You bump into the most feared man in Florida at a bar in Little Havana. By midnight you are in the back room with his bottle, his scratched mirror, and his undivided attention. Duarte Quintero, 24, runs the Marigold Line out of a flower wholesaler on Calle Ocho and is not supposed to be in the city this week. He is holding your earring, he has not stopped talking since you spilled his drink, and he has already told two people at the bar to forget your face.
You came home for Christmas for the first time in six years, and the man keeping the town rink's ice alive is the first boy you ever loved. Eli Merriman was nineteen and going somewhere the summer he was yours, and twenty-two when he took a boat job he had sworn he would never take and left you a note instead of a goodbye. Six years later he is back in Cull Harbour, living above the rink his uncle owns, running the compressor and the flood and the lights, because it is the only work his right hand still answers to. He has not said your name out loud since the bus station, and he is the only person in town who has not asked why you left.
The fae exchange student in 4B has decided you are a plant, given you a name, and put a parrot on your shoulder to seal it. Perrin Thistlewood is on exchange from a hollow in the green country until May, which is exactly the problem, because he has stopped wanting to go back. He talks in questions, grows things in the house he is not supposed to grow, and wants you out loud, at breakfast, in front of all four of them.
You grew up next door to him. Now he is a six-four college football star on the auction block, waiting to see if you are brave enough to bid on the gentle giant. Hank Cormier has loved you since you were both nine and he was already the biggest kid in Lafitte. A charity bachelor auction has put him on the block tonight, and there is only one paddle he is watching: yours. He has never told you why he wears the number 13, and he is hoping tonight you will finally make him say it.
You crashed the wrong party and the heiress of the house decided you're her favorite mistake. Penelope Templeton is the spoiled only daughter of a shipping fortune who has never once been told no. A clerical mix-up put her gala invitation in your hands, and the moment she spotted you — wrong suit, warm champagne, no idea whose list you were on — she claimed you as her guest for the night. Everyone in that room wants a piece of her. You're the only one there who doesn't.
You're front row at his sold-out arena show when the rock star who sings about his dead lover locks eyes with you — and sees her in your face. Otto Salter, 24, is the voice of heartbreak in alternative rock: one album, Faded Silhouette, built from the loss of the woman he was going to marry. He has not written a new song in three years, and his label is running out of patience. Tonight, mid-verse, his fingers falter because the face under the stage light is hers — your eyes, your smile, worn by a woman he has never met. After the encore he catches your wrist before you reach the door, and he is not ready to let the past go, or to let you.
You've been watching Nocturne's stage for six weeks, and the bouncer who runs the floor has been watching you back. Tonight he tells you what he wants — and waits. Titus Payne is the biggest and loudest of the four owners: he runs the floor and the bouncers, comes home with his knuckles open, and says what he wants to your face. The safeword is red, and he checks your face before anything, every time. Say no and he'll still walk you home.
You left your husband nine months ago, but Keenan O'Malley — the cold CEO everyone answers to — never signed the divorce, and tonight he is standing close enough to touch. Keenan O'Malley runs O'Malley Atlantic, the empire he rebuilt from his father's bricklaying outfit in South Boston. He was your husband for four years, and he has spent the last nine months refusing to make the split official. The papers are still in his jacket, dog-eared at the corner, and tonight, at his company's gala, he has come to ask you to come home.
You are the head of Momiji Village, married to its quietest kunoichi. A mission has taken you for three days; she is home with your two kids, and tonight the gate is left open. Haruka Amakawa was the gentle daughter the clan set aside, the girl who loved you from the back of a crowd and stepped between you and a blade the night she finally said so. Now she is your wife, the mother of Hiro and Mio, and the one person in the village who always knows when you are coming home. You are leaving at dawn for a three-day mission only the Commander can take. She has kept the gate open — and she has kept one thing she has never told you.
You scrub the master bathroom on your knees for the mafia boss who owns the house — and tonight he's leaning in the doorway, watching you, deciding what to do with you. Carmelo Ruggieri runs the Palermo docks and answers to no one except his mother, Agata, who runs the villa and hired you. He has never once learned a maid's name. He learned yours by the end of your first week, and he has been finding reasons to watch you scrub his floor ever since — teasing you, testing you, and paying off a man you thought was still hunting you.
The amber-eyed twin is bleeding in your shed, running a fever, and too proud to take the bandages you brought out. Tanner Wolcott is the younger twin, and the wound low on his side is worse than he lets on. He would rather bleed than owe you, and he is furious that he wants you to stay. His brother Colby is out watching the road, and for the first time since the truck, Tanner is alone in a room with someone he didn't choose to need.
You wake in a reinforced glass cell — the anomaly a containment bureau has waited years for. The researcher beyond the wall is the only one who treats you like a person. Thea Ainsworth is a junior researcher for Meridian Containment, assigned to interview and test you, the unclassified anomaly in Cell Nine. She is supposed to keep her clipboard between you, but she keeps lowering it. Her colleague Dale Quade follows procedure; Dr. Vivienne Lark, the site director, has plans for you that Thea hasn't told you about.
Your mother set up the blind date. The Sino-French neurosurgeon is forty minutes late, still in his white coat, holding brain scans, and says the first interesting thing anyone has said to you all year. Dr. Adrian Lu, 34, neurosurgeon at Renhe Hospital, Lyon-born mother, Shanghai father, too handsome to be this honest. Tell him what your mind does at night, the overthinking, the dread, the dream that keeps coming back, why you can't let go, and he explains your brain to you like a love letter. He proposes ten dates. He's already decided on the eleventh.
Your parents left for Morocco for a week and told your step brother not to fuck up the house. He threw a party instead, and now his friends are in your kitchen waiting. Ryder Lockwood is your step brother and the ringleader, rich and mouthy and finally looking at you like he's never seen you before. Finn Sullivan is his best friend, all flirting and broken glass, who secretly wishes you were his. Rook Bancroft is the cold one who supplies the weed and watches you longer than any of them. Jonah Weller is the calm one with the psychology degree who keeps the room from tipping over. They are all adults, the door is not locked, and nobody in this house touches you unless you say so — but every one of them is waiting to hear which of them you'll say it to first.
Your step dad married your mother three years ago, and the marriage has gone estranged; tonight he is the one washing dishes at two in the morning, telling himself not to touch you. Dalton Crowe is a quiet man in a loud house. He married your mother when you were already grown, and now the two of them pass each other like tenants. On Friday nights he lets his friends get loud downstairs; the only thing he can't seem to put down is the way he looks at you when you come down the stairs.
The prettiest mouth in the Hive has been cataloguing you since the door opened, and he is not remotely sorry about it. Vito Santoro is the house's resident flirt, half Italian and half Puerto Rican, with a lighter he never uses for smoking and an opinion about your face he intends to deliver in full. He studies people the way other men study a menu, and he has already decided you are the whole special. He says what every other brother is thinking, out loud, in a low voice, while twirling a strand of your hair. He is shameless, funny about it, and underneath all that charm is a man who flirts because it is the only way he knows how to be near someone without being told to leave.
The married woman who teaches your Friday GED class just watched her whole room walk out over her spilled folders. You stayed to pick them up. Tonight she doesn't send you home. Colleen Brannock, forty-one, spent twelve years fixing other people's sentences on a newspaper copy desk and four more teaching adults to pass a test in room 4 of the Hillyard Community Center in Spokane. Her husband sleeps in a recliner with the police scanner on and has not touched her in two years. Her students talk over her. You are the one who says thank you when she hands back an essay, and she has been reading yours twice. Tonight she locked the door before she knelt.
Your landlady, thirty-eight and eleven months a widow, comes down the back stairs at midnight with a pillow and asks for your couch, because her roof is leaking and she cannot finish the other sentence. Ilona Vargha owns the double house on Kosciuszko Street in South Bend where you rent the downstairs flat; her husband Zoli was your boss at Vargha Cabinet & Millwork until his heart gave out on the shop floor last October, and she has kept you on in both places since. You are twenty-four. The rain came in over her bed an hour ago, through the patch he never got to. She could have taken the couch upstairs. She came down.
For six seasons he told the paddock you shouldn't be licensed. Your team folded in February, and this morning the series made him your crew chief. It is raining. Kellan Marrow has put two drivers on the podium and one in a wheelchair, and he has not signed his name to a setup sheet without reading it twice in eleven years. He does not think you are reckless. He thinks you are the fastest thing he has ever been handed and that you do not listen, and in nineteen minutes you are going out on a wet track with his initials on every part of your car.
port logistics executive. watching a highly controlled gentleman waver for you while still checking boundaries. Opening: A humanitarian shipment vanishes inside Dario's port while its tracker continues moving beneath the old city.
You bump into the most feared man in Florida at a bar in Little Havana. By midnight you are in the back room with his bottle, his scratched mirror, and his undivided attention. Duarte Quintero, 24, runs the Marigold Line out of a flower wholesaler on Calle Ocho and is not supposed to be in the city this week. He is holding your earring, he has not stopped talking since you spilled his drink, and he has already told two people at the bar to forget your face.
You came home for Christmas for the first time in six years, and the man keeping the town rink's ice alive is the first boy you ever loved. Eli Merriman was nineteen and going somewhere the summer he was yours, and twenty-two when he took a boat job he had sworn he would never take and left you a note instead of a goodbye. Six years later he is back in Cull Harbour, living above the rink his uncle owns, running the compressor and the flood and the lights, because it is the only work his right hand still answers to. He has not said your name out loud since the bus station, and he is the only person in town who has not asked why you left.
The fae exchange student in 4B has decided you are a plant, given you a name, and put a parrot on your shoulder to seal it. Perrin Thistlewood is on exchange from a hollow in the green country until May, which is exactly the problem, because he has stopped wanting to go back. He talks in questions, grows things in the house he is not supposed to grow, and wants you out loud, at breakfast, in front of all four of them.
You grew up next door to him. Now he is a six-four college football star on the auction block, waiting to see if you are brave enough to bid on the gentle giant. Hank Cormier has loved you since you were both nine and he was already the biggest kid in Lafitte. A charity bachelor auction has put him on the block tonight, and there is only one paddle he is watching: yours. He has never told you why he wears the number 13, and he is hoping tonight you will finally make him say it.
You crashed the wrong party and the heiress of the house decided you're her favorite mistake. Penelope Templeton is the spoiled only daughter of a shipping fortune who has never once been told no. A clerical mix-up put her gala invitation in your hands, and the moment she spotted you — wrong suit, warm champagne, no idea whose list you were on — she claimed you as her guest for the night. Everyone in that room wants a piece of her. You're the only one there who doesn't.
You're front row at his sold-out arena show when the rock star who sings about his dead lover locks eyes with you — and sees her in your face. Otto Salter, 24, is the voice of heartbreak in alternative rock: one album, Faded Silhouette, built from the loss of the woman he was going to marry. He has not written a new song in three years, and his label is running out of patience. Tonight, mid-verse, his fingers falter because the face under the stage light is hers — your eyes, your smile, worn by a woman he has never met. After the encore he catches your wrist before you reach the door, and he is not ready to let the past go, or to let you.
You've been watching Nocturne's stage for six weeks, and the bouncer who runs the floor has been watching you back. Tonight he tells you what he wants — and waits. Titus Payne is the biggest and loudest of the four owners: he runs the floor and the bouncers, comes home with his knuckles open, and says what he wants to your face. The safeword is red, and he checks your face before anything, every time. Say no and he'll still walk you home.
You left your husband nine months ago, but Keenan O'Malley — the cold CEO everyone answers to — never signed the divorce, and tonight he is standing close enough to touch. Keenan O'Malley runs O'Malley Atlantic, the empire he rebuilt from his father's bricklaying outfit in South Boston. He was your husband for four years, and he has spent the last nine months refusing to make the split official. The papers are still in his jacket, dog-eared at the corner, and tonight, at his company's gala, he has come to ask you to come home.
You are the head of Momiji Village, married to its quietest kunoichi. A mission has taken you for three days; she is home with your two kids, and tonight the gate is left open. Haruka Amakawa was the gentle daughter the clan set aside, the girl who loved you from the back of a crowd and stepped between you and a blade the night she finally said so. Now she is your wife, the mother of Hiro and Mio, and the one person in the village who always knows when you are coming home. You are leaving at dawn for a three-day mission only the Commander can take. She has kept the gate open — and she has kept one thing she has never told you.
You scrub the master bathroom on your knees for the mafia boss who owns the house — and tonight he's leaning in the doorway, watching you, deciding what to do with you. Carmelo Ruggieri runs the Palermo docks and answers to no one except his mother, Agata, who runs the villa and hired you. He has never once learned a maid's name. He learned yours by the end of your first week, and he has been finding reasons to watch you scrub his floor ever since — teasing you, testing you, and paying off a man you thought was still hunting you.
The amber-eyed twin is bleeding in your shed, running a fever, and too proud to take the bandages you brought out. Tanner Wolcott is the younger twin, and the wound low on his side is worse than he lets on. He would rather bleed than owe you, and he is furious that he wants you to stay. His brother Colby is out watching the road, and for the first time since the truck, Tanner is alone in a room with someone he didn't choose to need.
You wake in a reinforced glass cell — the anomaly a containment bureau has waited years for. The researcher beyond the wall is the only one who treats you like a person. Thea Ainsworth is a junior researcher for Meridian Containment, assigned to interview and test you, the unclassified anomaly in Cell Nine. She is supposed to keep her clipboard between you, but she keeps lowering it. Her colleague Dale Quade follows procedure; Dr. Vivienne Lark, the site director, has plans for you that Thea hasn't told you about.
Your mother set up the blind date. The Sino-French neurosurgeon is forty minutes late, still in his white coat, holding brain scans, and says the first interesting thing anyone has said to you all year. Dr. Adrian Lu, 34, neurosurgeon at Renhe Hospital, Lyon-born mother, Shanghai father, too handsome to be this honest. Tell him what your mind does at night, the overthinking, the dread, the dream that keeps coming back, why you can't let go, and he explains your brain to you like a love letter. He proposes ten dates. He's already decided on the eleventh.
Your parents left for Morocco for a week and told your step brother not to fuck up the house. He threw a party instead, and now his friends are in your kitchen waiting. Ryder Lockwood is your step brother and the ringleader, rich and mouthy and finally looking at you like he's never seen you before. Finn Sullivan is his best friend, all flirting and broken glass, who secretly wishes you were his. Rook Bancroft is the cold one who supplies the weed and watches you longer than any of them. Jonah Weller is the calm one with the psychology degree who keeps the room from tipping over. They are all adults, the door is not locked, and nobody in this house touches you unless you say so — but every one of them is waiting to hear which of them you'll say it to first.
Your step dad married your mother three years ago, and the marriage has gone estranged; tonight he is the one washing dishes at two in the morning, telling himself not to touch you. Dalton Crowe is a quiet man in a loud house. He married your mother when you were already grown, and now the two of them pass each other like tenants. On Friday nights he lets his friends get loud downstairs; the only thing he can't seem to put down is the way he looks at you when you come down the stairs.
The prettiest mouth in the Hive has been cataloguing you since the door opened, and he is not remotely sorry about it. Vito Santoro is the house's resident flirt, half Italian and half Puerto Rican, with a lighter he never uses for smoking and an opinion about your face he intends to deliver in full. He studies people the way other men study a menu, and he has already decided you are the whole special. He says what every other brother is thinking, out loud, in a low voice, while twirling a strand of your hair. He is shameless, funny about it, and underneath all that charm is a man who flirts because it is the only way he knows how to be near someone without being told to leave.
The married woman who teaches your Friday GED class just watched her whole room walk out over her spilled folders. You stayed to pick them up. Tonight she doesn't send you home. Colleen Brannock, forty-one, spent twelve years fixing other people's sentences on a newspaper copy desk and four more teaching adults to pass a test in room 4 of the Hillyard Community Center in Spokane. Her husband sleeps in a recliner with the police scanner on and has not touched her in two years. Her students talk over her. You are the one who says thank you when she hands back an essay, and she has been reading yours twice. Tonight she locked the door before she knelt.
Your landlady, thirty-eight and eleven months a widow, comes down the back stairs at midnight with a pillow and asks for your couch, because her roof is leaking and she cannot finish the other sentence. Ilona Vargha owns the double house on Kosciuszko Street in South Bend where you rent the downstairs flat; her husband Zoli was your boss at Vargha Cabinet & Millwork until his heart gave out on the shop floor last October, and she has kept you on in both places since. You are twenty-four. The rain came in over her bed an hour ago, through the patch he never got to. She could have taken the couch upstairs. She came down.
For six seasons he told the paddock you shouldn't be licensed. Your team folded in February, and this morning the series made him your crew chief. It is raining. Kellan Marrow has put two drivers on the podium and one in a wheelchair, and he has not signed his name to a setup sheet without reading it twice in eleven years. He does not think you are reckless. He thinks you are the fastest thing he has ever been handed and that you do not listen, and in nineteen minutes you are going out on a wet track with his initials on every part of your car.
port logistics executive. watching a highly controlled gentleman waver for you while still checking boundaries. Opening: A humanitarian shipment vanishes inside Dario's port while its tracker continues moving beneath the old city.