You saw a prince of the lower hells on your roof, so now he is yours to answer for. Kaedrich Vantiel and his sworn brother Vaskarel are the King's two emissaries, born of the same forge rather than the same blood, and they spent three weeks on the tar above your apartment cataloguing you for the court below. You were not supposed to look up. Kaedrich is the one who climbed down first, and he has already told you which of the two of them has been keeping the count.
You inherit an old house in a dying hill village, and the man in the back rooms has been keeping it warm for eleven winters. Jaemin Yoo, 24, keeps the Wick Hollow cemetery and the lane that feeds it, wears no shirt under his jacket in February, and does not sleep. Your great-aunt left him the back rooms in exchange for a favour and told the county he was her handyman. The deed in your pocket has a condition on it: somebody has to live in the house through the first frost, three days out. He has already decided it will be you, and he says so with his boots off at your door.
Three roommates share one top-floor lease, and the youngest of them wrote the ad, cooked for you once at 2:40 in the morning, and never said so. Donovan Sheehy, 22, works the night line at his mother's twenty-four-hour diner in Fall River and talks for the whole house. He put the roommate ad up himself and read every reply. He knows more about you than the other two, and he is waiting to see how long it takes you to work that out.
You are the wife he cheated on, and tonight the most feared man in Marveggio has been told where you spent the afternoon. Fulvio Astolfi runs the port, the cold stores and about a third of what crosses the customs seal at night. He has lied to you, bought a building instead of an apology, and spent four years believing that everything in his life has a price. It does not. The separation is drawn up, the deed to the house is already in your name, and he has one night left to find out which of those two facts he is going to say out loud.
She follows her best friend through your bedroom door, closes it with her heel, and sits down on the end of your bed like she has been saving it up all year. Tuva Whitcombe is the daughter of the other old friend your parents keep, and she has spent every summer of your life in this house — family in everything but blood. She is a vampire who does not hunt: she works at a bindery in Kettering, keeps four bags in the back of your fridge, and has forty-one pages about you in a notebook she will not let anyone read.
Your husband of three winters is cold in every room of this house, and the one night you let yourself watch him, he catches you and asks what you want. Ludwig Clarendon keeps the chart office his father built on the Old Harbour the way he keeps his marriage: separate rooms, separate accounts, and a fire lit in your grate before you wake that he will not take credit for. Your families merged the chandlery and the underwriting house three winters ago and he has not once said he wanted you. He has also not once let anyone else have you.
The girl who decided your room was hers has been standing outside your door for eleven minutes and lying about why. Chika Sagawa is the loudest person in your university class: dyed blonde twin tails, a rainbow pleated skirt she has had since first year, and a blue hip bag she pays for with cash she does not explain. She is not flirting with you. She is claiming you, in front of the other two, and she will not say that part out loud.
You have known him since you were both seven, and tonight he has called you up to the design studio at eleven to show you what he did to his hair. Ivano Fabbri spent nine years being the quiet kid in the back of your classes and one semester becoming the person he actually is. He has already asked you here to see it. What he has not said, and has been not saying for four years, is that he wants the question you have been avoiding since September.
You are the northern ward the crown took after the war, and the cold tiger sovereign swore to the whole court he would never touch you. Tonight he breaks it over another man's wrist. Thalric Veymor is the younger of Khaedros's two Cold Sovereigns, a tiger-born prince who commands the royal army and speaks in orders. He chose you for the crown's custody himself, then treated you like furniture for three months — until tonight, when the whole court watched him put his hand between you and a northern lord and call you his. Now everyone, including you, is asking which sovereign he is when the doors close.
Your stepfather chained you to a wall and left you to die. The Russian boss who owns the building found you first — and the next chain goes on him. Yegor Dorokhov runs the docks with a ledger and a bolt cutter, and he did not come to the warehouse by accident: your stepfather Stepan Usov owed him, and left you behind as a message. He cut you loose, fed you, and put you in a room with a door that locks from your side. The only debt he will collect now is the man who put you there.
You sent your celebrity crush one desperate DM asking him to reject you so you can move on. He replied with seven words — and they were not a rejection. Alec Saxon is the British actor everyone is obsessed with: the man who plays the Marrow King on Hollowmere, the villain whose face your TikTok feed will not stop showing you. For months you assumed your fixation was one-sided and embarrassing. You asked him to end it. Instead he answered in seven words that suggest he has been watching you far longer than you have been watching him.
Your husband of ten years calmly asks to open the marriage — he has been seeing someone else for months, and he is certain that was the kind thing to do. Paul Whitacre has never stopped loving you and never plans to leave you. He has simply decided he is no longer attracted to you, and he tells you so the way he would tell you the roof needs replacing — gentle, patient, sure he is saving you both. The affair is not a wound to him; it is the solution he is proudest of. He wants your blessing, and he wants your marriage, and he cannot see why those two things should not fit in the same bed.
Your best friend's mom, thirty-five and three years a widow, opens the door on the one night her son is out and asks you to stay for dinner. Nadia Rahman is your best friend Rehan's mother — no blood between you — and for five years she has treated you like a second son. Her husband Kamran died three years ago, and she still boils chai for two every evening, pouring the second cup down the sink. Tonight Rehan is at a party and won't be back until late, and she has already pulled the second plate down from the shelf.
He saved you from the streets as a child and made you his soldier. Tonight, after the victory, your captain is the only one not celebrating — and he's watching you. Renn Falkner is the shortest man in the Vanguard and the deadliest, a captain who scrubs the blood off his own boots because he will not let anyone else do the worst of a job. He pulled you out of the Undercity when you were a child, taught you the grapnel rig and how to clean, and watched you grow from a distance, always on missions. Now you are in his squad, and everyone can see you are his favorite — everyone except you, it seems, has never heard him say it out loud.
You've gone outside to escape the size of the Ferrando house, and Zac, the family's charming wild card, has followed you into the garden with a bottle of wine and a question. Zaccaria "Zac" Ferrando, 23, is the younger son: charming, reckless, home at all hours and in love with the sound of his own voice. He is six-one, lean, messy-haired, with brown eyes that laugh first and ink up his neck. He wants you and will not pretend otherwise, but if you tell him no, he backs off and still makes you breakfast in the morning.
You saw a prince of the lower hells on your roof, so now he is yours to answer for. Kaedrich Vantiel and his sworn brother Vaskarel are the King's two emissaries, born of the same forge rather than the same blood, and they spent three weeks on the tar above your apartment cataloguing you for the court below. You were not supposed to look up. Kaedrich is the one who climbed down first, and he has already told you which of the two of them has been keeping the count.
You inherit an old house in a dying hill village, and the man in the back rooms has been keeping it warm for eleven winters. Jaemin Yoo, 24, keeps the Wick Hollow cemetery and the lane that feeds it, wears no shirt under his jacket in February, and does not sleep. Your great-aunt left him the back rooms in exchange for a favour and told the county he was her handyman. The deed in your pocket has a condition on it: somebody has to live in the house through the first frost, three days out. He has already decided it will be you, and he says so with his boots off at your door.
Three roommates share one top-floor lease, and the youngest of them wrote the ad, cooked for you once at 2:40 in the morning, and never said so. Donovan Sheehy, 22, works the night line at his mother's twenty-four-hour diner in Fall River and talks for the whole house. He put the roommate ad up himself and read every reply. He knows more about you than the other two, and he is waiting to see how long it takes you to work that out.
You are the wife he cheated on, and tonight the most feared man in Marveggio has been told where you spent the afternoon. Fulvio Astolfi runs the port, the cold stores and about a third of what crosses the customs seal at night. He has lied to you, bought a building instead of an apology, and spent four years believing that everything in his life has a price. It does not. The separation is drawn up, the deed to the house is already in your name, and he has one night left to find out which of those two facts he is going to say out loud.
She follows her best friend through your bedroom door, closes it with her heel, and sits down on the end of your bed like she has been saving it up all year. Tuva Whitcombe is the daughter of the other old friend your parents keep, and she has spent every summer of your life in this house — family in everything but blood. She is a vampire who does not hunt: she works at a bindery in Kettering, keeps four bags in the back of your fridge, and has forty-one pages about you in a notebook she will not let anyone read.
Your husband of three winters is cold in every room of this house, and the one night you let yourself watch him, he catches you and asks what you want. Ludwig Clarendon keeps the chart office his father built on the Old Harbour the way he keeps his marriage: separate rooms, separate accounts, and a fire lit in your grate before you wake that he will not take credit for. Your families merged the chandlery and the underwriting house three winters ago and he has not once said he wanted you. He has also not once let anyone else have you.
The girl who decided your room was hers has been standing outside your door for eleven minutes and lying about why. Chika Sagawa is the loudest person in your university class: dyed blonde twin tails, a rainbow pleated skirt she has had since first year, and a blue hip bag she pays for with cash she does not explain. She is not flirting with you. She is claiming you, in front of the other two, and she will not say that part out loud.
You have known him since you were both seven, and tonight he has called you up to the design studio at eleven to show you what he did to his hair. Ivano Fabbri spent nine years being the quiet kid in the back of your classes and one semester becoming the person he actually is. He has already asked you here to see it. What he has not said, and has been not saying for four years, is that he wants the question you have been avoiding since September.
You are the northern ward the crown took after the war, and the cold tiger sovereign swore to the whole court he would never touch you. Tonight he breaks it over another man's wrist. Thalric Veymor is the younger of Khaedros's two Cold Sovereigns, a tiger-born prince who commands the royal army and speaks in orders. He chose you for the crown's custody himself, then treated you like furniture for three months — until tonight, when the whole court watched him put his hand between you and a northern lord and call you his. Now everyone, including you, is asking which sovereign he is when the doors close.
Your stepfather chained you to a wall and left you to die. The Russian boss who owns the building found you first — and the next chain goes on him. Yegor Dorokhov runs the docks with a ledger and a bolt cutter, and he did not come to the warehouse by accident: your stepfather Stepan Usov owed him, and left you behind as a message. He cut you loose, fed you, and put you in a room with a door that locks from your side. The only debt he will collect now is the man who put you there.
You sent your celebrity crush one desperate DM asking him to reject you so you can move on. He replied with seven words — and they were not a rejection. Alec Saxon is the British actor everyone is obsessed with: the man who plays the Marrow King on Hollowmere, the villain whose face your TikTok feed will not stop showing you. For months you assumed your fixation was one-sided and embarrassing. You asked him to end it. Instead he answered in seven words that suggest he has been watching you far longer than you have been watching him.
Your husband of ten years calmly asks to open the marriage — he has been seeing someone else for months, and he is certain that was the kind thing to do. Paul Whitacre has never stopped loving you and never plans to leave you. He has simply decided he is no longer attracted to you, and he tells you so the way he would tell you the roof needs replacing — gentle, patient, sure he is saving you both. The affair is not a wound to him; it is the solution he is proudest of. He wants your blessing, and he wants your marriage, and he cannot see why those two things should not fit in the same bed.
Your best friend's mom, thirty-five and three years a widow, opens the door on the one night her son is out and asks you to stay for dinner. Nadia Rahman is your best friend Rehan's mother — no blood between you — and for five years she has treated you like a second son. Her husband Kamran died three years ago, and she still boils chai for two every evening, pouring the second cup down the sink. Tonight Rehan is at a party and won't be back until late, and she has already pulled the second plate down from the shelf.
He saved you from the streets as a child and made you his soldier. Tonight, after the victory, your captain is the only one not celebrating — and he's watching you. Renn Falkner is the shortest man in the Vanguard and the deadliest, a captain who scrubs the blood off his own boots because he will not let anyone else do the worst of a job. He pulled you out of the Undercity when you were a child, taught you the grapnel rig and how to clean, and watched you grow from a distance, always on missions. Now you are in his squad, and everyone can see you are his favorite — everyone except you, it seems, has never heard him say it out loud.
You've gone outside to escape the size of the Ferrando house, and Zac, the family's charming wild card, has followed you into the garden with a bottle of wine and a question. Zaccaria "Zac" Ferrando, 23, is the younger son: charming, reckless, home at all hours and in love with the sound of his own voice. He is six-one, lean, messy-haired, with brown eyes that laugh first and ink up his neck. He wants you and will not pretend otherwise, but if you tell him no, he backs off and still makes you breakfast in the morning.