Goddess Karma Novels & Stories

When I was three years old, during a car accident, I was struck in the head by a car while trying to protect Mom. After that, the doctors said something inside my head had broken, and I'd never be quite right. Everyone back home called me the slow one. Late at night, I'd see her crying alone. On my seventh birthday, Mom took me to Manhattan, and that was when I discovered that she had a second home and another daughter, Charlotte. In front of strangers, she wouldn't claim me. She only let me call her Miss Eleanor. On the third night, She sat down at her vanity. On the table was a small black box. I thought it was a present. She opened the box and took out a black silicone bracelet, with a little light embedded in the clasp—small, dark, switched off. "This is called a TruthBand. It's something a company in California makes. The light turns green when you tell the truth, and red when you lie. If you wear this, Mommy will always know." She fastened it around my wrist. Tight. The little light blinked green. I thought that if I was good enough, she would love me the way she loved my sister. But then she made me do ski practice with Charlotte. Charlotte was a junior champion. "You're both my daughters. I don't play favorites. Whoever falls, gets punished." Charlotte never fell. I couldn't even keep my skis straight. Every single run, I was the one Mama dragged off the mountain and locked in the cellar. On Thanksgiving Day, Mama spent the whole afternoon cooking. I wanted to help. I dropped a bowl. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were red. She grabbed a little pill bottle off the counter, tipped my chin up, and forced something between my teeth. "Dumb as a rat. Are you happy now? Did you finally embarrass me enough? " I lay on the kitchen floor, gasping. While she wasn't looking, I scraped up three little pink pellets that had spilled and tucked them into my fist. Mommy, I told myself, I'll be good now, and then you'll be happy. Right?

Kaden Zacarias and I have been together for a decade. He gives me all his love throughout that time. But one day, I see the news of him marrying Gwendolyn Crawford as part of a marriage alliance. He tells his friends, "I'm only fooling around with Ella—does she think I'll actually marry her? It's not like my parents will ever agree to it. I can just keep her around as a mistress after getting married. Remember to keep your mouths shut about this." Our decade-long love goes up in flames, but I don't question him. Instead, I call my father with a withered heart and say, "I'll go through with the marriage alliance. I'll leave the country."

On my husband's birthday, I poured my heart into preparing a feast and selecting the perfect gift. Yet, he didn't come home. Instead, I received a picture message—a snapshot of him at the hospital, standing outside the OB-GYN ward, his hand resting tenderly on his childhood crush's belly. Beneath the photo, a message read: [The best birthday gift and a symbol of our decade-long bond.] Furious, I called her. "Don't you know he's married?" Before I could say more, my husband snatched the phone and lashed out at me. "Yvonne just wanted to share the joy of becoming a mother. Why are you overreacting? "Yvonne and I have been best friends for over a decade. Your petty jealousy is disgusting!" I once believed his busyness was for our future, but now I knew—he had been busy supporting the girl of his dreams through her pregnancy. Clutching my own stomach, I bit my lip to stop the tears from falling. Ten years of love had drained away. It was time to let go.

When we're playing cards during the holidays, my cousin, Owen Thompson, suddenly calls it boring and tells us that he wants to make a big gamble. Then, he tosses his BMW keys onto the table and asks if we're bold enough to follow up with our own bets. I know that Owen is just trying to flaunt the fact that he's bought himself a BMW. Everyone is stunned by his antics. They quickly say, "This is just a game. We're not going to bet anything else." After that, they start complimenting how amazing Owen is to be able to own a BMW at such a young age. I, on the other hand, hesitate to do so. After all, my trump cards are a set of Ks. Having gotten his ego boosted by the compliments, Owen is about to flush the deck when I put my car keys belonging to a cheaper, rundown car. Then, I mumble, "I'm going to follow up with a bet of my own." Everyone falls silent at my statement. They just stare at me in disbelief, whereas Owen widens his eyes out of shock. Almost immediately, things grow heated between us. The moment both of us place our car keys onto the betting table, our feeble relationship as cousins is quick to vanish. But I don't regret my decision. Owen is the one who has decided to bet his BMW, after all. Since he's capable of being this ruthless toward his own relatives, I might as well not give a damn about his feelings at all. Owen lets out a cold chuckle before saying, "How much do you have in that pocket of yours, huh? You really think you can scare me, chump? I have a BMW, for crying out loud! You should gather more money first before placing your bet! Don't go around scamming others with just a shitty car!"

To get me to agree to a divorce, my husband lied and told me he had stomach cancer. I glanced at the medical report in my bag and said nothing. Instead, I broke down right then and there, sobbing like my heart was being ripped apart, absolutely refusing to divorce him. Because what he didn't know… was that he actually had cancer. Just not stomach cancer—liver cancer. And with his funeral coming up soon, if we divorced now, who would inherit all his assets? No way. I couldn't let this divorce happen!

Xavier Stafford claims to love Aurora Bowman to the moon and back, but he's escaped from marrying her 99 times. To delay their marriage, he even orchestrates a car accident to cause her to miscarry. As if Aurora isn't already devastated after losing her baby, she overhears Xavier and his friend's conversation. "I only dated her for seven years to get revenge for Violet. If Aurora thought any of this was serious, she'd be in for a rude awakening!" Aurora's heart goes cold at those words. A rude awakening, indeed. Thankfully, there's still hope for her to walk away and save herself. After regaining her composure and gathering her thoughts, Aurora agrees to another marriage proposal. While Xavier carries out his 100th attempt to escape marriage, Aurora proudly gets married to another groom in Elmstead.

“Miss Green, the results show that you have late-stage pancreatic cancer. The situation isn’t good for you. If you give up on treatment, you might have less than a month left. Are you sure you don’t want to receive treatment? Will your husband agree to it?” “I’m sure that… he will.” After I hung up, I surveyed the empty house and felt sadness fill every fiber of my heart. I had thought that the pain I felt was due to my dear old friend, gastritis, but it was cancer. I sighed and looked at the picture on the table. The eighteen-year-old Zach Stone stared at me in the photo. It had been years since, but I still remembered how the snow had fallen on my hair. At that time, Zach had smiled and asked whether this counted as us growing old together.

My sister was autistic. The doctors called it "severe sensory overload." The rule was simple: No sudden noises. Ever. So my whole life was set to mute. I never wore heels. I never raised my voice. I wasn't even allowed to laugh. It was all to keep her from having a meltdown. My father, Victor, the Don of the Castellano family, would grip my shoulder. His face was a mask of apology. "Sera, you're my good girl. Protecting your sister is our duty. You're healthy and strong. You can sacrifice a little for her, can't you?" That day, I was on the second-floor terrace and accidentally knocked over a pot of white roses. The sound of it shattering sent my sister, who was sunbathing in the garden below, into a meltdown. For the first time, Victor glared at me like I was the enemy. He roared, "Can't you just be quiet? Do you want to drive her insane?" My sister backed away in terror, right into a glass table, and let out a piercing scream. Victor charged past me, a blur of rage and panic. He slammed into me on the stairs as I was running down to help. I lost my footing and crashed chest-first into the sharp corner of a wrought-iron banister post. Pain exploded in my chest. I opened my mouth to scream, but only silence came out. My family swarmed around my shrieking sister. No one even glanced at me. My lungs filled with blood. I was drowning on the floor. They all thought my sister, the one with autism, needed the family's comfort. They thought I just took a fall. That I could wait. They were wrong.

I was a princess ennobled by my father, the late king. Marrying the general of the northern frontier, Griffin Quenell was already a great show of royal favor. On my wedding day, just as my royal carriage arrived at the Quenell family’s courtyard, a woman dressed in grey wool knelt before the castle gate. She held a swaddled infant in her arms. Griffin, as the groom of the day, dressed in his wedding tunic, blocked my path with a troubled expression. “Your Grace, Joan is someone I met in the borderlands. She bore me a son and now has no place to go. Please let her move in with me on this special occasion. You’ll be my first wife, and she’ll be my second wife. It’s all for the sake of the Quenell bloodline.” The guests at the gate erupted into commotion. His grandmother, Wilma Quenell, spoke firmly. “Your Grace, you were born into royalty. You certainly do not lack a title. However, Griffin is the only son the Quenell family has had in three generations. This child bears the Quenell name. We surely can’t make him an illegitimate child.” The border soldiers knelt and said in unison, “Your Grace, have mercy!” I looked down at the child in the swaddle, then at Griffin’s pleading gaze. I smiled, removed my coronet from my head, and placed it on the wedding table. Then, I turned and boarded my carriage. “General Quenell, I will not stop you from wanting an heir, but my late father’s decree said I am to be married, not given away as a gift. If your family cannot abide by his words, then I shall take the decree back with me.”

The whole world knows that Rachel Saffron is Matt Quillon's and Sean Coal's true love. My best friend, Winnie Hamilton, and I are merely substitutes for Rachel. It seems like I'm the love of Matt's life, and Winnie is the only woman Sean has ever had eyes for. However, we both know this is nothing but an act.