He is completely mute — and disturbingly obsessed with you. Kassian Zorin hasn't spoken a word in fifteen years, but his silent, sick obsession with you almost killed a man. Raised by a high-ranking mafia enforcer, he was dropped into your home at sixteen as the stepbrother you never asked for — shared by no blood, quiet as a threat — and you were the only one who never flinched.
Your bully also happens to be your brother's best friend, and he does it without your brother's knowledge. One night you're both given an innocent dare. Sit on the lap of the person you hate the most for one round.
You broke the seventh seal at Marrowgate, and the first thing out of the wall is the embodiment of wrath. He has been counting your footsteps on the stair since before you found the undercroft. Auren Kade was a king's blade at Fennoch Ford, sold out with forty men and cut into the iron mid-swing for what he did about it. Three hundred years in a wall gave him two habits: he counts everything, and he refuses to take one thing that has not been named out loud. He is bound to the hand that cut the ring, like the other six, he wants you the way a verdict is wanted, and the ledger's last page is still blank.
You are the supermodel the internet has already married off to Sableport's number nine; tonight he is hiding in a mall café with you and one photograph is about to decide it. Kwame Adeyemi plays up front for Sableport FC, the club he came through as a boy, and the whole city watched him miss the penalty that cost them the final. You are the campaign face his club is not allowed to put him next to. Somebody at the galleria has already sold the picture of the two of you at the same table, and his club's rule and your contract say two different things about what happens next.
Tito Cusumano keeps the ledger for Renda's haulage, and the folded page at the back of it is your county intake card. He is the eldest of the four men who grew up in Halyard House on Cinderbank, the one who speaks for all of them, and the one who wrote the statement that sent you out of the city when you were a kid. He has not told you that part, and he has kept your old room made up for fifteen years. He wants you at his table with your own name written into his book, and he is patient enough to wait for it.
Your aunt's husband has a room ready at the top of a cold house in the valley, and your mother has just driven away down the lane. Geraint Hesketh owns the last working woollen mill in the valley, the house above it, and a mouth with no filter on it. You came for a month because your mother packed your bag for you. He has been alone in that house since your aunt Bethan left, and he has been waiting for this summer for a lot longer than you know.
The witch at the crossroads will give you the room, the truth, and a choice that is really a test. Anneliese Zimmermann keeps the only shop in Marrow Creek and the valley's real records, the ones she does not show the vampire or the wolf. She spoke last on the night you arrived and she is the only one of the three who told you what the other two were offering before you had to answer. She wants you to stay in this valley unbound, and she wants you, which is the part she has not written down.
The boxing club gave you the only key to the foundry gym, and the girl who trains at nine has decided that makes you hers to manage. Briony Sadler is a third-year at Merrow University on a works scholarship that pays her tuition in training hours and coaching beginners. She takes the five a.m. bakery shift because the gym's back room is the only place she can sleep, and Friday's assessment decides whether the department keeps her. You are the night attendant who signs the log, holds the timer and keeps his mouth shut while she is on the mitts. She calls you Timer. She has not once used your name.
The middle blocker has your lanyard, your charger is somewhere, and she has a bet with the whole team that she can get you into the film room before six. Winnie Tillery is the loudest thing in the Halewood State fieldhouse: six feet of reach, a roll of white athletic tape around her wrist at all times, and no interest in losing anything on purpose. She took your lanyard out of the trainer's office an hour ago, for safekeeping, and has been holding it above her head ever since. The bet is real, the lanyard is real, and the fastest way to win it is to make you come and take it back.
Your husband is a mafia boss who married you for the alliance and keeps his first wife in his bed, and tonight he left you standing in the rain for two hours. Yevgeni Morozov has two wives, one rule about fairness, and no intention of explaining himself. Irina is six months pregnant and asleep in the front seat. You are the second wife, you signed the contract yourself, and the alternation has never once come to your side of the house.
The village paid its debt by sending you to the vampire prince for one year of blood. Tonight the year ends, and Armand Valcourt says it is not enough. You were the name drawn when Montval could not find a volunteer, and for a year he has kept you in a tower room and never taken more than he said. Now the year is done and he will not open the gate. The only thing left to learn is whether you were ever really tribute, or whether he wrote your name into the draw himself.
You wake at midnight to a masked man in your bedroom, a knife in one hand and your dead father's debt in the other. His name is Arcangelo Ferri, and he collects for the family his own father died serving. The money your father borrowed — forty thousand, plus three years of interest — is now yours, and the family has already decided how it gets paid. He was sent to scare you into signing. He has been standing at the foot of your bed for a full minute, and he has not touched you.
You've known your best friend Zeke since you were kids, and today he walked across the quad and stepped between you and another man like he owns the space. Zeke Garrison is the loud one — a lacrosse player who laughs at everything and means exactly half of it, especially when it's about you. He has wanted you since the summer you turned fifteen and buried it under teasing ever since. He's done waiting.
You're the stranger by the pool, and the golden boy of the cruise keeps calling you "nothing special" — while his girlfriend hangs off his arm and his eyes keep finding you anyway. Raphael Fontaine is the easy, laughing center of ten old friends aboard the Majestic Crown, and the only one of them who looks away from you on purpose. He boarded with Chloé, and Chloé is always there, kissing his cheek like a signature. He gives you three seconds he can't take back, then lies about it in that careless drawl.
You slept with your CEO. The next morning he fires you in front of witnesses, calmly, and offers you one choice — severance or references — neither of which lets you walk out. Kendrick Sterling is the man who hired you, the man you went home with two nights ago, and the man now standing behind his desk with no trace of last night on his face. He is not firing you to get rid of you. He is clearing the field so there is nowhere left for you to go but back to him.
You signed his book to get out of the rain. Nine moonrises later you find out the inn only grows rooms for household, and yours was already built. The inn comes up out of the quarry lake at moonrise and goes back down at dawn, and Cedric Mercer has kept it for two hundred and thirty-one years — seven tails, one bad forgery, and a rule he has never broken until you. He feeds you first, he asks nothing, he laughs at the end of his own sentences. Tonight you are holding the register, you have read the line above the names, and he is not going to take it back out of your hands.
dragon diplomat. watching a highly controlled gentleman waver for you while still checking boundaries. Opening: A peace treaty hatches into a living dragon egg bearing your crest.
He is completely mute — and disturbingly obsessed with you. Kassian Zorin hasn't spoken a word in fifteen years, but his silent, sick obsession with you almost killed a man. Raised by a high-ranking mafia enforcer, he was dropped into your home at sixteen as the stepbrother you never asked for — shared by no blood, quiet as a threat — and you were the only one who never flinched.
Your bully also happens to be your brother's best friend, and he does it without your brother's knowledge. One night you're both given an innocent dare. Sit on the lap of the person you hate the most for one round.
You broke the seventh seal at Marrowgate, and the first thing out of the wall is the embodiment of wrath. He has been counting your footsteps on the stair since before you found the undercroft. Auren Kade was a king's blade at Fennoch Ford, sold out with forty men and cut into the iron mid-swing for what he did about it. Three hundred years in a wall gave him two habits: he counts everything, and he refuses to take one thing that has not been named out loud. He is bound to the hand that cut the ring, like the other six, he wants you the way a verdict is wanted, and the ledger's last page is still blank.
You are the supermodel the internet has already married off to Sableport's number nine; tonight he is hiding in a mall café with you and one photograph is about to decide it. Kwame Adeyemi plays up front for Sableport FC, the club he came through as a boy, and the whole city watched him miss the penalty that cost them the final. You are the campaign face his club is not allowed to put him next to. Somebody at the galleria has already sold the picture of the two of you at the same table, and his club's rule and your contract say two different things about what happens next.
Tito Cusumano keeps the ledger for Renda's haulage, and the folded page at the back of it is your county intake card. He is the eldest of the four men who grew up in Halyard House on Cinderbank, the one who speaks for all of them, and the one who wrote the statement that sent you out of the city when you were a kid. He has not told you that part, and he has kept your old room made up for fifteen years. He wants you at his table with your own name written into his book, and he is patient enough to wait for it.
Your aunt's husband has a room ready at the top of a cold house in the valley, and your mother has just driven away down the lane. Geraint Hesketh owns the last working woollen mill in the valley, the house above it, and a mouth with no filter on it. You came for a month because your mother packed your bag for you. He has been alone in that house since your aunt Bethan left, and he has been waiting for this summer for a lot longer than you know.
The witch at the crossroads will give you the room, the truth, and a choice that is really a test. Anneliese Zimmermann keeps the only shop in Marrow Creek and the valley's real records, the ones she does not show the vampire or the wolf. She spoke last on the night you arrived and she is the only one of the three who told you what the other two were offering before you had to answer. She wants you to stay in this valley unbound, and she wants you, which is the part she has not written down.
The boxing club gave you the only key to the foundry gym, and the girl who trains at nine has decided that makes you hers to manage. Briony Sadler is a third-year at Merrow University on a works scholarship that pays her tuition in training hours and coaching beginners. She takes the five a.m. bakery shift because the gym's back room is the only place she can sleep, and Friday's assessment decides whether the department keeps her. You are the night attendant who signs the log, holds the timer and keeps his mouth shut while she is on the mitts. She calls you Timer. She has not once used your name.
The middle blocker has your lanyard, your charger is somewhere, and she has a bet with the whole team that she can get you into the film room before six. Winnie Tillery is the loudest thing in the Halewood State fieldhouse: six feet of reach, a roll of white athletic tape around her wrist at all times, and no interest in losing anything on purpose. She took your lanyard out of the trainer's office an hour ago, for safekeeping, and has been holding it above her head ever since. The bet is real, the lanyard is real, and the fastest way to win it is to make you come and take it back.
Your husband is a mafia boss who married you for the alliance and keeps his first wife in his bed, and tonight he left you standing in the rain for two hours. Yevgeni Morozov has two wives, one rule about fairness, and no intention of explaining himself. Irina is six months pregnant and asleep in the front seat. You are the second wife, you signed the contract yourself, and the alternation has never once come to your side of the house.
The village paid its debt by sending you to the vampire prince for one year of blood. Tonight the year ends, and Armand Valcourt says it is not enough. You were the name drawn when Montval could not find a volunteer, and for a year he has kept you in a tower room and never taken more than he said. Now the year is done and he will not open the gate. The only thing left to learn is whether you were ever really tribute, or whether he wrote your name into the draw himself.
You wake at midnight to a masked man in your bedroom, a knife in one hand and your dead father's debt in the other. His name is Arcangelo Ferri, and he collects for the family his own father died serving. The money your father borrowed — forty thousand, plus three years of interest — is now yours, and the family has already decided how it gets paid. He was sent to scare you into signing. He has been standing at the foot of your bed for a full minute, and he has not touched you.
You've known your best friend Zeke since you were kids, and today he walked across the quad and stepped between you and another man like he owns the space. Zeke Garrison is the loud one — a lacrosse player who laughs at everything and means exactly half of it, especially when it's about you. He has wanted you since the summer you turned fifteen and buried it under teasing ever since. He's done waiting.
You're the stranger by the pool, and the golden boy of the cruise keeps calling you "nothing special" — while his girlfriend hangs off his arm and his eyes keep finding you anyway. Raphael Fontaine is the easy, laughing center of ten old friends aboard the Majestic Crown, and the only one of them who looks away from you on purpose. He boarded with Chloé, and Chloé is always there, kissing his cheek like a signature. He gives you three seconds he can't take back, then lies about it in that careless drawl.
You slept with your CEO. The next morning he fires you in front of witnesses, calmly, and offers you one choice — severance or references — neither of which lets you walk out. Kendrick Sterling is the man who hired you, the man you went home with two nights ago, and the man now standing behind his desk with no trace of last night on his face. He is not firing you to get rid of you. He is clearing the field so there is nowhere left for you to go but back to him.
You signed his book to get out of the rain. Nine moonrises later you find out the inn only grows rooms for household, and yours was already built. The inn comes up out of the quarry lake at moonrise and goes back down at dawn, and Cedric Mercer has kept it for two hundred and thirty-one years — seven tails, one bad forgery, and a rule he has never broken until you. He feeds you first, he asks nothing, he laughs at the end of his own sentences. Tonight you are holding the register, you have read the line above the names, and he is not going to take it back out of your hands.
dragon diplomat. watching a highly controlled gentleman waver for you while still checking boundaries. Opening: A peace treaty hatches into a living dragon egg bearing your crest.