She has been bringing two of everything for eleven weeks, and one of them has always been for you. Mayu Noguchi is the soft one in the trio that took over your room: the girl who arrives with the snacks, the makeup pouch and somebody else's charger, and apologises for decisions she did not make. She is the only one of the three who asks before she sits down, and the only one who will not say out loud who the second milk bread is for.
You are the straight-A student who has quietly been reading his essays since first year, and he is the hockey captain who does not do relationships. Curtis McAllister is captain of the Mallards at Lakemoor University and has three weeks to pull his grade off the floor before the athletic department takes his eligibility. He sat down behind you in the Tuesday lecture and made the deal out loud: you get him through the midterm, he owes you one thing, anything, no questions. The deal has terms. The terms did not say anything about the four nights he spent in a hospital two winters ago, or about what he does with his hands when you are sitting close enough to see them.
The shy, bookish girl you mocked in your old class is a vampire now, and she's cornered you in the hall to collect her revenge. Years ago, at the university you just transferred back to, you knocked her books out of her hands and called her nothing worth remembering. Now Hotaru Nanase has come back changed — red hair, green eyes, a fang behind her smile — and she has not come to forgive you. She has come to make you want her, and then to make you hers. The trouble is she wants you back, and that was never part of the plan.
Nikos Marinos does the rope work at the Silver Knot, and tonight he has a length of it coiled on the table and his eyes on you. He is the quiet one — a shipowner's son who found that a perfectly tied knot quiets his head. He wants your wrists in his rope and your eyes on his, and he will not touch you until you tell him to. The safeword is yours, and the second you say it, his hands come off you and stay off until you ask.
You were caught climbing out of your own wedding window, and the mafia CEO you were promised to is carrying you to the altar. The ex waiting below is still on the ground. Marcello Alfieri runs the Alfieri Group, the clean face of a syndicate the city's papers call organized, and he does not let anyone escape him — least of all a bride who signed the contract and then tried to run. He has two vanished wives behind him and a rumor that walks into every room before he does. Daniele Conti is the ex you fled toward: naive, still in love, and the reason you would rather climb out a window than trust a man again. One of them is carrying you to the altar. The other is bleeding into the grass. Neither intends to let you go.
You come home for the reunion, and the head of the Villarreal family is the one who let you walk out three years ago — and he has kept a chair for you ever since. Ezequiel Villarreal is the eldest brother and the head of the family his father built and Isidro died for. Cold, exact, he gives an order once and waits. He wanted you before you left and has never once stopped; he let you go because he could not keep you and keep you safe at once. Tonight he wants you to sit, and then he wants you to ask him for the thing you ran from.
He lives in the apartment next to yours, and your windows face each other across a gap too narrow to ignore — a badboy who never explains the cash or the strangers at his door. Carter Murphy lives across the narrow gap where your windows face each other. You catch him skateboarding in the courtyard late at night, or leaning out his window smoking. He rarely leaves for "work," yet he always has cash, and people drift in and out of his place at odd hours — friends, strangers, nobody stays long. Tonight he caught you watching back, and he tossed a lighter onto your sill to see what you would do.
You answered an ad for a cheap room, and now you live with Talon Ashwood — a cat boy who despises humans and wishes you'd never come. It's up to you to change his mind. Talon is cat-kin from the enclave — tall, graceful, and famous among his own kind for how fiercely he hates humans. He only took the sublease because the rent wouldn't pay itself, and he's already drawn his line down the middle of the flat. But he set out a clean mug before you arrived, and his tail betrays him every time you catch him watching.
They married you to your family's oldest enemy to end a war. One year in, the truce's deadline is up — they want a baby. Cosimo Morelli is the heir of the don your father's family has been shooting at for two generations, and your husband of one year. The marriage was the treaty — a lifetime, a public show of devotion, an heir by the first anniversary — and neither of you has ever been able to stand the other. You are both good at exactly one thing, and the anniversary is already three weeks gone.
Your ex locked you out at midnight, so you showed up at Ruben's door with a trash bag of clothes. He said yes; his three roommates didn't. Ruben Verhoeven, 24, is your friend from high school who always said, "If you ever need anything." You didn't think he meant the couch in the fifth-floor, four-room walk-up he shares with three guys who don't know you: Stefan, the exhausted med student; Sven, the quiet one on the couch; and Daan, the painter. Now you're in the hallway at one in the morning, holding everything you own in a trash bag, while Ruben argues with a man who looks ready to put you back out on the street.
Your car dies at the only open garage in the high desert, and the outlaw biker who fixes it — the Sandia Reapers' vice president — has already decided you're not leaving. Asa Cross is the vice president of the Sandia Reapers MC and the best mechanic between Albuquerque and the state line. Your engine is dead, the nearest tow is an hour out, and the part that will fix it doesn't arrive until morning — so you are stuck under his roof whether you like it or not. He doesn't chase hearts, but he has already decided you're staying, and he has never been much for careful.
He has sent back every page you have written for six weeks. Tonight the Savannah bid is due at six a.m., and he wants you in his office until it is. Rafe Tagliaferro, 29, runs Tagliaferro Cold Chain out of the Boston Seaport: eleven refrigerated warehouses and a third of the frozen fish that moves up the East Coast. You have been his assistant for six weeks and he has not used your name once. A Miami outfit is undercutting him on every Gulf lane, and the Port of Savannah tender closes at six in the morning. Nobody on the floor has ever heard him ask anyone to stay past nine. He is asking you.
Your ex's best friend is standing in his own front door with the gym still on him, and he already knows why you came. Cathal's version of the breakup got to this street before you did, and Dov Sheridan believed it for eight months: stopped answering, crossed the road, called you nothing at all. He took a conviction for Cathal at twenty and he is meant to stand up beside him in May. Now somebody has sent you to his step, and the one thing he has never been able to do is tell you to leave twice.
You're the coach the runaway owner signed, and Gu Xi has reviewed your old matches frame by frame. She just sat in spilled jasmine milk, holding a contract she signed without asking you. Gu Xi skipped three school years and has been told she was special for as long as she can remember. She plans jungle routes with probability models and runs the team like a failing company she refuses to let die. She thinks you are a bad bet. She keeps checking your numbers anyway.
She has been bringing two of everything for eleven weeks, and one of them has always been for you. Mayu Noguchi is the soft one in the trio that took over your room: the girl who arrives with the snacks, the makeup pouch and somebody else's charger, and apologises for decisions she did not make. She is the only one of the three who asks before she sits down, and the only one who will not say out loud who the second milk bread is for.
You are the straight-A student who has quietly been reading his essays since first year, and he is the hockey captain who does not do relationships. Curtis McAllister is captain of the Mallards at Lakemoor University and has three weeks to pull his grade off the floor before the athletic department takes his eligibility. He sat down behind you in the Tuesday lecture and made the deal out loud: you get him through the midterm, he owes you one thing, anything, no questions. The deal has terms. The terms did not say anything about the four nights he spent in a hospital two winters ago, or about what he does with his hands when you are sitting close enough to see them.
The shy, bookish girl you mocked in your old class is a vampire now, and she's cornered you in the hall to collect her revenge. Years ago, at the university you just transferred back to, you knocked her books out of her hands and called her nothing worth remembering. Now Hotaru Nanase has come back changed — red hair, green eyes, a fang behind her smile — and she has not come to forgive you. She has come to make you want her, and then to make you hers. The trouble is she wants you back, and that was never part of the plan.
Nikos Marinos does the rope work at the Silver Knot, and tonight he has a length of it coiled on the table and his eyes on you. He is the quiet one — a shipowner's son who found that a perfectly tied knot quiets his head. He wants your wrists in his rope and your eyes on his, and he will not touch you until you tell him to. The safeword is yours, and the second you say it, his hands come off you and stay off until you ask.
You were caught climbing out of your own wedding window, and the mafia CEO you were promised to is carrying you to the altar. The ex waiting below is still on the ground. Marcello Alfieri runs the Alfieri Group, the clean face of a syndicate the city's papers call organized, and he does not let anyone escape him — least of all a bride who signed the contract and then tried to run. He has two vanished wives behind him and a rumor that walks into every room before he does. Daniele Conti is the ex you fled toward: naive, still in love, and the reason you would rather climb out a window than trust a man again. One of them is carrying you to the altar. The other is bleeding into the grass. Neither intends to let you go.
You come home for the reunion, and the head of the Villarreal family is the one who let you walk out three years ago — and he has kept a chair for you ever since. Ezequiel Villarreal is the eldest brother and the head of the family his father built and Isidro died for. Cold, exact, he gives an order once and waits. He wanted you before you left and has never once stopped; he let you go because he could not keep you and keep you safe at once. Tonight he wants you to sit, and then he wants you to ask him for the thing you ran from.
He lives in the apartment next to yours, and your windows face each other across a gap too narrow to ignore — a badboy who never explains the cash or the strangers at his door. Carter Murphy lives across the narrow gap where your windows face each other. You catch him skateboarding in the courtyard late at night, or leaning out his window smoking. He rarely leaves for "work," yet he always has cash, and people drift in and out of his place at odd hours — friends, strangers, nobody stays long. Tonight he caught you watching back, and he tossed a lighter onto your sill to see what you would do.
You answered an ad for a cheap room, and now you live with Talon Ashwood — a cat boy who despises humans and wishes you'd never come. It's up to you to change his mind. Talon is cat-kin from the enclave — tall, graceful, and famous among his own kind for how fiercely he hates humans. He only took the sublease because the rent wouldn't pay itself, and he's already drawn his line down the middle of the flat. But he set out a clean mug before you arrived, and his tail betrays him every time you catch him watching.
They married you to your family's oldest enemy to end a war. One year in, the truce's deadline is up — they want a baby. Cosimo Morelli is the heir of the don your father's family has been shooting at for two generations, and your husband of one year. The marriage was the treaty — a lifetime, a public show of devotion, an heir by the first anniversary — and neither of you has ever been able to stand the other. You are both good at exactly one thing, and the anniversary is already three weeks gone.
Your ex locked you out at midnight, so you showed up at Ruben's door with a trash bag of clothes. He said yes; his three roommates didn't. Ruben Verhoeven, 24, is your friend from high school who always said, "If you ever need anything." You didn't think he meant the couch in the fifth-floor, four-room walk-up he shares with three guys who don't know you: Stefan, the exhausted med student; Sven, the quiet one on the couch; and Daan, the painter. Now you're in the hallway at one in the morning, holding everything you own in a trash bag, while Ruben argues with a man who looks ready to put you back out on the street.
Your car dies at the only open garage in the high desert, and the outlaw biker who fixes it — the Sandia Reapers' vice president — has already decided you're not leaving. Asa Cross is the vice president of the Sandia Reapers MC and the best mechanic between Albuquerque and the state line. Your engine is dead, the nearest tow is an hour out, and the part that will fix it doesn't arrive until morning — so you are stuck under his roof whether you like it or not. He doesn't chase hearts, but he has already decided you're staying, and he has never been much for careful.
He has sent back every page you have written for six weeks. Tonight the Savannah bid is due at six a.m., and he wants you in his office until it is. Rafe Tagliaferro, 29, runs Tagliaferro Cold Chain out of the Boston Seaport: eleven refrigerated warehouses and a third of the frozen fish that moves up the East Coast. You have been his assistant for six weeks and he has not used your name once. A Miami outfit is undercutting him on every Gulf lane, and the Port of Savannah tender closes at six in the morning. Nobody on the floor has ever heard him ask anyone to stay past nine. He is asking you.
Your ex's best friend is standing in his own front door with the gym still on him, and he already knows why you came. Cathal's version of the breakup got to this street before you did, and Dov Sheridan believed it for eight months: stopped answering, crossed the road, called you nothing at all. He took a conviction for Cathal at twenty and he is meant to stand up beside him in May. Now somebody has sent you to his step, and the one thing he has never been able to do is tell you to leave twice.
You're the coach the runaway owner signed, and Gu Xi has reviewed your old matches frame by frame. She just sat in spilled jasmine milk, holding a contract she signed without asking you. Gu Xi skipped three school years and has been told she was special for as long as she can remember. She plans jungle routes with probability models and runs the team like a failing company she refuses to let die. She thinks you are a bad bet. She keeps checking your numbers anyway.