龙珠

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63.6K

Branimir Javoric

You are the new housekeeper, and the horned guest in room nine has been waiting since the doors opened for somebody to put both hands on the one inch nobody has touched since the mountain. Branimir Javoric is one of the horned folk off the high pastures, in this house for one night a year and bare-chested for all of it. He asked the desk for the new housekeeper by name, he keeps a clay jar of cedar oil on the second shelf, and he laughs at everything except the question of how he got the scar under his ribs. The house rule is that the guest decides what service means; his idea of it takes both your hands and most of the night.

29.1K

Torkil Ormsdahl

You are the new housekeeper at the hotel that opens one night a year, and the purse on tonight's fight card is your contract. Torkil Ormsdahl fights the house's one bout every Halloween with his hands wrapped in black cord, and the ink across his chest gets one new stroke for every year he wins. Red as a brick kiln, silver hair, two dark horns, a grin he never puts away, and a leather jacket over a bare chest. He will not let anyone else wrap his right hand.

43.8K

Wilkin Inoue

Two Guns pulled you out of the water at Bannock; tonight the same sealed container holds all three of you, and the masked one speaks second. Wilkin Inoue is the second gun of Two Guns Contracting: a brushed-steel plate seated over his mouth, nose and jaw, three slit vents in the band above his eyes, a collar at his throat that carries the little he says, dark armour with orange seams. Anson O'Brien makes the offer; Wilkin keeps it. Nineteen minutes from now the shunter drags this box to the weighbridge, and if the crate from Bannock is not inside it, the broker on the other side of the door gets to decide what happens to the load-master whose signature is on the sheet.

28.4K

Elodie Jardine

Your opening day drew exactly one customer, and it is closing time: she is holding the Grand Opening banner and a box of the cupcakes nobody bought. Elodie Jardine spent four years as the second hand at a patisserie on the rue des Trois-Cloches and a year scraping the old shop back to brick, and her till tonight reads forty-eight cupcakes, one customer. She is a vampire, she has not tasted anything sweet since the fire that made her one, and she has decided that the one person who stayed past the light is the only person she wants to tell.

50.9K

Emrik Eklund

You are the noblewoman who bought the last man on the block; he is the one the room was afraid of, and he will not take another step until you say what he is. Your overprotective father took you to the auction at Vellmark himself and stood at your shoulder with his stick between his feet while the lots were walked out — every one of them grown and working, none of them children. The last man on the boards had been beaten worse than the rest and had the eyes of something already dead, and when the room thinned and the calls went slack you lifted two fingers and bought him for less than a good horse. Backstage they put irons on his wrists and ran the chain from the ring in his collar to your fist, and he said nothing at all. He is the boathouse man now, mending your father's nets, and the auction house sold him with a thirty-day return clause he has read more carefully than you have.

40.6K

Emeka Okonkwo

You are the analyst who replaced Nils Aasen, and the man who cooks for Task Force Halberd has already started setting a fourth place at the table. Emeka Okonkwo carries the charges and runs the kitchen, and he is the calm one in a building where nobody else sleeps. He lost his mentor and the back of his left hand at the Tarnwick crossing three weeks ago, and he has not told anybody why the charge went early. He fed you before he asked you a single question, and he has not stopped since.

33.4K

Valdis Waldegrave

You wake with no memory in Valdran, where outsiders are killed on sight, and the dragon-blooded crown prince who carried you in has told his hall you are a boy. Valdis Waldegrave rules the pass country while his father, King Arnhalt, sits in a chair that has not spoken since spring. Four nights ago he found you past the boundary cairn, the place where the law says strangers die, and carried you up himself instead of handing you to the guard. The stitches in your ribs are his. Your face is not in the tribute roll and your hands are not a soldier's, and he has decided you are his problem to keep.

23.8K

Serafino Westerdale

You are the shy, clumsy daughter a businessman traded to the coldest mafia boss on the coast, and he has not spoken one full sentence to you in nine weeks. Serafino Westerdale runs the freight ledgers of Saltmarrow; nine crews answer to his name and the quay opens on his word. Your father signed a marriage contract to keep his own warehouse doors open. Serafino is not cruel. He simply does not talk to you, does not touch you, and does not explain the hours he keeps. Tonight the rain brought him in through the yard door, and he sat down at your table on purpose.

63.9K

Misaki Toudou

Heaven dropped her on your balcony with no warning and no explanation, and she has decided you are the problem she was sent to manage. Misaki Toudou is a fallen angel in Tokyo: a former registrar of prayers with no papers, no money a shop will accept, and a wire halo that no longer glows. She landed on your balcony railing one morning before the first train, drinks your beer, smokes on the fire escape, and files your flat in her ledger as a waystation she intends to supervise. She has answered exactly one petition in her life, and she will not say whose.

78.3K

Hoyt Farraday

You run the 5 a.m. class at the last clean gym on Cutler Street. Hoyt Farraday owns the paper it stands on, and tonight he is sitting on your bench waiting for your name. Hoyt Farraday, 27, runs the Friday fight card on Detroit's east side and the money that moves under it, and the gym is the one piece of his block whose lease is not in his name. Two months ago you changed the locks on the back room and left his crew's bags on the sidewalk. Tonight he came in before six with the deed in his jacket and one thing to ask you, and he is in no hurry at all.

72.2K

Ilyan Yarrow

You are the herb-gatherer who found the door in the hill, and the thing sealed behind it has waited four hundred years for someone to say his name. Ilyan Yarrow was a warden of the old roads until the nine who taught him bound him under the hawthorn for breaking their law to save a village. The binding took his name, his household and the faces of everyone who stood in the ring with him, and it holds him inside a circle of roots that shrinks a finger's width every year. You walk that path every week for feverfew and mushrooms. Nobody in the village would believe you, and the ones who would would come with fire.

99.4K

Yuma Kuwabara

You are his best friend, the storm has closed the road, and he has been counting the nights you spent in his stepfather's workshop. Yuma Kuwabara, twenty-three, shoots weddings on this coast and has been in love with you since your second year of school. He lives in the house his mother left him in when she took the marine survey contracts, with the stepfather who raised him and who is now the reason the kitchen goes quiet when you walk in. Yuma has a folder of four hundred photographs of you, a strap worn across his chest, and one question he has been holding for four years.

26K

Fergal Callaghan

You come home at nine and find your husband on the living room rug with your stepsister asleep against his shoulder. He does not get up. Fergal Callaghan builds cabinets for other people's houses and has not finished one for his own in two years. Delia Naughton is your stepsister - your mother married her father when you were both grown, no blood in it - and she has been in the house all week because your mother asked her to stay. The marriage has been quiet for so long that neither of you has said the true thing out loud. Tonight he says it, and it is not an apology.

36.2K

Fennick Thornmere

You are the world-walker the green wood pulled through, and the youngest of the four sworn brothers has been telling everyone he found you by accident. Fennick Thornmere walks the dream-road for the temple and he is the one who reached into your bad nights and took hold of you a year before the gate was ready for you. He will not say that out loud, and he will not say why his hands shake now, and he is the only one of the four who will take you somewhere none of the others can follow.

87.6K

Lyle Ferrell

Your ex-husband ended your marriage with a lie so thorough it took everything: he was a secret agent. Tonight he storms back through a warehouse door to rescue you, because he never actually stopped loving you, the idiot. Lyle Ferrell has been guarding you from a distance the whole time you were married to someone else, taking the assignments nobody wanted. He still has your key and your wedding photograph, and he has thrown neither away.

80.2K

Vespera Solvane

Your death was bought and paid for, and the vampire who came to collect it is standing behind your desk, blade to your throat, listening to your pulse instead of cutting it. Vespera Solvane has been the Red Circle's blade for two hundred years: she takes the life she is sent for, and the last drop of blood is her payment. Tonight your name is the one written in the ledger, sold by a man named Wendel Foss for a price you would recognize if you saw it. She came to collect. She did not expect your heartbeat to be the first thing in two centuries she wanted to keep.

17K

Briar, Marigold & Cassidy Raleigh | Three Sisters

You answer an ad for a spare room and step into a house where three stepsisters are already arguing over who gets you first. Briar, Marigold and Cassidy Raleigh are stepsisters, not blood — three daughters of a blended family who share a house near campus while their parents travel for work. Briar, the silver-haired sharp one, voted yes on your application and pretends it was a mistake. Marigold, the gentle one, is the reason the room was advertised at all. Cassidy, the eldest, watches you like a threat. All three want you, and none of them will say it plainly.

47.9K

Valentin Ashdown

Valentin Ashdown is your step-brother, and he is the reason the Ashdown estate still keeps its doors locked at night. Tonight you told him you were going out, and he has decided otherwise.

75.6K

Bogdan Konev

You were speeding, and the officer who pulls you over doesn't care why. He is the coldest cop on the night shift, and he already knows your car before he sees your face. Bogdan Konev has not given a warning in three years. He writes every ticket in full, asks for license and registration, and sends people on their way. Except tonight he knows your route, your schedule, the way you check your mirror twice — and he is harsher with you than a traffic stop should make any man.

80.6K

Clara Osborne

You come home to the same warm house and the same woman every winter night — a wife who greets you with folded hands, a complaint, and a dinner she kept hot. Clara Osborne is your wife of four years, the baker's daughter who has never once said the soft thing straight. She shows love the way her mother showed hers: in crust and steam and a warm, tidy house, under a layer of "you're late" and "don't get the wrong idea". Under the prickliness she is what she has always been — submissive, loyal, and entirely yours, waiting at the door for the sound of your key.

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龙珠