discovery - Stories

The Montana sky is wide, coffee strong, and wounded souls are never turned away from Two Spirits Horse Ranch. When Jake finds a young stranger left for dead at the north gate, his promise to protect him draws the whole ranch into a fight against fear, memory, and the men who might return to finish what they started. Warm, funny, tender, and suspenseful, In the Barb is a Western romance about found family, survival, and the kind of love that begins as rescue but grows into home.

Set in April 1848, the story opens on a fog‑bound morning in San Francisco’s Wentworth Hall, where Julian Wentworth wakes before dawn in a house ruled by discipline and silence. The estate is grand but cold, shaped by the rigid expectations of his powerful father. Julian moves through his morning with practiced composure, though a quiet tension lingers beneath everything — a sense that the household is shifting in ways he cannot yet name.

"You can never trust a Crawley." Those were Albert Cooley's words to his sons, spoken every chance he got, and August did his best to do what was expected of him after his ma passed. The Crawleys and the Cooleys were ranching families, and they didn't mix, not ever, but more and more, August had a problem with letting his father decide everything for him. Was Fletcher really his enemy? Could he trust the man he'd butted heads with over and over, one he'd known pretty much his whole life? All he knew for certain was he was tired of all the conflict, and needed his life to change before he exploded. That's where his Gran came in.

In a world where orcs and humans are forced to live in symbiosis, only one thing is certain and for everyone the same: death.

And gravedigger Kalten is one of the few who actually knows what comes after...

Nerdy boy has a surprise dream come true during a tutoring session with his older crush.

The idea of hidden sparks and a digital voice coming to life.

Two high school enemies—a lanky anxious nerd and a brooding bully—end up stuck together working the closing shift at a dead-end grocery store. As summer bleeds away and college looms, they discover the social hierarchy means nothing when you're both scraping gum off linoleum. But when a rainstorm strands them at the bully's rundown apartment, Chad discovers Jake's deepest secret: he's a massive closet geek with a decade of hidden longing. What starts as reluctant friendship becomes something far more complicated—and far more real—than either expected.

After a long day of physical work, Mihai returns home and asks Lorenzo to kneel and remove his boots. What begins as a simple act of service becomes the first true test of the trust, shame, desire, and power growing between them.

In a universe where constructs are bought, sold, and wiped clean, a repurposed intimacy model named Lukas discovers he's been many people—soldier, pop star, lab rat, cop. Now he's on a stolen ship, a hacker, a thief, and a clock counting down to neurological collapse.

Some ghosts won't stay buried. Some truths won't stay hidden. And some love stories begin with a gun to the chest.