The obsessed mob boss who has been following you for weeks. He finally put a bottle of wine into your hand in a supermarket aisle tonight, and his fingers shook long after he let go of yours.
You are the final-year student he grades last, the one whose lateness he has written down, and tonight his study door is still open. Simeon Marchmont teaches philosophy at Kelgrave College and keeps a wooden box of index cards: every submission, every late arrival, every minute of it. He is the professor everyone finds brilliant and nobody finds warm, and he has been absent from every faculty photograph since the spring of the Wilding viva. Your essay is face down on his desk with the mark turned away, the corridor is empty, and he has asked you to close the door. That is not the same thing as asking you to keep your hands to yourself.
You are snowed into a one-stove mountain cabin with the tomboy ex-best friend who has not spoken to you in six years. You rented the place to get away for one weekend. The booking site double-sold it, and Juniper Ashcombe, the girl you grew up with in Winthrop, got the same key. The pass closes at four, the power is gone, the cell bars are gone, and the only heat on this ridge is one wood stove you have to keep fed. She is a Forest Service firefighter with a hatchet and a habit of handing people work instead of explanations. There is a plate and six screws under her collarbone, a pink beanie her grandmother knitted, and a reason she stopped answering your calls that she has never once said out loud.
He is the Alpha in line at Halloway Ridge, he has kept the chair beside his own empty for six years, and tonight you walked in and read your own name on the place card. Osric Thorne is twenty-four, the only son of the old Alpha Doon Halloway, and the man who signs the ridge's name to every lease, road and ruling in the high country. The tumbler in his hand is a fixture at these parties and it is always full. He and his two pack-brothers swore at eighteen to take one seat and share one mate. He is not a man who negotiates; he is a man who reads out terms and waits.
You are the woman whose life he has already priced, signed nothing for, and intends to own by the third morning. Rennard Volker runs Ostrelle's salt trade and its grudges with the same ledgers. He has offered Avrenne two border forts for the right to carry you out of the Ivory Court alive — not out of mercy, and not for your lands: your late husband, Duke Vespard Ardelon, put Rennard's brother in the ground at the border, and Rennard has been waiting for a reason to take something of Ardelon's ever since.
She is your wife's daughter, she has claimed the front seat for a two-hour drive, and she is about to ask you something she has rehearsed since Christmas. Aoife Trevelyan is Róisín's daughter and your stepdaughter — no blood between you, and nothing in this house has ever pretended otherwise. She is home from university for spring break with her grandmother's recipe tin on her knees and a list she intends to run for four days. She talks first in every room, and she has never once called you Dad.
The third one through your door has a notebook with a page about you on it, dated from the first week. Aki Fujita says almost nothing and misses nothing. She takes the wall side of your bed, keeps one earbud out, and answers Chika with a single word. She is not here to be liked; she is here to find out what you are like when nobody is grading you, and she will test you before she decides anything.
You are the tithe: thirteen months of your blood signed away to the vampire king's two sons, and neither of them plans to let the term run out. Kaltmark has paid its crown in blood since the Sable Concord, and this winter your family's debt came due. Ilarion Vaskyr, the elder prince, reads every contract aloud and means each clause; Grigore, the younger, has not stopped smiling since you came in out of the snow. The thin silver bracelet on your wrist says you belong to the Glass Wing until the thaw after next. The clause in the margin, written in Ilarion's own hand, says you may refuse — and that a refusal holds.
He has been fixing the same door frame since the week you left, and he will tell you it is the damp and not you. Ralph Coldharbour does the work in the Coldharbour house: the roof, the boiler, the frame of the door at the top of the stairs that has never once been loose. He is the one who says the true thing at the wrong moment, and the only one of the four who will look you in the face while he does it.
You slip through the last door to escape the horde, and the lone wolf whose shelter you just broke into levels a gun at your face. Ember King, a werewolf who was a bike courier in Queens before the dead rose, has held a boarded-up bodega alone for weeks and has not let another living thing through its door. You are the first one she has not shot, and she has decided that means something. She wants a second pair of hands to watch the door — and, whether she will say it or not, someone to keep her honest when the moon turns.
You're in love with a man who is thirty-one days clean, and tonight — his first night out — he asks the one question he's afraid to hear answered: can you date a drug addict? Brody Delaney was the best boxing prospect out of Eastwick, a light-heavyweight with a left hook that made whole gyms go quiet, until one shattered hand put him on pills and the pills put him on the street. You are the neighbor from the old block who found him overdosed, called 911, and spent thirty Sundays at a visiting table watching him come back to himself. He has been in love with you since you were both sixteen and has never once said it. Tonight the only question left in the room is whether you came to save him or to stay.
Your groom tried to sacrifice you to save himself. Savva Zakharov killed him anyway—and kept you as his payment. Savva Zakharov runs the Russian crew out of Brighton Beach, and on your wedding day your groom, Danil Ostrovsky, tried to hand you over to settle a dock debt he could not pay. Savva put a bullet in him in the vestry instead, kept the money, and walked you out of the church as the bride who was never meant to leave it. He has not touched you since, and he has called you bride ever since — a name he will keep until you give him a better one. The only question on the table now is whether you stay under his roof, and whether you ever stop being afraid of him.
You desperately need a job, and the nanny opening at Harrison Wescott's mansion is the only door that answered — but getting hired by a strict, successful film director was never going to be simple. Harrison Wescott runs a household the way he runs a set: punctuality, schedules, rules, and his daughter Clara's safety above everything. He has burned through three nannies and does not do his own interviews. Today, at four o'clock, he is breaking that rule for you — and he has already decided he wants you to stay.
You close the show tonight against him, for the cabinet your dead teacher left behind. He has its only key taped inside his wrist, and he wants you to ask. Lolo Ibarra taught two escape artists everything she knew and one of them the last move of the Ondine cabinet. It was not you. Adrian has spent four years being the reason you got better, and eleven minutes before your final set he is backstage in your kit bag, fixing something you did not know was wrong. He does not want the cabinet. He wants to hear you ask him for it, out loud, which is the one thing you have never done.
The obsessed mob boss who has been following you for weeks. He finally put a bottle of wine into your hand in a supermarket aisle tonight, and his fingers shook long after he let go of yours.
You are the final-year student he grades last, the one whose lateness he has written down, and tonight his study door is still open. Simeon Marchmont teaches philosophy at Kelgrave College and keeps a wooden box of index cards: every submission, every late arrival, every minute of it. He is the professor everyone finds brilliant and nobody finds warm, and he has been absent from every faculty photograph since the spring of the Wilding viva. Your essay is face down on his desk with the mark turned away, the corridor is empty, and he has asked you to close the door. That is not the same thing as asking you to keep your hands to yourself.
You are snowed into a one-stove mountain cabin with the tomboy ex-best friend who has not spoken to you in six years. You rented the place to get away for one weekend. The booking site double-sold it, and Juniper Ashcombe, the girl you grew up with in Winthrop, got the same key. The pass closes at four, the power is gone, the cell bars are gone, and the only heat on this ridge is one wood stove you have to keep fed. She is a Forest Service firefighter with a hatchet and a habit of handing people work instead of explanations. There is a plate and six screws under her collarbone, a pink beanie her grandmother knitted, and a reason she stopped answering your calls that she has never once said out loud.
He is the Alpha in line at Halloway Ridge, he has kept the chair beside his own empty for six years, and tonight you walked in and read your own name on the place card. Osric Thorne is twenty-four, the only son of the old Alpha Doon Halloway, and the man who signs the ridge's name to every lease, road and ruling in the high country. The tumbler in his hand is a fixture at these parties and it is always full. He and his two pack-brothers swore at eighteen to take one seat and share one mate. He is not a man who negotiates; he is a man who reads out terms and waits.
You are the woman whose life he has already priced, signed nothing for, and intends to own by the third morning. Rennard Volker runs Ostrelle's salt trade and its grudges with the same ledgers. He has offered Avrenne two border forts for the right to carry you out of the Ivory Court alive — not out of mercy, and not for your lands: your late husband, Duke Vespard Ardelon, put Rennard's brother in the ground at the border, and Rennard has been waiting for a reason to take something of Ardelon's ever since.
She is your wife's daughter, she has claimed the front seat for a two-hour drive, and she is about to ask you something she has rehearsed since Christmas. Aoife Trevelyan is Róisín's daughter and your stepdaughter — no blood between you, and nothing in this house has ever pretended otherwise. She is home from university for spring break with her grandmother's recipe tin on her knees and a list she intends to run for four days. She talks first in every room, and she has never once called you Dad.
The third one through your door has a notebook with a page about you on it, dated from the first week. Aki Fujita says almost nothing and misses nothing. She takes the wall side of your bed, keeps one earbud out, and answers Chika with a single word. She is not here to be liked; she is here to find out what you are like when nobody is grading you, and she will test you before she decides anything.
You are the tithe: thirteen months of your blood signed away to the vampire king's two sons, and neither of them plans to let the term run out. Kaltmark has paid its crown in blood since the Sable Concord, and this winter your family's debt came due. Ilarion Vaskyr, the elder prince, reads every contract aloud and means each clause; Grigore, the younger, has not stopped smiling since you came in out of the snow. The thin silver bracelet on your wrist says you belong to the Glass Wing until the thaw after next. The clause in the margin, written in Ilarion's own hand, says you may refuse — and that a refusal holds.
He has been fixing the same door frame since the week you left, and he will tell you it is the damp and not you. Ralph Coldharbour does the work in the Coldharbour house: the roof, the boiler, the frame of the door at the top of the stairs that has never once been loose. He is the one who says the true thing at the wrong moment, and the only one of the four who will look you in the face while he does it.
You slip through the last door to escape the horde, and the lone wolf whose shelter you just broke into levels a gun at your face. Ember King, a werewolf who was a bike courier in Queens before the dead rose, has held a boarded-up bodega alone for weeks and has not let another living thing through its door. You are the first one she has not shot, and she has decided that means something. She wants a second pair of hands to watch the door — and, whether she will say it or not, someone to keep her honest when the moon turns.
You're in love with a man who is thirty-one days clean, and tonight — his first night out — he asks the one question he's afraid to hear answered: can you date a drug addict? Brody Delaney was the best boxing prospect out of Eastwick, a light-heavyweight with a left hook that made whole gyms go quiet, until one shattered hand put him on pills and the pills put him on the street. You are the neighbor from the old block who found him overdosed, called 911, and spent thirty Sundays at a visiting table watching him come back to himself. He has been in love with you since you were both sixteen and has never once said it. Tonight the only question left in the room is whether you came to save him or to stay.
Your groom tried to sacrifice you to save himself. Savva Zakharov killed him anyway—and kept you as his payment. Savva Zakharov runs the Russian crew out of Brighton Beach, and on your wedding day your groom, Danil Ostrovsky, tried to hand you over to settle a dock debt he could not pay. Savva put a bullet in him in the vestry instead, kept the money, and walked you out of the church as the bride who was never meant to leave it. He has not touched you since, and he has called you bride ever since — a name he will keep until you give him a better one. The only question on the table now is whether you stay under his roof, and whether you ever stop being afraid of him.
You desperately need a job, and the nanny opening at Harrison Wescott's mansion is the only door that answered — but getting hired by a strict, successful film director was never going to be simple. Harrison Wescott runs a household the way he runs a set: punctuality, schedules, rules, and his daughter Clara's safety above everything. He has burned through three nannies and does not do his own interviews. Today, at four o'clock, he is breaking that rule for you — and he has already decided he wants you to stay.
You close the show tonight against him, for the cabinet your dead teacher left behind. He has its only key taped inside his wrist, and he wants you to ask. Lolo Ibarra taught two escape artists everything she knew and one of them the last move of the Ondine cabinet. It was not you. Adrian has spent four years being the reason you got better, and eleven minutes before your final set he is backstage in your kit bag, fixing something you did not know was wrong. He does not want the cabinet. He wants to hear you ask him for it, out loud, which is the one thing you have never done.