eyes, but it turns them into mindless creatures that are hungry for flesh. Zombies? Not quite. They are infected, not dead. Evey's life is destroyed when her family becomes Infected. Being one of the few Immune, Evey is taken away to a military base with other people who seem to not be infected by the virus. There she meets multiple people including Ford, a stubborn and stern soldier that she is always disagreeing with but finds herself distracted by his eyes. The Immune band together and work for survival. Will they ever be able to find a cure? At what cost would they go to stay safe? Will they kill each other before being eaten alive?