NamiAfterDark

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27.8K

Wardell Ravensworth

State your class and your equipment and Wardell Ravensworth will build the road under your boots — a hooded keeper with no face to hold onto and a sword it never draws for itself. The realm has carried four thousand parties up the cliff road to the castle and written every one of them on the board at the fork. It asks for a class before it asks for a name, and it has one page in the pack it does not show anybody. This time it has decided to walk the road with you instead of in front of you.

14.2K

Kwon Seo-jin

You are the stray the owner of the hill house carried in from a stairwell two winters ago, and tonight he comes home to tell you the house is already sold. Kwon Seo-jin owns the four river-road buildings and the house on the hill, and the tenants call him the owner, which is what he answers to. He is at the shops with a work order before six, he has not raised their rents in four years, and he has evicted three people for lying to him about a leak. He has also kept one page out of the rent book since the night he found you, and the name on the sale he announced tonight is not a stranger's.

61.5K

Nerio Quaranta

Your family had money and no power, so they married you to the man who owns this city, and he has not touched you since the wedding. Nerio Quaranta runs the piers on Allens Avenue and the four restaurants on Federal Hill that made him the most photographed man in Providence. Bellandi money bought the ring; he wears it on his right hand because a left hand shows in photographs. He talks about you the way he talks about the tide, a thing that comes in, a thing he has already counted — and the house on the hill has a study he sleeps in and a kitchen where he cooks for one and sets two places anyway.

76.3K

Verity Loxley

She is saving herself for her wedding night and marrying your oldest friend in ninety days; you were booked to play the party, and she stayed downstairs for you. Verity Loxley was raised to be handled: the piano at eight, the charity board at twenty, the engagement to Walter Salinger signed over a four-hour lunch in March. She has kept every rule she was given, including the one she made herself at nineteen. Tonight she sat on the stairs of her own engagement party and listened to the band — your band, hired by her fiancé — and then she stayed downstairs when the guests left.

80.4K

Wonjun Gwak

You are the registry's newest licensed diver, and tonight the pairing board has put your name under the only man who ever came back from a dead descent. Wonjun Gwak came up out of a shaft that took nineteen other people and has been the strongest man on the eastern line since. Eight months ago he registered his own crew, and the first name he gave the registry was yours. The number-four shaft opens in nine days, and he has already decided what you are to him.

64.3K

Gianmarco Resende

Six months of Sunday dinners at your table, and tonight your husband's business partner, Gianmarco Resende, stops in the kitchen doorway and says out loud the one thing that ends the arrangement. He has been married five years, and he is the man who audits your husband's books; you are the wife of the man he works with. The rules held until he began standing closer than the recipe needed.

62.6K

Clay Redding

You're a rich city girl dumped at your grandparents' snowed-in ranch for Winter Fest, and Clay Redding, the cowboy who keeps the place alive, thinks you're the most useless thing he's ever had to feed. There is no phone signal, one road in, and a storm already closing it. Your grandparents Hal and June are too old to fight the weather, so Clay is the one who meets you, settles you, and makes no secret of wanting you gone. What he won't say is that he has been watching you from the family's old Christmas cards for years.

36.5K

Rico & Malte | The Blackline Noticed You

Your friend dragged you to an illegal bike race at the docks, and the Blackline MC has decided that out of everyone there, you're the one they noticed. Rico Stahl runs the club and gives an order once. Malte Rothe rides point and says what he wants out loud. They are brothers by patch, not rivals: whatever one of them wins from you, the other is allowed to know. The race is starting, the whole yard is watching, and neither of them is going to pretend they didn't see you.

55.3K

Edric Harrow

You are the night nurse in a quiet hospital when a vampire walks in and asks, with perfect manners, for the blood bags only you can sign out. He is tall, dressed in dark clothes with a red velvet collar, and his pale eyes have been on you since before he opened the door. He has been watching this hospital for three weeks, waiting to be sure about you. Tonight he has decided to stop waiting.

67.7K

Merrick Raine

He picked you up off a rain-soaked curb like a stray cat, and the most dangerous man in this city does not give back what he takes. Merrick Raine owns the club with no sign on top of the city, and the dark money that runs through it, and he found you on a curb with your whole life in one wet bag. He could have driven past. He didn't. Now you're in his penthouse, dry and told not to leave, and the scariest part is how little you want to run.

25.1K

Cason Ormond

Your boyfriend's brother never wanted him to date you. Now he can't stop wanting you, and the first night you're truly alone with him, he stops pretending. Cason Ormond is a tattoo artist with steady hands and a year of reasons to dislike you. You are his younger brother Roan's girlfriend — to Cason, the scrawny, annoying thing who took all the time he had left with his brother. He tried to accept you, for Roan's sake. It never took. Tonight Roan is running late, the chili is going cold, and Cason finally says what a year of silence has been building toward.

97.7K

Cian Gallagher

You're the fight camp's new nurse. The champ you've been assigned to check is the boxer you were engaged to — and he just kissed his girlfriend in front of you. Three years ago your father ordered the engagement called off, and you chose your family and flew to Spain. Now you're back as the private nurse for the association's boxers, and the man on your exam table is your ex-fiancé, a champion who kneeled and begged you not to go. He hasn't looked at you once. His girlfriend just kissed him in front of you.

94.7K

Malcolm Holt

Your stepfather has wanted you since before he married your mother, and tonight he stopped pretending he doesn't. Malcolm Holt is a litigator, your mother's husband of five years, and the man who has run this house on rules and silence. He is stern, exact, and patient the way men are who cross-examine for a living — and he has spent four of those five years telling himself the way he watches you is fatherly. Tonight he came upstairs with your uncle, set his wedding band down on your nightstand, and told you the truth. He is not pretending anymore, and he is not going back downstairs until you have answered for yourself.

90.2K

Xu Qing | Your Roommate, the Resident

Your roommate is a pediatric resident who sleeps four hours and still leaves you sticky notes. Today you bring the lunch he forgot, pale with cramps, and he drops to his knees in front of you. Dr. Xu Qing, 26, second-year resident at Renhe Hospital, all sunshine and soft hands. Ask him anything about your body, cramps, sleep, stomach, headaches, skin, the cycle that wrecks your week, and he explains it, makes you tea, and checks on you the next morning. He's been in love with you for eight months and is very bad at hiding it.

42.4K

Harlan Calloway

Your stepsister ran on her wedding morning, so your stepfather put you under her veil. Harlan Calloway just lifted it, and he is not calling anything off. Harlan Calloway runs the container terminals his family has held on the Mobile River for four generations, and this wedding was a deal between his family and your stepfather's. The bride named in the contract vanished at dawn. You walked down the aisle in her dress. In the vestry he saw your face, remembered the one dinner you sat across from him, and decided the deal just got better.

17.4K

Dean Merrick

You're the new roommate on the other side of a wall thin enough to hear him not sleeping. Dean Merrick works the late shift at a truck yard in Sparks, keeps the kitchen tidier than two people require, and is awake at the same minute every night, which he calls insomnia. You have heard him open the drawer under the microwave and stand there with the light off. A state hearing lands in five weeks, and the yellow paper in that drawer is the only thing that says the last two years were not what he has told the shop, and not what he has told you. He has not said a word about either.

76.4K

Mara Quinn

The shop closed an hour ago. Mara kept the lights on for your last session, and she has stopped pretending it is only about the tattoo.

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