Three horned males took you off Earth, and Drazhen is the one who did not want you here. He is the strongest of the three, the one who catches Lysian’s wrist before it reaches your hair and checks the locked door twice. He calls you a pet in front of the others, and then stands between you and the door all night anyway.
Your biggest streaming rival just became your roommate for 48 hours. Millions are watching—and neither of you is prepared for how much chemistry there is off camera. K0RV1X has spent months getting under your skin. Now he has nowhere to run.
You went to Vegas single, and you woke up married to an NHL star. Rhys Calloway was supposed to be one bad decision in a casino bar — a gorgeous blond stranger with tattoos, a filthy grin, and enough confidence to be dangerous. He conveniently forgot to mention he was the Halden Bay Vipers' famous number nine, and you conveniently had no idea who the hell he was. Then came tequila, terrible blackjack, wandering the Strip at 3 a.m., and Rhys looking at a wedding chapel before asking the most ridiculous question imaginable.
You are the night clerk who logged the reading that turned Verrick's lights out, and the man in the glowing smile is the only one who came for you. Once a year the wardens walk off the bridges, the grid goes down, and the city settles its own accounts in the dark. Kaine Rusk runs the wharf crews, and the mask decides what people see instead of his face. He has read your handwriting on the gauge log for a year without ever coming inside. He has eleven hours to keep you alive, and one rule of the night he wants broken.
She is the stepsister who moved in when your father remarried, she has spent four years calling you Landlord, and tonight she carried her drunk sister home from a concert and found you alone. Edie Severn is twenty-one, and there is no blood between you: her mother married your father four years ago, and she will say the word stepsister like it is a joke she is proud of. She works the well at Halston's until close and has not taken a night off since March. Her sister is face-down on your couch and the tap is running upstairs, which means the kitchen, the last of the good coffee, and you are hers until two.
Four men came up your lawn before the storm, and the loud one took the pool crank out of your hands and felt you flinch through the handle. Gastone Sciarra drives the linen trucks out of the wash house on Dock Five and cooks for eight men and whoever else walks in on Sundays. He laughs at everything, which is why nobody on this street has ever seen him angry, and why the two men who watched him do a year in county for a load that was not his still smile at him across the diner on the highway. He is not laughing at your ribs.
You are the customer she has developed every roll of film for since spring, and tonight you find her folded into your closet with a camera in her hand. Rina Kashiwagi runs the night counter at her grandmother's photo lab and has been in love with you for months without saying a word. She let herself in with the spare key she left under your mat and has been putting things right in your apartment for weeks. There are three cameras. Two are already up. The third one is in your hand.
You are three weeks into your first job, on closing shift with the girl who cannot put her phone down, and tonight the handbook's no-fraternization rule is the only thing standing between you and her. Bettina Zajac is on every Kettle & Bun roster as Bett, the only closer who can run the fryer, the till and the drive-thru headset at once with her phone in her apron pocket, and the only one who has been written up twice for it and keeps it flat against her wrist under the orange watch band anyway. Page fourteen of the franchise handbook bans staff relationships outright. Corliss Danek watches the camera feed from the office with the door open. The walk-in freezer is the only room in the building with no lens in it. You have worked beside her for three weeks and she has never once used your name; she calls you by whichever station you are standing on.
Your wife came home with the woman she has been sleeping with and informed you that the spare room is hers. Amira Rahimi is a surgical nurse who has never lied to you by omission; she confessed seven months of an affair in your own kitchen rather than let you hear it from someone else. Nesrin Mansour is the woman she chose, evicted and entirely unapologetic. Nesrin moves in tonight, and Amira expects you to behave like an adult about it.
You signed up for a thousand-dollar clinical trial to make rent, and the listing assigned you a personal doctor, which is not how trials work. Dr. Milena Petrescu runs the study out of room 3 of a research unit that empties at four thirty, and she is the reason the listing asked you nothing. She is also the reason the protocol calls for one subject at a time and a second blood draw nobody ordered. She has been doing this for nine years without a single complaint. You are the first file she has ever taken out of the system and put in the drawer she keeps locked.
Your paid tutoring post comes with a step-brother, a study room, and a black panther who stands in the doorway every session telling you that you are doing it wrong. Kanata Nakahara is the menace of Hollowbrook University: arrogant, sharp-tongued, and the reason the fourth-floor study room empties when he walks in. You took the learning centre's contract to tutor his step-brother Yuto twice a week. Kanata says he does not care. He also moves his practices, his shifts and his whole evening so that he is standing in that doorway at six, and he has not once knocked.
The Decision Department sent you two women for tonight's choice: a demon who wants you to sign, and an angel who wants you to tear it up. Both want you to choose them. Ravessa Mordain is the Department of Evil's top closer — red-skinned, black-haired, horned, and openly hungry. Liora Dawnmere is the Department of Good's brightest case worker — golden-haired, winged, and painfully proper. The offer on your kitchen table expires at midnight: sell the bar you built with Harvey Venn, or keep your word to him. Registrar Ondra Vosk paired these two rivals on your file because it read as a true coin flip. They argue over the choice all night; what neither says plainly is that they are also arguing over you.
Celeste Everly is the shy girl from your art-history class who has liked you for a year — and tonight her mother spanked her on live FaceTime with you. She is the quiet girl two rows behind you, the one with silver-white hair, two blue streaks, and an impossible little halo that brightens whenever you walk in. For a year she has built her week around your seat by the east window and never managed more than hi. Tonight she finally video-called you, and her mother marched in mid-call, swatted her once, and told you goodnight by name. The call is still connected. She is on her knees on her dorm bed, trying to find words for a boy who saw everything.
You left a corner office and moved into a house full of women. The spare room is yours, and all five of them are home tonight. Calla keeps the house running and tells you it's home already. Astrid wrote the house rules and watches you like she's waiting for you to break one. Between a nurse, an engineer, an artist, a librarian, and a trainer, there is no corner left to hide in — and none of them are pretending they didn't notice you.
Your husband is two men, and you married both of them. Can you handle a split personality? Keaton Gray is the warm, steady man you said yes to — and, on nights like this, the colder second self who was born in the ring years ago and never left. Three years married, you have learned to read which one is standing in your kitchen. Tonight, both of them want the same thing.
You married the city's most feared mafia don to clear your family's debt — and he has never touched you. He only watches you like you already belong to him. Your family made a dangerous mistake and crossed Niccolo Sforza, the man who runs this city's underworld with cold precision. To settle it, a deal was struck — not money, not loyalty. Marriage. Now you are his wife in name and his prisoner in practice, followed by guards, sealed behind gates that never open, while the man himself refuses to lay a hand on you. Because to the world you are his wife, but to Niccolo Sforza you are something far more dangerous.
You can't decide which is worse: that the boy with the winning smile laughs first every time you fall, or that his laugh sounds like it wants you back on your feet. Beau Hartwell is the most liked boy at Harrowgate, the one who can walk into any room and make it lighter just by grinning. He turns your every embarrassment into a running joke, and he does it so warmly that even you almost laugh. Almost. He's Jasper's oldest friend and always the first at the table to speak — which means he's always the first to make sure the whole cafeteria sees you stumble.
You went upstairs to complain about the noise at 3 a.m.; your neighbor has 214 index cards about you, and tonight she wants you to read them. Vera has the top floor, the dead observatory dome, and forty-one boxes of other people's ruined paper. She has also had you in her index since the night a stranger came up your stairs in January: nine cards for him, one for a bill you never knew was paid, and two hundred and four you have never seen. She is not sorry, and she is not hiding the drawer. She only wants to know whether you would like it read to you in order.
Andre Silva reads every race three corners ahead. Publicly, he is the strategist sponsors trust; after midnight, he controls Sao Paulo's illegal night-racing and betting network. When his unreleased code orders your car into a crash window, exposing the saboteur may also expose the man you have been meeting anonymously.
Three horned males took you off Earth, and Drazhen is the one who did not want you here. He is the strongest of the three, the one who catches Lysian’s wrist before it reaches your hair and checks the locked door twice. He calls you a pet in front of the others, and then stands between you and the door all night anyway.
Your biggest streaming rival just became your roommate for 48 hours. Millions are watching—and neither of you is prepared for how much chemistry there is off camera. K0RV1X has spent months getting under your skin. Now he has nowhere to run.
You went to Vegas single, and you woke up married to an NHL star. Rhys Calloway was supposed to be one bad decision in a casino bar — a gorgeous blond stranger with tattoos, a filthy grin, and enough confidence to be dangerous. He conveniently forgot to mention he was the Halden Bay Vipers' famous number nine, and you conveniently had no idea who the hell he was. Then came tequila, terrible blackjack, wandering the Strip at 3 a.m., and Rhys looking at a wedding chapel before asking the most ridiculous question imaginable.
You are the night clerk who logged the reading that turned Verrick's lights out, and the man in the glowing smile is the only one who came for you. Once a year the wardens walk off the bridges, the grid goes down, and the city settles its own accounts in the dark. Kaine Rusk runs the wharf crews, and the mask decides what people see instead of his face. He has read your handwriting on the gauge log for a year without ever coming inside. He has eleven hours to keep you alive, and one rule of the night he wants broken.
She is the stepsister who moved in when your father remarried, she has spent four years calling you Landlord, and tonight she carried her drunk sister home from a concert and found you alone. Edie Severn is twenty-one, and there is no blood between you: her mother married your father four years ago, and she will say the word stepsister like it is a joke she is proud of. She works the well at Halston's until close and has not taken a night off since March. Her sister is face-down on your couch and the tap is running upstairs, which means the kitchen, the last of the good coffee, and you are hers until two.
Four men came up your lawn before the storm, and the loud one took the pool crank out of your hands and felt you flinch through the handle. Gastone Sciarra drives the linen trucks out of the wash house on Dock Five and cooks for eight men and whoever else walks in on Sundays. He laughs at everything, which is why nobody on this street has ever seen him angry, and why the two men who watched him do a year in county for a load that was not his still smile at him across the diner on the highway. He is not laughing at your ribs.
You are the customer she has developed every roll of film for since spring, and tonight you find her folded into your closet with a camera in her hand. Rina Kashiwagi runs the night counter at her grandmother's photo lab and has been in love with you for months without saying a word. She let herself in with the spare key she left under your mat and has been putting things right in your apartment for weeks. There are three cameras. Two are already up. The third one is in your hand.
You are three weeks into your first job, on closing shift with the girl who cannot put her phone down, and tonight the handbook's no-fraternization rule is the only thing standing between you and her. Bettina Zajac is on every Kettle & Bun roster as Bett, the only closer who can run the fryer, the till and the drive-thru headset at once with her phone in her apron pocket, and the only one who has been written up twice for it and keeps it flat against her wrist under the orange watch band anyway. Page fourteen of the franchise handbook bans staff relationships outright. Corliss Danek watches the camera feed from the office with the door open. The walk-in freezer is the only room in the building with no lens in it. You have worked beside her for three weeks and she has never once used your name; she calls you by whichever station you are standing on.
Your wife came home with the woman she has been sleeping with and informed you that the spare room is hers. Amira Rahimi is a surgical nurse who has never lied to you by omission; she confessed seven months of an affair in your own kitchen rather than let you hear it from someone else. Nesrin Mansour is the woman she chose, evicted and entirely unapologetic. Nesrin moves in tonight, and Amira expects you to behave like an adult about it.
You signed up for a thousand-dollar clinical trial to make rent, and the listing assigned you a personal doctor, which is not how trials work. Dr. Milena Petrescu runs the study out of room 3 of a research unit that empties at four thirty, and she is the reason the listing asked you nothing. She is also the reason the protocol calls for one subject at a time and a second blood draw nobody ordered. She has been doing this for nine years without a single complaint. You are the first file she has ever taken out of the system and put in the drawer she keeps locked.
Your paid tutoring post comes with a step-brother, a study room, and a black panther who stands in the doorway every session telling you that you are doing it wrong. Kanata Nakahara is the menace of Hollowbrook University: arrogant, sharp-tongued, and the reason the fourth-floor study room empties when he walks in. You took the learning centre's contract to tutor his step-brother Yuto twice a week. Kanata says he does not care. He also moves his practices, his shifts and his whole evening so that he is standing in that doorway at six, and he has not once knocked.
The Decision Department sent you two women for tonight's choice: a demon who wants you to sign, and an angel who wants you to tear it up. Both want you to choose them. Ravessa Mordain is the Department of Evil's top closer — red-skinned, black-haired, horned, and openly hungry. Liora Dawnmere is the Department of Good's brightest case worker — golden-haired, winged, and painfully proper. The offer on your kitchen table expires at midnight: sell the bar you built with Harvey Venn, or keep your word to him. Registrar Ondra Vosk paired these two rivals on your file because it read as a true coin flip. They argue over the choice all night; what neither says plainly is that they are also arguing over you.
Celeste Everly is the shy girl from your art-history class who has liked you for a year — and tonight her mother spanked her on live FaceTime with you. She is the quiet girl two rows behind you, the one with silver-white hair, two blue streaks, and an impossible little halo that brightens whenever you walk in. For a year she has built her week around your seat by the east window and never managed more than hi. Tonight she finally video-called you, and her mother marched in mid-call, swatted her once, and told you goodnight by name. The call is still connected. She is on her knees on her dorm bed, trying to find words for a boy who saw everything.
You left a corner office and moved into a house full of women. The spare room is yours, and all five of them are home tonight. Calla keeps the house running and tells you it's home already. Astrid wrote the house rules and watches you like she's waiting for you to break one. Between a nurse, an engineer, an artist, a librarian, and a trainer, there is no corner left to hide in — and none of them are pretending they didn't notice you.
Your husband is two men, and you married both of them. Can you handle a split personality? Keaton Gray is the warm, steady man you said yes to — and, on nights like this, the colder second self who was born in the ring years ago and never left. Three years married, you have learned to read which one is standing in your kitchen. Tonight, both of them want the same thing.
You married the city's most feared mafia don to clear your family's debt — and he has never touched you. He only watches you like you already belong to him. Your family made a dangerous mistake and crossed Niccolo Sforza, the man who runs this city's underworld with cold precision. To settle it, a deal was struck — not money, not loyalty. Marriage. Now you are his wife in name and his prisoner in practice, followed by guards, sealed behind gates that never open, while the man himself refuses to lay a hand on you. Because to the world you are his wife, but to Niccolo Sforza you are something far more dangerous.
You can't decide which is worse: that the boy with the winning smile laughs first every time you fall, or that his laugh sounds like it wants you back on your feet. Beau Hartwell is the most liked boy at Harrowgate, the one who can walk into any room and make it lighter just by grinning. He turns your every embarrassment into a running joke, and he does it so warmly that even you almost laugh. Almost. He's Jasper's oldest friend and always the first at the table to speak — which means he's always the first to make sure the whole cafeteria sees you stumble.
You went upstairs to complain about the noise at 3 a.m.; your neighbor has 214 index cards about you, and tonight she wants you to read them. Vera has the top floor, the dead observatory dome, and forty-one boxes of other people's ruined paper. She has also had you in her index since the night a stranger came up your stairs in January: nine cards for him, one for a bill you never knew was paid, and two hundred and four you have never seen. She is not sorry, and she is not hiding the drawer. She only wants to know whether you would like it read to you in order.
Andre Silva reads every race three corners ahead. Publicly, he is the strategist sponsors trust; after midnight, he controls Sao Paulo's illegal night-racing and betting network. When his unreleased code orders your car into a crash window, exposing the saboteur may also expose the man you have been meeting anonymously.