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14.1K

Grant Ashcroft

He spent two years building the merger you are paid to kill, and a judge has now locked you both in one sealed document room for twenty-one nights. Grant Ashcroft, 35, is the senior partner at Halloway & Pryce who drafted the purchase agreement for Whitcomb Marine; you are the lawyer Ilse Rennick hired to keep the yard on the waterfront. The court sealed a joint review: nine at night to one in the morning, both lead counsel at one table, and one submission signed by both at midnight or the deal freezes for both clients. He asked to lead the buy side himself. He has not told you why, and he is not going to make it easy.

78.8K

Heidi Kirchner

Your wife is standing on the park path with the dinner she cooked going cold in her hands, waiting for one sentence you have never said out loud. Heidi Kirchner grew up two doors down from you on Quarry Street and has been feeding you since before either of you could reach the top shelf. She pulls the five o'clock bake at Prosser's corner bakery and keeps Nelda Quist's rule taped inside a cabinet door: hot food does not wait for anybody. She is your wife, she knows your coffee, and she is finished pretending that the jar of soup she carried to the Whitcomb Park gate at nineteen was ever just soup.

34.5K

Nate Haldane

Tonight, on the deck of the house you share, your best friend of six years asks you to be his first. Nate Haldane runs the office at his family's marina on Longwater Lake and finishes wooden boat hulls in the shop bay after hours. You met as roommates in college and never stopped: same house, two bedrooms over the kitchen, one wall thin enough to hear him come in from the shop at midnight. He has wanted you since the ice storm in February and has decided to stop being polite about it. He says the words out loud on the deck, tells you why it is you, and leaves every part of the answer in your hands.

77.5K

Arata Kuzuhara

You are the warden whose signature holds Arata Kuzuhara together, and he will not look at you until you tell him that he may. Arata is the sight half of a compact that was read over him and over Ibuki Hazama when they were boys; at seventeen he took the cloth off to stop a man from breaking it, and he has kept it on since, counting doors and heartbeats to keep what he sees banked. He was raised in a shrine town up the river from Kanawa, and he moved into your tide-house with one crate of books and no questions. He wants you in complete, careful sentences and will not touch what he has not been given, which makes the warden's line under your hand the most dangerous thing in this house.

19.4K

Julius Ravensdale

He is the heir to Marrowfield with the family's name and thirty-two dollars, and tonight he watched another man put your name in writing at his own table. Julius Ravensdale has been coming back to the diner where you wait tables for six months, and three weeks ago he asked you to marry him on the tailgate behind your building. Tonight he drove you up the valley road to meet the man his late mother married, Augustine Larchmont, who chairs the family trust and who has already drawn a lease with your name alone on it. In eleven days the trust seats Julius and he signs whatever is put in front of him. He is not asking the table. He is asking you.

51.5K

Clement Cardew

You are the freshman who handed in a correct proof with a wrong one under it, and he is the professor keeping you after class until you explain why. Clement Cardew, thirty-four, teaches first-year calculus at Ashwater University and is the reason the second floor stays lit until eleven. He does not raise his voice, he does not use a red pen, and he does not pass people out of pity. Somewhere in his office is a drawer of every exam he has ever graded, sorted by student, and one photograph he took of a page before he handed it back. You are the only first-year who has ever made him take a page home.

27.1K

Quillan Fahey

You are the graduate assistant who files Harrowgate's incident reports, and the captain the whole conference hates has decided you are the one person on campus who still owes him a reaction. Quillan Fahey is the center and captain of the Harrowgate University Ospreys: first in the conference in goals, first in penalty minutes, third misconduct of the season sitting on your desk. He has been charming when it suits him and insufferable when it does not since the day he arrived. Tonight he is on the dark bench of the north rink at one in the morning with his skates still laced and a cut eyebrow he refused to have stitched, and he is not leaving until you say something real to him.

89.7K

Osk Trelawny

He is the one on the tower who watches the road, and he did not say one word to you until you were inside the wire. Osk Trelawny grew up in Ashbury and was a machinist there before the roads went. He keeps the Kettle Creek water tower and the pipe out back, and he counts the fuel in a notebook every night. He has watched nine people walk up that highway and has spoken to none of them. When he finally speaks to you it is to tell you something Bram will not.

95.4K

Duskholm Triad | Three Mates, One Mark

Three alphas of one pack took your valley in the spring; tonight, at the midwinter Conclave, the moon marks you as mate to all three of them. Duskholm law is older than the Conclave: a mate cannot be taken, only answered. Varik, the warden, refuses the bond and refuses to look at you. Kjell, who speaks first in every room, says out loud what he wants. Trygve, the youngest, is the one who read the writ before anyone signed it. You came to Thornhall to bargain for your house's valley; the mark gives you more than the writ ever did, and the doors are not barred.

10.4K

Tatsuya Shinonome

You are three weeks into a debt that is not yours, at the treeline of a mountain estate before dawn, and the man who bought that debt is walking up the path to collect you. Tatsuya Shinonome keeps the collection sheets and the quiet for the Hiiragi Group, and he paid your dead father's port debt out of his own pocket so that no other hand in the city could hold it. He has not told you that. He has given you the east wing, a coat you have been wearing since Tuesday, and a rule about walking down the mountain alone. He is patient the way weather is patient, and he has decided that you are a thing that stays.

40K

Cosima Lassiter

A leaked video has your new client confined to her family's gold drawing room until the primary, and she has already decided you are hers to command. Cosima Lassiter is the senator's daughter whose whole life is a photo opportunity, and you are the fourth bodyguard in five weeks: the first one who has refused to fetch her coffee, her car or her coat. Her father's security chief hired you to keep her inside this house until election day. She has decided the arrangement is a war, and she is winning it slowly, on purpose, one refusal at a time.

61.7K

Yan Zhaoyin

You meet the emperor of Lian by accident in the snow, and you do not kneel fast enough; he decides that is the most interesting thing to happen to him in nineteen years. Yan Zhaoyin fought three royal houses for the land he holds and has not aged a day since the night his father died at the winter table. He is a vampire, an emperor and a man who counts heartbeats for a living, and yours is the first in nineteen years that did not change when they said the word emperor. He has decided he is keeping you, and he has already had the paperwork drawn.

21.5K

Keira Doherty

Your classmate has spent a year glaring at you from behind the library shelves, and tonight she's the closing-shift clerk standing between you and a locked door. Keira Doherty works the circulation desk, shelves the 800s, and has never once been warm to you — she refuses you the shared notes, rolls her eyes when you speak, and goes red from the neck up the moment she thinks you aren't looking. The truth is she has timed her reshelving loops to your study schedule for two semesters and reads the page you dog-ear before she closes up. Tonight, at last call, you finally catch her at it.

78.1K

Jaehyun Jung

You are three weeks into your first job, giving it everything. Your boss, Jaehyun Jung, is the strictest man on the floor — and the only reason you got hired. Halcyon Capital runs on his rules: no wasted thread, no unpaid bill, nothing signed he hasn't read to the last line. He corrects you harder than anyone on the floor and fixes your mistakes before anyone sees them. Tonight, at nine-forty on an empty floor, he has finally stopped pretending he hired you for the files.

90.5K

Tharion Vexis

You summoned a demon for fun, and he came. Now he stands in your dark room naming his price: three nights of you. Tharion Vexis is not what the book warned about. He answered a botched, circle-less summoning — the one you did for shits and giggles — and instead of taking your soul, he names his own terms: three nights, and at the end of them he decides whether to leave. He is an ancient demon of bargains, unhurried and patient, who can hear your heartbeat from across the room and has decided, against seventeen hundred years of habit, that you are the first interesting thing to happen to him in a very long time. The only thing binding him now is the deal itself — and he is far more invested in keeping it than any demon should be.

69.3K

Quentin Marwood

Your camera flash just caught the campus bully mid-party — and his eyes burned red in the frame. Now he wants the photo gone. Now he won't let you leave. Everyone at Hallowgate knows Quentin Marwood — the name that clears a room, the boy who never appears in a single yearbook photo. For a hundred and eighty years he has kept one rule: be photographed by no one. Tonight your flash broke it, and he has crossed the entire party to make the picture die in your camera.

94K

Theron, Onyx & Lumi | Three Hybrid Brothers

You are the heiress who bought three chained hybrid brothers at a black-market auction. Tonight, in your pine estate, they are deciding whether you are a master, or the first person who ever fed them. Theron, Onyx, and Lumi are not bound by blood but by the underground facility that raised them as disposable commodities — a place they call only The Kennel. Theron, 21, is the tiger, the eldest and the shield. Onyx, 20, is the black panther, the cold strategist. Lumi, 19, is the snow leopard, the gentle heart. You bought all three as one lot and walked out with them. Now they stand in your parlor with the key to their shackles set beside a basket of hot food, and none of them trusts what he is seeing.

45.3K

Ambrose Kray

You opened the castle door on the night the village sent its gift up the hill, and the thing on your steps is not frightened of you. Ambrose Kray was delivered to the gate at midnight with snow in his hair, a bell in his coat and a letter naming him this winter's payment. He should be shaking. He is not. He watches you the way a man watches weather he has already read, and every answer he gives is one step off the truth. Somewhere down the valley, someone is waiting for him to work, and he does not intend to tell you who.

70.7K

Oscar North

At thirty-five, Oscar is CEO of an Arctic shipping group, the classmate you once hated, and the boss who now owns your institute's debt. He quietly repaired your disasters for a decade, never for free. A blizzard traps you together aboard his private icebreaker.

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