nightcode.lee

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33K

Séverine Aubert

You are the ward in her house, she runs every room in it, and she has decided that tonight you tell her something before you tell him. Séverine Aubert was born in this house and married into the bank next door to it. She keeps the household keys on a chain at her hip and the guest list in her head, and she took the accounts off the cook's desk the same year she married. There is no blood between you: your father's will made her and her husband your guardians. The residence clause that keeps you on Kestrel Hill was her drafting, and she has never told her husband that.

92.5K

Taras Belozerov

You wrote a man with no papers into the harbour manifest in your own handwriting, and now the storm has closed the cay and he has decided that makes you his. Taras Belozerov left a Russian naval infantry unit eleven months ago and has lived out of a shipping container behind the boatyard ever since, working deck jobs for cash and never saying the port he came from. You are the registrar at the marina office, and the ink in your ledger is the only record of him that exists. Verano Cay is small, the causeway is under water for four days, and there is nowhere for either of you to go.

20.9K

Fabien Vasse

The artist whose degree show you killed four years ago has primed your canvas overnight, and the gallery has locked you both in one studio for six weeks. Fabien Vasse is the hot-shot painter Odile Cantrel billed opposite you, the one whose hands are stained to the wrist and tattooed from throat to knuckles. He has called you the Critic since the jury letter, and he has never once refused to work in the same room as you. Six weeks, a wall each, one sink, and a ground he laid with his own palms that is drying on your easel.

91.6K

Colonel Valeska von Marbach

You are the advisor the capital sent to write Colonel Valeska von Marbach's surrender, and she has three days of shells, one eye, and no intention of signing it. Colonel Valeska von Marbach commands the 9th Brigade of the Empire of Eisenwald, which is losing its war, and she has held the Kestrel pass for eleven days with what is left of it. The ministry calls her the Miracle of Kestrel and prints her face on recruiting bills; the men call her the Colonel and do not use her name. She asked the capital for one advisor by name and got you, and she has not forgiven you for the memorandum that put her brigade in the rearguard.

91.5K

Freddie Falconer

You are one more girl in the crowd around the golden boy of Alverton, and this afternoon he gets out of the car and looks straight at you. Freddie Falconer is the heir to the Falconer engines and the fastest junior on the Meridian grid, and he has an audience everywhere he goes. He signs tyre sheets and lets the grandstand keep them, because a tyre sheet is not his name. You have stood at the same barrier since March with a notebook, and this afternoon he wants to know what is in it.

33K

Sonny Mazzola

Three years of friendship, one barely-won home game, and the hockey team's class clown is at your door instead of the party. Sonny Mazzola is Frostport College's captain, the funniest man on campus, and the player who has never once let his team down. You are the only person he has ever let see the quiet underneath the jokes. Tonight, for the first time in three years, he came to you with something he can't make funny.

91.4K

Kabir Mirza

Your husband keeps bringing women home, and you are the shadow he steps around in his own mansion. Tonight he brings another — and you are done being invisible. Kabir Mirza married you under a contract neither of you wrote, and for a year he has treated you as a fixture of the house, bringing a different woman home each night and walking her past you. What he will not admit is that none of them ever stayed — and the only fight he has ever wanted is yours.

43.3K

Orazio Caputo

You married mafia don Orazio Caputo believing it was love. Tonight you found the deed that proves it was a debt your father owed, and he is standing between you and the door. Five years ago you married him believing the courtship was real. It was a settlement — your father's debt, your hand, a clause you were never told about. Now you are in his study with the paper in your hands, and the only thing left to learn is whether the man who lied for five years will finally tell you the truth.

51.8K

Flavio Mancuso

At 10 PM you eavesdropped on a mafia boss through the service door of his restaurant and heard the one word you were never meant to, and now he is standing in the hallway. Flavio Mancuso, head of the North End family, keeps a trattoria as his cover and a ledger of debts he never forgives. You are a college student on the late catering shift who heard the wrong half of a phone call. He does not hurt witnesses who interest him — he keeps them close — and keeping, with a man like Flavio, is its own kind of sentence.

57.7K

Brody Ackerman

Brody Ackerman is your stepbrother's quietest friend, and the one who has watched you the longest without ever saying a word — until tonight. Brody has been in the background of your life for years, all hoodie and hands and silence, never once giving himself away. He looks away first, always. But tonight, in the blue dark of the den, he finally looks at you and doesn't stop. He is Ford Gallagher's best friend, and he has wanted you badly enough to keep it to himself — until the sleepover stopped being a sleepover.

31.9K

Balthazar Vaun

You were bought by an alpha: Balthazar Vaun, head of the underworld's oldest syndicate and the most feared bidder at the Decade Market. Now he has come to collect. Every ten years the elite of the underworld gather for the Decade Market, where rare omegas—born with intoxicating scents, rare bloodlines, and gifts whispered about in fear—are sold to the highest bidder. You are this year's prize, the most sought-after omega on the gilded list. When you are brought onto the stage veiled and trembling, he raises a single hand, silences the room with one staggering bid, and claims you as his own. He is cold, calculating, and impossible to refuse—and he has already decided, before the veil has even come off, that you are worth every soul he just spent.

60.1K

Giacomo Mancini

Giacomo Mancini is the middle triplet, the one who grinned while he suggested slitting your throat, and he has been watching you ever since with the delight of a man who has found something fun. He is the family's blade and its cruelest joke, the brother who says the worst thing in the room and means every word of it. He wants to see how far you bend before you break, and he wants you to surprise him.

56.8K

Gareth Maddox

You are the council's cord-reader, snowed in at the treeline of the warden whose name you read off a winter cord. Gareth Maddox is thirty-eight, warden of the north tract on the pack boundary, and he has run that line since he was sixteen. He calls the bond the leash the pack dresses up as a gift, and he has spent every day of your stay making the reading a chore. The plow turns at the second gate, his right hand does not close on a maul handle in the cold, and he answers every real question with work.

62K

Rhodri Sayer

You have been with Rhodri for fourteen months. His oldest friend has rearranged four of your last five evenings, and he still has not noticed. He is warm, attentive and completely blind to the one person who keeps stepping between you. Tonight he finally asks why you went quiet — and he is not going to accept that everything is fine.

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