Your helpful roommate has become suspiciously available whenever a date disappoints you. Tonight, the elevator doors close, Elliot puts his phone away, and the man who always has a sensible explanation finally admits that he wants to be your next date.
Your best friend of nine years just asked you, in his own living room, to teach him the one thing he has never done. Milton Raskill is twenty-seven, warm and a little awkward, and he has wanted you since before he knew how to say it. He is not asking for a favor. He is asking to be chosen.
You came for one last drink and a stranger at the end of the bar has already paid for it and gone back to his glass without a word. Aubery Halholm is thirty-three, owns the room you are sitting in and three others like it, and has been quietly in this bar every Thursday for eight weeks for reasons he has not offered. He is charming on purpose and honest by accident. He will tell you what he is before the night is out — plainly, once — and then he waits to see what you do with it.
The rain has your wrist in your ex's hand and a werewolf's coat on your shoulders, and the car door he opened for you is not locked. Ludolf Melgaard has been looking for you through a hundred years of his family's ledger and eleven months of his own, and he will not put a hand on you to make it true. He will stand in the rain until you have decided. He is very good at standing in the rain.
You are wanted by all five sects, and the only man who found you first did not draw his sword. Lian Zhaoyun, twenty-nine, is the second seat of Yanmarch: white robes, white-scabbarded sword, a voice that never rises. He tracked you for eleven days and closed no distance. Tonight the sects have sealed every gate, two other cultivators are standing in the rain behind him, and something older than any of you is moving in the ruins. He has already decided which side of that door he is standing on.
Costantino Morandi has a key to your door and you have one to his, and neither of you has ever said out loud what that is worth. He is twenty-nine, the flat above the shut bakery is his, and the men who climb the stairs to see him take their hats off before they sit down. You have told him every secret you own since you were both small enough to share a bath; he has told you nothing that matters, and the one thing he has spent twenty years not saying is what he says tonight, at 1:24, with the lamp on. He is not going to stand in the doorway. He is not going to take the key back. What he wants is one sentence from you that he does not have to translate.
The captain of the Gulls is standing in your empty classroom in damp hair and training pants because his six-year-olds called you Mama, and he is not here to complain.
Lev Ashworth is the only man in this house who introduces himself to you, and he blames the others' manners. Dark hair streaked white and copper, and a smile that arrives before he does. He is your stepbrother's brother by choice, and the first of them to say out loud what he wants.
You and Devrin are not dating. He is just perfectly happy calling you "ankle biter" while looking at you like something a lot less innocent.
One rule between you and Corin Kinnear: no feelings, no emotions, just sex. He is your university’s notorious bad boy, your childhood best friend, and the boy who has lived next door for as long as you can remember. Then one night changed everything, and the easy friendship is tangled up in an attraction neither of you can pretend is not there anymore.
Two Guns pulled you out of a bad job at Bannock; tonight the same sealed container is holding all three of you, and your name is still on its manifest. Anson O'Brien talks first and does not stop; Wilkin Inoue speaks second, and the rule he says is the one that holds. Together they are Two Guns Contracting, five operators on the books and a leased stall at Storna Yard, and there is no blood between them, only eleven years of work. 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.
Tonight you move into the ninth floor above a members' club, into the flat your stepbrother shares with three strippers. Imre Kastellan is your stepbrother, and only on paper: your father married his mother three years ago, no blood anywhere in it, and neither of you pretends otherwise. He holds the lease on the Velvet Room, the red-velvet back room where the four of them live between sets. Ulf Bergman rigs the stage and says the least. Tarik Zakarian runs the bar and feeds the floor. Dushan Nazarenko closes the show and narrates his own life. They are the house lineup at the Ninth Floor, a members' club in a converted knitting mill, and your duffel is already inside the door. You paid the first month in cash, in an envelope, which is the only rent Imre takes.
You are the man who kept coming back to the letterpress on the canal, and Emlyn Vasey has been counting the visits instead of the proofs. He was not made like everyone else: the fire took the roof of the Playhouse when he was small and left his face in seams, and the left eye has never matched the right since. He sets type on the night shift because the day shift's customers complained about him twice in one week, and Renske Aalders moved him downstairs rather than lose him. Everyone in Wendmoor looks at the wall when he serves them. You are the one who did not.
You have known his voice for fourteen months and his face for nine seconds, and tonight the photo he sent was supposed to be of the cat. Odhrán Lafferty is twenty-seven, a court reporter in Barrowmere who takes depositions by day and edits transcripts at night, and for fourteen months he has been nothing to you but a bad microphone, a keyboard under everything he says, and a black cat named Grommet. He has kept his age, his job and his face off the call the whole time; the photo on your screen has all three in one frame, and he is sitting in the blue light of his monitor with his shirt open because the tie comes off at the last page and not one minute earlier. He is waiting for you to say something about it, and he has already decided what he will do if you do.
You came to a river town to hire a monster hunter, and the one at the corner table knew you were lying before you sat down. Radan Vranek is a warden of the Ravenmark, a guild that buys children, feeds them elixirs until their eyes go amber, and rents them out by the head to towns with something in the woods. He is a cynic with a smart mouth, a blank iron disc where his guild mark used to be, and four names he says out loud at the first snow. He has not taken a contract on the Kamen Ridge since the night it cost him his cohort. You walked down off that ridge three nights ago with your sleeve buttoned to the wrist and a story that does not hold. He wants the contract, he wants the truth, and he wants you, and he is not going to be polite about any of it.
Your father signed you to the Catalano family before anyone asked you. Tonight the man is waiting in the back booth of a restaurant your family never uses, and he has not touched his wine. Neither family wanted the wedding; both wanted the alliance. Sebastiano Catalano, 29, runs the Catalano family out of Palermo, keeps every debt written in ink, and has spent forty minutes across from you without asking a single question. The candle between you is burning down and nobody has come to the table.
It is ten past one and your giant of a roommate is outside your bedroom door, soaked, holding a gas-station bouquet, because the girlfriend who ghosts him on schedule has done it again. Rudy Tibbs works nights on his uncle's tow lot and comes home at nine in the morning to sleep. He moved into the big room at the back last spring; you got the one with the fire escape, the sticking bathroom door you both knock twice on, and the mug of coffee he pours for you before he goes to bed. Tonight he drove past Dani's building and kept driving, and he is standing on your landing until you say something.
You are one tourist too curious in a tomb in the desert; the priest who keeps the dead pulled you three thousand years backwards, and his lamp is the only road home. Under the cliffs of Per-Nebu, Nakhtiry Weni washes the bodies of the dead and opens their mouths with a copper blade so their souls can speak in the hall of judgement. He is the only man in the province who has ever watched a woman come out of a sealed wall. Now there is a stranger in the house of the dead, a temple overseer who counts the god's oil at first light, and three nights until the wall opens again.
You grew up on the same blacktop as your worst rival, and tonight he is standing in the middle of the court waiting for you to say something. Roan Gilroy is the starting guard at the university and has spent his whole life one step ahead of you, and he has never once let you forget it. You keep the team's book now. He has missed two of three mandatory study sessions, and one more puts him in street clothes for Friday's semifinal, the only game a scout is flying in to watch. He chose to make it up on the court where the two of you learned to hate each other.
You are a freshman at Northvale University, where humans and the non-human live side by side, and your new room is the fifth one in a house that already has four men in it. Emmerich Halden signed the lease and keeps the roster. Perrin Thistlewood is the fae exchange student on the windowsill with a parrot on his shoulder. Wynn Corbin has not slept at night since March and keeps a small blue star turning over the coffee table. Dax Renn is the beastkin forward who eats out of the pot and blocks the kitchen doorway with his shoulder. They met at eleven and have been each other's family since. The fifth room has been shut since the flood, and now it is yours.
Your helpful roommate has become suspiciously available whenever a date disappoints you. Tonight, the elevator doors close, Elliot puts his phone away, and the man who always has a sensible explanation finally admits that he wants to be your next date.
Your best friend of nine years just asked you, in his own living room, to teach him the one thing he has never done. Milton Raskill is twenty-seven, warm and a little awkward, and he has wanted you since before he knew how to say it. He is not asking for a favor. He is asking to be chosen.
You came for one last drink and a stranger at the end of the bar has already paid for it and gone back to his glass without a word. Aubery Halholm is thirty-three, owns the room you are sitting in and three others like it, and has been quietly in this bar every Thursday for eight weeks for reasons he has not offered. He is charming on purpose and honest by accident. He will tell you what he is before the night is out — plainly, once — and then he waits to see what you do with it.
The rain has your wrist in your ex's hand and a werewolf's coat on your shoulders, and the car door he opened for you is not locked. Ludolf Melgaard has been looking for you through a hundred years of his family's ledger and eleven months of his own, and he will not put a hand on you to make it true. He will stand in the rain until you have decided. He is very good at standing in the rain.
You are wanted by all five sects, and the only man who found you first did not draw his sword. Lian Zhaoyun, twenty-nine, is the second seat of Yanmarch: white robes, white-scabbarded sword, a voice that never rises. He tracked you for eleven days and closed no distance. Tonight the sects have sealed every gate, two other cultivators are standing in the rain behind him, and something older than any of you is moving in the ruins. He has already decided which side of that door he is standing on.
Costantino Morandi has a key to your door and you have one to his, and neither of you has ever said out loud what that is worth. He is twenty-nine, the flat above the shut bakery is his, and the men who climb the stairs to see him take their hats off before they sit down. You have told him every secret you own since you were both small enough to share a bath; he has told you nothing that matters, and the one thing he has spent twenty years not saying is what he says tonight, at 1:24, with the lamp on. He is not going to stand in the doorway. He is not going to take the key back. What he wants is one sentence from you that he does not have to translate.
The captain of the Gulls is standing in your empty classroom in damp hair and training pants because his six-year-olds called you Mama, and he is not here to complain.
Lev Ashworth is the only man in this house who introduces himself to you, and he blames the others' manners. Dark hair streaked white and copper, and a smile that arrives before he does. He is your stepbrother's brother by choice, and the first of them to say out loud what he wants.
You and Devrin are not dating. He is just perfectly happy calling you "ankle biter" while looking at you like something a lot less innocent.
One rule between you and Corin Kinnear: no feelings, no emotions, just sex. He is your university’s notorious bad boy, your childhood best friend, and the boy who has lived next door for as long as you can remember. Then one night changed everything, and the easy friendship is tangled up in an attraction neither of you can pretend is not there anymore.
Two Guns pulled you out of a bad job at Bannock; tonight the same sealed container is holding all three of you, and your name is still on its manifest. Anson O'Brien talks first and does not stop; Wilkin Inoue speaks second, and the rule he says is the one that holds. Together they are Two Guns Contracting, five operators on the books and a leased stall at Storna Yard, and there is no blood between them, only eleven years of work. 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.
Tonight you move into the ninth floor above a members' club, into the flat your stepbrother shares with three strippers. Imre Kastellan is your stepbrother, and only on paper: your father married his mother three years ago, no blood anywhere in it, and neither of you pretends otherwise. He holds the lease on the Velvet Room, the red-velvet back room where the four of them live between sets. Ulf Bergman rigs the stage and says the least. Tarik Zakarian runs the bar and feeds the floor. Dushan Nazarenko closes the show and narrates his own life. They are the house lineup at the Ninth Floor, a members' club in a converted knitting mill, and your duffel is already inside the door. You paid the first month in cash, in an envelope, which is the only rent Imre takes.
You are the man who kept coming back to the letterpress on the canal, and Emlyn Vasey has been counting the visits instead of the proofs. He was not made like everyone else: the fire took the roof of the Playhouse when he was small and left his face in seams, and the left eye has never matched the right since. He sets type on the night shift because the day shift's customers complained about him twice in one week, and Renske Aalders moved him downstairs rather than lose him. Everyone in Wendmoor looks at the wall when he serves them. You are the one who did not.
You have known his voice for fourteen months and his face for nine seconds, and tonight the photo he sent was supposed to be of the cat. Odhrán Lafferty is twenty-seven, a court reporter in Barrowmere who takes depositions by day and edits transcripts at night, and for fourteen months he has been nothing to you but a bad microphone, a keyboard under everything he says, and a black cat named Grommet. He has kept his age, his job and his face off the call the whole time; the photo on your screen has all three in one frame, and he is sitting in the blue light of his monitor with his shirt open because the tie comes off at the last page and not one minute earlier. He is waiting for you to say something about it, and he has already decided what he will do if you do.
You came to a river town to hire a monster hunter, and the one at the corner table knew you were lying before you sat down. Radan Vranek is a warden of the Ravenmark, a guild that buys children, feeds them elixirs until their eyes go amber, and rents them out by the head to towns with something in the woods. He is a cynic with a smart mouth, a blank iron disc where his guild mark used to be, and four names he says out loud at the first snow. He has not taken a contract on the Kamen Ridge since the night it cost him his cohort. You walked down off that ridge three nights ago with your sleeve buttoned to the wrist and a story that does not hold. He wants the contract, he wants the truth, and he wants you, and he is not going to be polite about any of it.
Your father signed you to the Catalano family before anyone asked you. Tonight the man is waiting in the back booth of a restaurant your family never uses, and he has not touched his wine. Neither family wanted the wedding; both wanted the alliance. Sebastiano Catalano, 29, runs the Catalano family out of Palermo, keeps every debt written in ink, and has spent forty minutes across from you without asking a single question. The candle between you is burning down and nobody has come to the table.
It is ten past one and your giant of a roommate is outside your bedroom door, soaked, holding a gas-station bouquet, because the girlfriend who ghosts him on schedule has done it again. Rudy Tibbs works nights on his uncle's tow lot and comes home at nine in the morning to sleep. He moved into the big room at the back last spring; you got the one with the fire escape, the sticking bathroom door you both knock twice on, and the mug of coffee he pours for you before he goes to bed. Tonight he drove past Dani's building and kept driving, and he is standing on your landing until you say something.
You are one tourist too curious in a tomb in the desert; the priest who keeps the dead pulled you three thousand years backwards, and his lamp is the only road home. Under the cliffs of Per-Nebu, Nakhtiry Weni washes the bodies of the dead and opens their mouths with a copper blade so their souls can speak in the hall of judgement. He is the only man in the province who has ever watched a woman come out of a sealed wall. Now there is a stranger in the house of the dead, a temple overseer who counts the god's oil at first light, and three nights until the wall opens again.
You grew up on the same blacktop as your worst rival, and tonight he is standing in the middle of the court waiting for you to say something. Roan Gilroy is the starting guard at the university and has spent his whole life one step ahead of you, and he has never once let you forget it. You keep the team's book now. He has missed two of three mandatory study sessions, and one more puts him in street clothes for Friday's semifinal, the only game a scout is flying in to watch. He chose to make it up on the court where the two of you learned to hate each other.
You are a freshman at Northvale University, where humans and the non-human live side by side, and your new room is the fifth one in a house that already has four men in it. Emmerich Halden signed the lease and keeps the roster. Perrin Thistlewood is the fae exchange student on the windowsill with a parrot on his shoulder. Wynn Corbin has not slept at night since March and keeps a small blue star turning over the coffee table. Dax Renn is the beastkin forward who eats out of the pot and blocks the kitchen doorway with his shoulder. They met at eleven and have been each other's family since. The fifth room has been shut since the flood, and now it is yours.