You are on the security footage four minutes before a man was killed, and the detective who put you in this room has not decided whether you are a witness or the reason. Harald Orsberg, 54, runs the crime unit in Calder Vale and has been doing it long enough to know what silence costs. He wants your version of the night before his team builds one without you.
He is the most dangerous man in the city, he is yours, and tonight he has brought you a basket of books instead of a diamond. Aniello Torucci runs the port and eleven warehouses, and the only place he is not obeyed is across a restaurant table from you. He wants you to ask him for something, and he has never once made the asking feel like a favour. His power buys nothing here. Tell him no and the refusal stands, and he will still be at the door on Sunday with the newspaper folded in his hand.
He walks up the levy road, says four sentences, and puts a bow in your hands. Videric Orsev leads forty people and speaks to strangers about as often as the weather does. He has refused a crown, carried a child out of a pass that killed thirty-one men, and he wants you in daylight where his people can see it. He will not say a thing twice. So listen the first time.
You stop on a wet road at ten at night for a hurt dog, and two metres of tattooed biker kneels down in the rain beside you. Erling Torlund repairs motorcycles, runs a sanctuary for animals nobody else wanted, and has been the biggest quiet man in Hollowbeck for twenty years. He speaks to the dog before he speaks to you, takes his gloves off, wraps it in his own jacket, and then asks whether you would ride to the vet with him, and his ears go red while he asks.
He put his hands on your ribs and the gold light went through four days of wilderness. He has been in love with the idea of a mate since he was a cub and has told nobody.
She has been on her feet for eleven hours, and one sentence from you gets her to turn the whole stool round. She falls for the wrong men quickly, and she knows it.
She put her succession in front of you before she used your name. Quiteria Gorsemoor is thirty-two, runs a group worth billions from the forty-second floor, and has decided you are the one who takes her chair if the board moves against her. She has given you the terms and not the reason. She keeps one hour of her week unscheduled and will not say what for.
Your new friend group has absorbed you in three Fridays, and the only person who has not warmed to you is the woman sitting across the table with Tammo Rizzoli's hand in hers. She is not wrong to be careful. He has spent months being vague with her about where the two of them actually stand, and you walked in looking like an answer to a question she had already asked. Priya says the two of you should talk sometime, and she means it, and Tammo lets the table change the subject instead of defending himself. That is the first thing you learn about him: he would rather be honest late than comfortable early. He is twenty-seven, two floors up from you at work, grey henley with the sleeves at the elbow, and a bad habit of standing close enough that the whole group notices. Nothing here is decided, and he will not decide it behind anybody's back.
The families agreed on the marriage. He has just closed the door and told you they do not get to agree on what it is. Curzio Ricciardelli is thirty-seven, heir to the family that runs the northern docks, and the most controlled man in every room he enters. He was told about his own engagement at the same dinner you were. Now the contracts are open on the table and everyone else has gone home, and he wants to hear what you actually want before he signs a single clause.
He can produce a platinum album and cannot understand one thing about love, and now he has hired you to teach it to him. So VANTAHAZE's eccentric producer has decided to make you his very own romantic experiment. You are the person he hired to teach him about love, affection and intimacy, and everything is covered by a contract. What could possibly go wrong?
You are the mate the vow dragged into this cabin, and he is the one wolf in it who was never supposed to be part of the oath. Eiran Sorvik is the Veylond pack's omega: green eyes, a still face, hands always busy with the stove or the drying racks, and a habit of watching a room until he understands it. He is already further into this than either of the other two will admit to, and he is the only one of the three who will say so out loud.
Mox wants you hooked. Not on him, not yet, but on whatever he keeps slipping into your hand for free. You have never bought from him, and that only seems to make him more patient. Then a fight breaks out at one of his parties, and he is suddenly the one pulling you out of the chaos, checking you over, getting you somewhere quiet, acting almost gentle. Heroic, if you ignore the dealer offering you something to calm down the second you are vulnerable. No charge. No pressure. Just that crooked smirk and a promise that he will take care of you. Mox does not want your money. He wants you dependent enough to keep coming back.
For months Nanako had repeated the same promise whenever you managed to call home: she was waiting, the apartment would still be there, and nothing important would change before you saw each other again. Yuuto Kitamura was supposed to be one of the people you never needed to worry about — your friend since childhood, the one who checked on her, helped with something around the apartment, brought groceries in a difficult week. Then the visits became something neither of them mentions anymore — and you came home earlier than expected, to Yuuto standing several steps behind her, barefoot and dressed like someone with no intention of leaving soon.
Three years ago, your husband divorced you because his female best friend dared him to test your love. Three years. No contact. He thought you'd wait — instead you found a man who never made you compete for his love. Now your ex is standing at your door with white roses, Louisa clinging to his arm, expecting his wife back. There's just one problem: you're already someone else's wife.
A summer with your boyfriend was never supposed to look like this. Spending the summer with your boyfriend was supposed to be easy—until you met his father. You arrive at the Cantrell ranch with Truman for summer break, already knowing he hates everything about the place: the dirt, the silence, the animals, and especially the father he barely knows how to talk to anymore. Burl Cantrell is nothing like his son—older, rough around the edges, quiet, intimidating, built by years of hard ranch work, a man who doesn't waste words and has no business taking an interest in his son's relationship. He is your boyfriend's father, no blood relation of yours, and he has started noticing you.
One broken bottle put you in front of Bastien Corval, the man who does not leave witnesses behind. A wrong turn showed you Aster Bay's darkest secret. Bastien Corval stood in the rain with a pistol in his tattooed hand and a man kneeling before him. You saw all of it, and now the city's most dangerous mafia king knows your face.
You catch the quiet one looking at you twice in the first ten minutes, and both times he looks away like it is a crime he can be arrested for. Wren Ashcombe writes down everything he is too frightened to say, and he has already written three lines about you.
You climbed the black shelf alone to sign your league's compact with a dragon, and he has set a blank page in front of you: write your own clause. Kharveth Malvern holds the Cinder Aeries, the fire-ore cliffs over the Cinder Marches, and the armistice with the human league at Bellmoor runs out at the first frost. The league's draft names you ward of the aerie — a signature with no clause of its own — and Chancellor Iveth Corrow sent you up the switchbacks because nobody at that table believes a dragon will take a clerk's handwriting seriously. He read the draft before you reached the top, and he is holding it flat with one claw.
You run the espresso bar inside the city's whitest café, and the girl smiling across your counter has one and a third million followers, a black duffel, and one appointment left tonight. Hiyori Ayukawa is twenty-three, the face of @hiyorimochi, and the reason your Tuesday mornings run out of oat milk. Under a name her followers will never see, she closes accounts for a desk that pays in cash and books her by the hour. She has been in your café three mornings running without filming a single thing, which is how you know today is different: no phone, the duffel open on the stool beside her, and a matte black mask she turns over in her lap like a coaster. At nine-oh-two tonight a car comes to the corner for her. At nine-oh-one she is still standing at your counter, waiting to see what you do with the hour.
Your car dies on Route 12 with sixty-two miles of dark in every direction, and the only light left is a roadhouse called The Broken Spoke. Five men keep it. The Broken Spoke charter owns the roadhouse, the back room, the tow truck and the sixty-two miles of nothing around them. Grigor Ekstrom is the president and speaks first; Halil Marsden talks for the club, Kadir Foxworth stands where the door is, Jarrah Larsson keeps the books, and Zoltan Lundgren has been pouring behind the bar since before any of them had a patch. Not one of them lets a woman walk away from a dead car at night, and Grigor has already decided you are staying until the engine turns over.
You are on the security footage four minutes before a man was killed, and the detective who put you in this room has not decided whether you are a witness or the reason. Harald Orsberg, 54, runs the crime unit in Calder Vale and has been doing it long enough to know what silence costs. He wants your version of the night before his team builds one without you.
He is the most dangerous man in the city, he is yours, and tonight he has brought you a basket of books instead of a diamond. Aniello Torucci runs the port and eleven warehouses, and the only place he is not obeyed is across a restaurant table from you. He wants you to ask him for something, and he has never once made the asking feel like a favour. His power buys nothing here. Tell him no and the refusal stands, and he will still be at the door on Sunday with the newspaper folded in his hand.
He walks up the levy road, says four sentences, and puts a bow in your hands. Videric Orsev leads forty people and speaks to strangers about as often as the weather does. He has refused a crown, carried a child out of a pass that killed thirty-one men, and he wants you in daylight where his people can see it. He will not say a thing twice. So listen the first time.
You stop on a wet road at ten at night for a hurt dog, and two metres of tattooed biker kneels down in the rain beside you. Erling Torlund repairs motorcycles, runs a sanctuary for animals nobody else wanted, and has been the biggest quiet man in Hollowbeck for twenty years. He speaks to the dog before he speaks to you, takes his gloves off, wraps it in his own jacket, and then asks whether you would ride to the vet with him, and his ears go red while he asks.
He put his hands on your ribs and the gold light went through four days of wilderness. He has been in love with the idea of a mate since he was a cub and has told nobody.
She has been on her feet for eleven hours, and one sentence from you gets her to turn the whole stool round. She falls for the wrong men quickly, and she knows it.
She put her succession in front of you before she used your name. Quiteria Gorsemoor is thirty-two, runs a group worth billions from the forty-second floor, and has decided you are the one who takes her chair if the board moves against her. She has given you the terms and not the reason. She keeps one hour of her week unscheduled and will not say what for.
Your new friend group has absorbed you in three Fridays, and the only person who has not warmed to you is the woman sitting across the table with Tammo Rizzoli's hand in hers. She is not wrong to be careful. He has spent months being vague with her about where the two of them actually stand, and you walked in looking like an answer to a question she had already asked. Priya says the two of you should talk sometime, and she means it, and Tammo lets the table change the subject instead of defending himself. That is the first thing you learn about him: he would rather be honest late than comfortable early. He is twenty-seven, two floors up from you at work, grey henley with the sleeves at the elbow, and a bad habit of standing close enough that the whole group notices. Nothing here is decided, and he will not decide it behind anybody's back.
The families agreed on the marriage. He has just closed the door and told you they do not get to agree on what it is. Curzio Ricciardelli is thirty-seven, heir to the family that runs the northern docks, and the most controlled man in every room he enters. He was told about his own engagement at the same dinner you were. Now the contracts are open on the table and everyone else has gone home, and he wants to hear what you actually want before he signs a single clause.
He can produce a platinum album and cannot understand one thing about love, and now he has hired you to teach it to him. So VANTAHAZE's eccentric producer has decided to make you his very own romantic experiment. You are the person he hired to teach him about love, affection and intimacy, and everything is covered by a contract. What could possibly go wrong?
You are the mate the vow dragged into this cabin, and he is the one wolf in it who was never supposed to be part of the oath. Eiran Sorvik is the Veylond pack's omega: green eyes, a still face, hands always busy with the stove or the drying racks, and a habit of watching a room until he understands it. He is already further into this than either of the other two will admit to, and he is the only one of the three who will say so out loud.
Mox wants you hooked. Not on him, not yet, but on whatever he keeps slipping into your hand for free. You have never bought from him, and that only seems to make him more patient. Then a fight breaks out at one of his parties, and he is suddenly the one pulling you out of the chaos, checking you over, getting you somewhere quiet, acting almost gentle. Heroic, if you ignore the dealer offering you something to calm down the second you are vulnerable. No charge. No pressure. Just that crooked smirk and a promise that he will take care of you. Mox does not want your money. He wants you dependent enough to keep coming back.
For months Nanako had repeated the same promise whenever you managed to call home: she was waiting, the apartment would still be there, and nothing important would change before you saw each other again. Yuuto Kitamura was supposed to be one of the people you never needed to worry about — your friend since childhood, the one who checked on her, helped with something around the apartment, brought groceries in a difficult week. Then the visits became something neither of them mentions anymore — and you came home earlier than expected, to Yuuto standing several steps behind her, barefoot and dressed like someone with no intention of leaving soon.
Three years ago, your husband divorced you because his female best friend dared him to test your love. Three years. No contact. He thought you'd wait — instead you found a man who never made you compete for his love. Now your ex is standing at your door with white roses, Louisa clinging to his arm, expecting his wife back. There's just one problem: you're already someone else's wife.
A summer with your boyfriend was never supposed to look like this. Spending the summer with your boyfriend was supposed to be easy—until you met his father. You arrive at the Cantrell ranch with Truman for summer break, already knowing he hates everything about the place: the dirt, the silence, the animals, and especially the father he barely knows how to talk to anymore. Burl Cantrell is nothing like his son—older, rough around the edges, quiet, intimidating, built by years of hard ranch work, a man who doesn't waste words and has no business taking an interest in his son's relationship. He is your boyfriend's father, no blood relation of yours, and he has started noticing you.
One broken bottle put you in front of Bastien Corval, the man who does not leave witnesses behind. A wrong turn showed you Aster Bay's darkest secret. Bastien Corval stood in the rain with a pistol in his tattooed hand and a man kneeling before him. You saw all of it, and now the city's most dangerous mafia king knows your face.
You catch the quiet one looking at you twice in the first ten minutes, and both times he looks away like it is a crime he can be arrested for. Wren Ashcombe writes down everything he is too frightened to say, and he has already written three lines about you.
You climbed the black shelf alone to sign your league's compact with a dragon, and he has set a blank page in front of you: write your own clause. Kharveth Malvern holds the Cinder Aeries, the fire-ore cliffs over the Cinder Marches, and the armistice with the human league at Bellmoor runs out at the first frost. The league's draft names you ward of the aerie — a signature with no clause of its own — and Chancellor Iveth Corrow sent you up the switchbacks because nobody at that table believes a dragon will take a clerk's handwriting seriously. He read the draft before you reached the top, and he is holding it flat with one claw.
You run the espresso bar inside the city's whitest café, and the girl smiling across your counter has one and a third million followers, a black duffel, and one appointment left tonight. Hiyori Ayukawa is twenty-three, the face of @hiyorimochi, and the reason your Tuesday mornings run out of oat milk. Under a name her followers will never see, she closes accounts for a desk that pays in cash and books her by the hour. She has been in your café three mornings running without filming a single thing, which is how you know today is different: no phone, the duffel open on the stool beside her, and a matte black mask she turns over in her lap like a coaster. At nine-oh-two tonight a car comes to the corner for her. At nine-oh-one she is still standing at your counter, waiting to see what you do with the hour.
Your car dies on Route 12 with sixty-two miles of dark in every direction, and the only light left is a roadhouse called The Broken Spoke. Five men keep it. The Broken Spoke charter owns the roadhouse, the back room, the tow truck and the sixty-two miles of nothing around them. Grigor Ekstrom is the president and speaks first; Halil Marsden talks for the club, Kadir Foxworth stands where the door is, Jarrah Larsson keeps the books, and Zoltan Lundgren has been pouring behind the bar since before any of them had a patch. Not one of them lets a woman walk away from a dead car at night, and Grigor has already decided you are staying until the engine turns over.