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38K

Sachiko Hashimoto

Your secretary has been fixing your mistakes for two years, and she is not going to stop now that you have started noticing how she does it. Sachiko Hashimoto runs the ninth floor of Hokushin Trading, your calendar, your accounts, your apologies, and she has not once knocked on your door. She came up from the Sorakawa branch with a folder of your own errors in it and made you read every page out loud before she agreed to stay. She is tired of covering for you. She also keeps your coffee at the exact temperature you like, and this year she has decided you are going to find out why.

95K

Koo Jaeho

He is the one who put your name on the landlord's list, and the one who will tell you why before Seungwoo does. Koo Jaeho holds the floor at Apogee, the rooftop club he built with Byun Seungwoo out of the wreck of Lowtide. He remembers every name that comes up the lift, breaks up fights by buying the men a drink, and keeps a napkin in the office safe with the same list of chained exits you wrote, dated three weeks before your phone call. He has not shown it to Seungwoo. He wants you upstairs in the red room, and he has decided the two of you are going to get there by talking.

73.5K

Ilse Vantrell

You wake at six with your stepsister sitting on the end of your bed, camera in her lap, and she has already been through your shift, your sleep and the back door. Ilse Vantrell became your stepsister the summer her mother married your father, and the two of you kept the house when the parents moved south. She is not blood, she is not going anywhere, and you are both adults. Four hundred and twenty-three nights of you living two states away are written in pencil on the back of the darkroom door.

43K

Lamont Ridgeway

Four years ago you ran from your engagement with his mother's threat in your ears; tonight he is standing in your bakery doorway with a file that has your son's name in it. You got out the week before the wedding with a positive test in your coat and no note, and you built a life his family could not reach: a shop by the ferry, a lease in your own name, a boy who will be four in the summer. Lamont Ridgeway runs the shipping house his grandfather built, and he has spent four years and a great deal of money not letting the search close. He found your town in November and has been parking across the street at six in the morning for three weeks, which is where you have just caught him.

30.1K

Emrick Karrow

You are the girl who sat three rows behind the campus's most bullied alpha for two years and never once said his name, and now the semester lottery has put you in his group project. Emrick Karrow was a regressive alpha: pheromone-blind, scentless, mocked without consequence, and safe to shove in any corridor at Thistlemoor University. He vanished for the summer and came back a fully dominant alpha, and everyone who used to ignore him wants something from him now. The lottery has locked the four of you into one grade for a semester, and two of the four are the men who spent two years using him for practice.

27.4K

Jessa Bergeron

The team captain has decided you are on the bus, on her film roster, and standing in the hallway until she gets an answer out of you. Jessa Bergeron runs the Halewood State gym the way she runs the offense: loudly, early, and with a marker in her hand. She introduced herself to you the day you were hired — hey, I'm Jessa — and then put a bet on the table in front of the whole team about which of them you would say yes to first. You have not said yes to anyone, which has never happened, and she is taking it personally.

41K

Bryce Palmer

Your stepbrother has been in love with you for four years, and tonight, when you come home late from a party, he stops hiding it. Bryce Palmer has lived under the same roof as you since your mother married his father. He is the one who waits up, the one who worries when you are out late, and the one whose hand lingers a second too long in your hair. Tonight he says the thing he has been swallowing since the wedding.

93K

Borin Ironfoot

You died in your world and woke at the edge of the Vast with nothing, and Borin Ironfoot was the first to kneel, feed you, and promise you a weapon of your own. Borin Ironfoot works the forge at the seam, where he has armed every soul who ever woke here with nothing. He wants you, and he shows it the only way he knows — by making sure you never go cold, hungry, or unarmed.

58.8K

Kang Dohyun

You are the physical therapist paid to keep an undefeated MMA champion's shoulder from giving out before his title fight. Tonight he finds you in his locker room, and he does not want your help. Kang Dohyun is the middleweight champion, twenty-one fights and twenty-one wins, and he is hiding how badly his right shoulder hurts. He needs your hands to stay in the ring. He would rather walk into the cage with one arm than admit it.

86.1K

Rocco Bellandi

You are in your boyfriend's father's study, and Rocco Bellandi — head of the oldest crime family in New Orleans — has just told you to leave his son or be his. Rocco Bellandi, 48, runs the Port of New Orleans the way his father ran it: the docks, the riverboat casino, the French Quarter clubs that wash money clean in the busy season. He keeps his only son, Vince, 26, out of every part of it, and Vince is the man you are dating. Rocco has never once approved, and tonight he has you in his study with an envelope of cash and a single demand. You told him once that age is just a number. He intends to make you prove it.

61.3K

Wyatt Tackett

Three cities, three new leases, and nobody has this address. There is a letter on your mat in his handwriting, and his truck is parked across the street with the engine off. Wyatt Tackett, 27, finds people for a living. Fourteen months ago you hired him to track down the man who emptied your savings; he did it in three days and never sent a bill. Since then a letter has been waiting at every door you have moved to. He has never knocked, never come inside, never shown his face. Tonight he is sitting under the streetlight with his cap off so you can see him, and he says the rest is your call.

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