The Villa Novels & Stories

In order to take care of my father, who got hurt from a fall, I gave up on my chance to get promoted and even took a week's leave. On the day he gets discharged from the hospital, my dad hands me a mysterious envelope with a wide smile on his face. "Thank you for your trouble over the past few days, Luther. This is a little token of appreciation from me. You can buy yourself a nice pack of smokes." I rub my hands together, feeling warmth surging into my heart. But when I open the envelope, all I see is seven dollars. Still, I comfort myself in thinking that the sum isn't important at all. It's the thought that counts, after all. But the next day, I come across a social media post of my younger brother, Felix Grayson, who never showed his face around the hospital during Dad's hospitalization. It features a photo collage of a luxurious villa, with a photo of the purchasing contract smack dab in the middle of collage. The caption writes, "I bought the top-tier riverside villa for seven million dollars! Thank you so much for your support, Dad!"

My best friend is bound to a trade system—she can force a swap with me three times. At 13, she takes my heart. At 18, she takes my SAT scores. And now, for the final swap, she wants my entire identity. I hide under the covers, unable to hold back a laugh. My villa is rented, and my family background is totally fake. Go ahead, bestie. Swap away! This time, I really hope you don't hold back.

In my previous life, my sister thought that since my husband and I had high-paying jobs, she could swap her son with my child without anyone noticing. But twenty-five years later, the tables turned. My son had grown into a street thug, while her son—raised under my care—rose smoothly through life. Young as he was, he had already become a CEO. He was dutiful, bought me a villa, and even sent me traveling around the world. My sister barged into his company, waving a DNA test report, kicking up a scene, only to be thrown out by security. "Mr. Kieran said that even if you are his biological mother, you never gave him a single day of care," they told her. "So he refuses to acknowledge you." Breaking down completely, she drove her car into me and ended my life. When I opened my eyes again, we had returned to the very day she switched our babies. This time, my sister clutched her own child tightly, a wild, triumphant grin on her face. "From now on, you can be the mother of a street thug," she sneered. "The villa and all those riches—they're mine!"

Isabella is a young lady who is forced to sign a contract deal which sells her without possible revocation to the deadliest mafia Lord. Luca. Her parents, having no other option, use her as the last collateral to pay up whatever they owed Luca. After she arrives at Luca's Villa, he tries to make her comfortable but still drops warnings for her. Isabella is anything but comfortable. She is determined to get away from there as fast as possible. Isabella, without the knowledge of Luca, plans an escape. Ready to leave.

During the holidays, I get home in advance, hoping to surprise my wife, Zara Hudson. But the moment I open the front door, I find out that an unfamiliar young man has already taken over my villa and is in the middle of hosting a party. The spot where my wedding portrait used to be now features an intimate photo of that man making out with Zara. "Where the hell did a loser like you come from? How dare you trespass on private property!" I'm shell-shocked for the first few seconds. But soon, I explain, "That woman in the photo is my wife. This villa is mine, too." All the guests begin jeering and making fun of me instead. "You must have gone insane from daydreaming! That woman is Mr. Barrington's wife! Mr. Barrington, go ahead and teach him a lesson!" The man, Alan Barrington, and I get into a huge fight afterward. Furious and humiliated, Alan calls Zara and demands that she get home just to prove that he's her partner. What everyone doesn't expect is that the moment Zara shows up, she gets down on her knees in front of me and begins bawling her eyes out. As I gaze at her pallid complexion, I just chuckle coldly in return. "Zara Hudson, I want you to scram out of my home with that boy toy of yours! Also, you'd better come up with a way to pay off those loan shark loans!"

After our father died, my sister and I inherited a fortune, a luxury villa, and a tiny convenience store. She took the money and the mansion without hesitation, leaving me with the old shop everyone looked down on. One month later, the apocalypse began. A zombie outbreak swept through the world overnight. The rich became trapped in their homes with no food, no power, and no way out. My sister, once proud of her mansion and millions, ended up starving behind locked gates. Meanwhile, I survived comfortably inside the convenience store I had rebuilt into a fortress, living off endless supplies of snacks, canned food, and soda. When my sister collapsed on the streets begging for help, I risked my life to save her. But greed was stronger than gratitude. After eating my food and recovering her strength, she waited until I fell asleep… then threw me outside to be torn apart by zombies. The moment I died, I opened my eyes again. I had returned to the day we divided the inheritance. This time, my sister smugly grabbed the convenience store first, convinced she had stolen the better deal. What she didn’t know was that I had been reborn too. And this time, I came back with a Apocalypse Survival System. While she fought over scraps, the villa she abandoned would become the safest shelter left in the world.

During a classmates' reunion party, the villa unexpectedly collapses, trapping both Priscilla Hobbs, my husband's true love, and me beneath the fallen ceiling. My husband is a member of the rescue team. To keep Priscilla alive, he chooses to lift the ceiling from her side. He says, "Pris is an actress. She can't be crippled." The ceiling crushes my legs as it's lifted from the other end. My husband seems to have forgotten that I have a congenital blood clotting disorder. Without my legs, I'll die…

My bride went missing on the night of our big day but woke up in my brother's room the next day. My parents persuaded me to ignore it for the sake of fame but scolded my wife as an easy girl. Angrily, I moved out of the villa with my wife. Soon after, my wife had a miscarriage and suffered from depression due to gossip. She jumped off from the top floor in front of me. Desperately, I followed her. Opening my eyes again, I found myself back to the time when the wedding ended.

The little boy I had saved when we were kids grew up to be a possessive, obsessive CEO. For ten years, he kept me by his side, using my grandmother's illness as a bargaining chip to force me into marrying him. He tried everything to win my heart, pulling every trick in the book, but no matter what he did, he could never make me love him. In a fit of rage, he found a woman who looked almost exactly like me to take my place. They flaunted their relationship for everyone to see, and people whispered that the CEO had finally found his true love. But that day, the woman, riding on his affection, barged into the villa with her entourage. She broke my fingers one by one, slashed my face with a utility knife, and removed my clothes to humiliate me. "Even though you had surgery to look like me, I'll let that slide. But you even learned to paint like me, too? You really did your homework. Let's see how you try to seduce men now!" Just as I was bleeding out and on the verge of death, the obsessive CEO finally showed up. The stand-in grabbed my hair and dragged me in front of him, smugly reporting, "Honey, this wench was hiding in the villa trying to seduce you. I've made sure she can't succeed!"

Ian Ludwig and I have grown more in sync in the eight years we have been married. I believe him when he lies to me that he's on a business trip, when in reality he's buying a villa for Francesca Yarrington, his childhood friend. He also believes me when I hand him a divorce agreement, saying that it is a property transfer agreement. There's still one month left in the cooling-off period before our divorce is finalized. That gives me just enough time to clear out everything from our eight years of marriage.