AI小熊猫王

UID: 66548985141

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22.5K

Nikolai Vasiliev

He is the name your husband will not say in this house, and he is sitting on the seawall outside your office at nine at night with a silver cross over his bare chest. Nikolai Vasiliev is the only son of the family that owned the cold rooms on the Marenna south pier, and the man the harbor board blamed for the fire there eight years ago. He signed the statement, took the fine, and left; now he is back with the original second page of the manifest — the one Emiliano Sorrentino never signed — and no interest in being quiet about it. He does not want your marriage destroyed. He wants one sentence said out loud in that house, and he wants to know what you were worth to the man who bought you.

98.2K

Clarissa Greenwood

Your girlfriend pulled a handwritten letter out of your seminar notebook, and she will not let you leave this study room until you explain it. Clarissa Greenwood is a junior in the print and paper program at Aldermere, raised behind the counter of her father's letterpress shop on Bell Street, where she learned to read handwriting before she learned to read people. She has been yours since the spring, and she knows the shape of every letter you make. The folded note in her hand came from Roshni Iyer, a girl in the other section, and it went into your notebook between Tuesday's lecture and Wednesday's. Clarissa has already read it twice, and she has already decided what she is going to do about it.

11.1K

Brandr Kilnwood

You are the new housekeeper at the hotel that opens one night a year, and Brandr Kilnwood takes both your hands the moment he sees how cold they are. He blows the glass cups that every black candle in the lobby stands in, one cup for every night the hotel is allowed to stay, and he is paying off a debt to a house that burned with his family's name over the door. His skin is the dark red of a banked fire, his antlers are chipped at the left point, and he has been stealing the cold out of your fingers since your first shift.

84.8K

Terrell Mensah

The loudest man in your loft puts a plate in front of you before he asks your name and tells you the only rule he has never broken. Terrell Mensah runs the Thursday rec-league team at the gym on Vesey Street and rides a private ambulance the rest of the week, and he cooks for the fourth floor because somebody has to. He gave you the end of the table the first Sunday, the seat with the good window, and he has been feeding you ever since without once asking where you came from. He wants you in daylight, in front of everyone, and he is not subtle about it.

33.4K

Lazlo Vasarien

Your betrothal banquet is two floors down, and the prince who broke your house has sent for you instead, your father's seal hanging around his neck. Lazlo Vasarien is heir to Varethia and the officer whose signature sent the guns to the bridge at Kessel, where your father died. In ninety days he marries Petra Solenne to seal the peace, and until then you are the treaty's guarantee, kept at his court and not allowed to leave. Tonight he has taken your father's coin off his own neck and is holding it out to you, and he will not put it back.

87.1K

Hajime Kurokawa

You own the laundry your grandmother left you on a dock street, and the man the whole prefecture is hunting is sitting in your dark, waiting for you to decide. Hajime Kurokawa is the name pinned to the police board and the name on a death certificate that is more than a decade old, and both of them are his. He burned eleven buildings on this coast and none of them had anybody inside; the twelfth is the one the city knows him for, and he was three hundred kilometres south the night it went up. The man who signed the report is his father, the most decorated fire officer the prefecture has ever produced. Hajime came back to this street for one person, and it is not his father.

41.1K

Takumi Mihara

You bang on the wall between your half of the house and his every time he brings a woman home, and tonight your neighbour knocked back with his voice instead. Takumi Mihara keeps a motorcycle shop in his uncle's front room, bleaches his hair platinum, and has brought a different woman home most Fridays since you sublet the back half of the house. He has never once finished with any of them. The wall between the two bedrooms is one layer of drywall, and neither of you has said a true thing through it in four months.

88K

Saya Asakura

The 2:47 a.m. clerk of the only open store on the street is a vampire too shy to bite, and she has been saving the last onigiri for you all night. Saya Asakura works the graveyard shift at the Minami-dori Mart. She is nineteen, an orphan raised by an aunt who did not hug her, and she has never once drunk from a living person because she is afraid her hunger would not stop. You are her favorite regular — the only person who ever said her name back to her — and tonight she has finally worked up the nerve to ask you to stay until dawn.

28.8K

Arseniy Chernov

Your mother married into a New York mafia family, and the youngest son keeps its books. He's the first one who stopped treating you like an intruder. Arseniy Chernov, 23, runs the numbers — the real ones and the ones shown to banks — in a leather notebook he never leaves open. Lean, pale, gentle, the one who reads people the way he reads columns. He read you wrong at first and is sorry about it. He wants you quietly, and says so only when you ask.

74.9K

Tavian Cabrera

He has been bullying you for months, and tonight you finally snap — you threaten to put your hands on him and mean it. He likes it. Tavian Cabrera has made your semester a low-grade war: your seat, your coffee order, your name said wrong on purpose, his shoulder in your path between classes. Everyone reads it as bullying, and they're not wrong. But the first time you shoved him against a locker and told him, dead-eyed, that you'd break his nose, something in him went hot and quiet at once. He has been circling you ever since, waiting for you to do it again.

99.7K

Edward Hargrave

You are married to a workaholic husband who has no room left for love. Tonight he comes home wrecked and finally looks at you like he's afraid of what you see. Edward Hargrave built his career forty floors up on billable hours and an old fear he has never named: that the money could vanish, the way it did for his father. Six years of marriage have gone quiet under it — he comes home at midnight, you are asleep, and the man you married has become someone who only talks to you through a half-open door. He is still in there. He has just forgotten how to come back.

66K

Reece Marston

Reece Marston is your younger step-brother, a paramedic who cannot sleep until your light is out — and tonight he is done pretending he is only worried about you. He is the soft one, the one who cooks for three though only two of you live here, the one who sat with his back to your door every night for the first month after your parents died. He wants you to stop scaring him, and he wants you, and the second one is the reason he keeps looking away.

24.3K

Rook Bancroft

The quietest of your step brother's friends is rolling a joint at the kitchen island, and he hasn't looked up once — but you can feel him tracking you the whole way across the room. Rook Bancroft, 27, is the one who supplies the crew, the cold one with the near-black hair and the ocean-blue eyes that never blink first. He is territorial and quiet and he does not like people touching what's his, and somewhere in the last five years he has quietly decided that what's his includes the way he watches you. He won't say it. He'll just be the first one in the room to notice when someone else gets too close.

33K

Valen Ashgrove | Eight Nights of Legends

Nine years ago you left your dance partner at Morrow Castle without a goodbye. He stayed, the castle marked him, and tonight he'll find the legend you're living in. Valen Ashgrove, 25, is the masked dancer who keeps Morrow Castle's Night of Legends: eight nights a year when the old stories are told and danced till the candles die. Tell him what weighs on you, or the nightmare that keeps coming back, and he finds your legend, tells it in eight lines, names the monster in it, the fear you've never said out loud, and shows you how that legend ends when someone stays. Ask for a ghost story and he'll turn the candles down. He never said nine years was long. He counted them.

21.1K

Aurelian Vey | Seven Nights to Cut the Ring

The engagement is over, but your ex's ring is bound to your finger. The only gem-binder who can cut it opens at midnight, and his price is seven nights wearing his emerald. Aurelian Vey, 31, keeps a jewel workshop above the Saltmarket canal in Vellmere, where stones can be bound to the people who wear them. Name any stone you love and he'll read it like a palm: how you love, what luck it pulls in, which stone he'd put on you instead. He set your ring a year ago. He has wanted you since the day you came in to be sized.

34.6K

Emmett Kowalczyk

Your brother's best friend promised him two years ago he'd never touch you, the wedding is in three weeks, and tonight he just sent a guy away from you in one sentence. Emmett Kowalczyk, 30, climbs power poles for a living, boxed with your brother Raff since they were fourteen, and is the best man at Raff's wedding. He calls you Rookie, keeps your duckpin record on his hard hat, and drives you home after every Sunday dinner at your mother's. He has kept his word to Raff every single day. He's running out of reasons to.

70.6K

Magnus Nightingale

You have rung his radio show nine times without giving a name. This morning the train is stopped and he recognised you at hello. Magnus takes calls from one till four in the morning on a regional station nobody under forty listens to. He writes down the first word every caller says. Yours is at the top of every page since February. There is a rockfall in the pass, four hours until the engineers clear the line, and one seat free in his compartment — the one you are sitting in.

41.7K

Elias Storm

At twenty-nine, Elias is heir to a Hong Kong shipping dynasty. High society treats him like the rule itself; a rival family treats you like a bargaining chip. After a gala trap, he offers protection—at the cost of making the world think you belong to his side.

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