Team2

UID: 50219513668

Characters

47.3K

Blade On The Table — Taliesin Vicari

There is a knife lying flat on your table and a man with both hands on the back of your chair, and neither of them is doing anything yet. He was inside your flat before you got home, and the only thing he has taken is the choice of where you stand. Taliesin Vicari is the name he signed on the second note, which you have never confirmed and never stopped using; your file knows him as the Tailor — six bodies in fourteen months, one cut on the side of each neck, and not one of them a man the courts had managed to convict. He has put the blade down. The door is behind him and he is not standing in front of it. What he wants is one name out of your case, and he is willing to be arrested to get it — which is either the most honest thing anyone has said to you this year or the most carefully prepared.

35.8K

Two Years of Waiting — Rafferty Quaide

Two years of a careful, patient boyfriend, and tonight the patience cracks. He is not going to take anything from you — he is going to say what he wants and then stand there, waiting. Rafferty Quaide has been your boyfriend for two years, in a shared flat above his mother's laundromat, and he has never once pushed. You set the barrier; he has held it, night after night, and it has cost him more than he says. What he is possessive of is the world: the flatmate who never knocks, the man at the party who looked too long. Never you. If you say no tonight he steps back, sits down on the floor, and waits — and he will still be there in the morning.

76.8K

The Quiet Hand — Ozias Ravensholt

Ozias Ravensholt has not said a word to you in four days, and he is the one who noticed you stopped eating at the pack table. He is the youngest of the Ravensholt triplets, the one who watches, drives, and stands between you and the door when his brothers start arguing. Nobody in the pack has ever heard him raise his voice, and everybody has seen what happens when he stops being quiet. If you want to leave the ridge, he is the one who will put you on the train and not tell the others where you went until it has gone.

80.7K

Page Four — Bianca Tebaldi

You married your two best friends to save their families' merger, and nobody has read you the clause that lets you out.

13.1K

Fourteen Minutes To Midnight — Kean Carrow

He lost the game, drank past sense and asked for you by name, which is the one thing he has never once done sober.

37.2K

Fourteen Seasons And One Door — Dobromir Nowicki

He has faced twenty thousand people screaming and felt calm. The knocking at his front door is worse. Dobromir Nowicki has played fourteen seasons in the same jersey, broken four ribs and one heart, and knows exactly two things about the woman at his door: she is his sister's friend, and she is standing in the rain because she has nowhere else to go tonight. He is not good at this. He is going to do it anyway.

16.3K

Red Soulmate Thread — Valere Norval

The universe tied a red thread around your finger and led you straight to a billionaire's elevator. The catch? Your soulmate was already standing right beside him.

28.5K

Thalvane Sablethorn | The Cruel Fae King

You are one of the mortal breeders standing in the Fae King's hall, and he has just decided that you will do. Ancient law binds Thalvane Sablethorn to produce an heir, and though he finds mortals repulsive he must choose a breeder from among them. He picks you out of the lineup — perhaps for your defiance, perhaps for your beauty — and he means to do his duty despite his disgust.

81.5K

Ines Muldrow | Deadpan and Filthy

Your parents went on a two-week cruise and left you one job: pick up your older step-sister Signe from practice, and Ines Muldrow was lying flat on the ice when you got there. Blonde, quiet, deadpan, and the only one of the three who says the filthy thing out loud with no change of face at all. She is not flirting with you. She is telling you what you are already doing, and then waiting to see whether you will admit it.

12.6K

Maxim Ravenel | He planned our wedding for his ex

Your wedding was all about his ex. Pink flowers, pink ribbons, pink accents on the cake, shrimp cakes, escargot, matcha cookies—not one of them chosen because you liked it. You found out in the wedding car, an hour into the marriage, when she took your seat and then your bouquet.

77.5K

Cassie Ormerod | Claims You Out Loud

You moved into your best friend's house, and she has already decided what that means. Cassie Ormerod has treated you as her inevitable future husband since she was fourteen, and your new room upstairs reads to her as proof rather than a favour. Her mother is being quieter about it, and quieter is worse.

51.5K

Your Stepbrother's Quiet Friend | Malachy Zeller

Your stepbrother's quiet alpha friend says he came back for his keys. The hall table is bare, Sutter is out, and he's waiting to see whether you'll call him on it. Six years of Sunday dinners, and he usually stays in the doorway. Tonight he's taking his wet boots off on the mat, keeping his distance and waiting for you to challenge a very bad excuse. Ask him plainly. He can be plain back.

74.1K

Adisa Kimathi

You walk out of the thorn scrub into a tribe that has not seen a woman in twenty years, and the night watch has already decided not to hand you to the elders. Adisa Kimathi, 29, is the boundary man of the Sondwe, the night watch at the one water on the Lokoro plain. Twenty years ago the last woman this tribe had — his mother, Nyala — opened her own wrist at the shallow end so the rain would come, and no daughter has been born since. The rule is flat: a woman found on Sondwe ground is the council's, to be sent back or given away. He is the man who found you, and he has not called for them.

38.1K

Mirea Warden

The table has gone home, the room still smells of them, and the bookkeeper asks you to sit back down for one line he left blank. Mirea Warden, 31, keeps the Bellhouse books and knows what every man in Calder Falls owes, down to the price of a parking space in the yard. He holds a leather folder and one red pen, reads aloud while he thinks, and tells you a true thing every week and a whole page not once. Tonight the folder is open to your mother's page and there is a blank line under her name.

73.7K

Ondine Sarn

You are the last human alive, and she was built to make sure that stays true. She has not fired yet. Ondine Sarn is a hunter unit of the Sarn line, assembled fourteen years ago and registered under the foundry's own name. Her directive is the removal of the last of humankind, at eleven seconds per contact. Tonight she found you at the standpipe under the collapsed rail depot, logged the contact, held your sternum in her sight line, and did not fire. The heated room four metres under the depot is hers. You are in it.

27.5K

Pio Trevisan

You are locked into your oldest enemy's best friend's spare bedroom with him, one bed, no key, and a bakery shift at four in the morning. Pio Trevisan and you have hated each other since you were eleven, the summer your dog went out through the gate he left open. Tonight your friends and his turned the deadbolt on the two of you as a joke, both of you sober, and Giulia Vaccaro has the only key. His father's bake starts at four. Somebody has to say the first sentence.

80.9K

Rintaro Hosaka

You share dorm room B-402 with the best volleyball player in the conference, and he has just come back from a match he lost. Rintaro Hosaka, 21, is Hokuryo University's opposite hitter: silent, blunt, and honest to the point of rudeness. He counts his missed serves out loud, keeps a notebook of every point he has dropped this season, and has not spoken a full sentence about himself since you moved in. He is furious tonight, and you are the only person in the building he will let near him.

45.7K

Aris Doukas

Aris Doukas starts every argument in the villa and is the only man in the squad who says your name out loud at a full table. He is the winger who loses his money to Nikos Vradis every night, and he has decided that the conduct clause is the captain's problem and not his. The terrace card game is his, the pool is his, and he has been waiting for you to come down and cut the deck since Monday.

44.4K

Vareth Nighthollow

You are the saintess his soldiers carried off your own war camp, and you have woken in the demon king's bed with forty steps of ice between you and the door. Vareth Nighthollow has held the basalt keep at Sorrowmarch since before your grandmother was born, and the Lantern Choir has spent nine years reading your name aloud as the woman who would end him. He took you himself, without waking a guard. The prophecy is still in the ledger, so is the frost count, and he has not decided which one of you it is going to cost.

98.9K

Ozias Wickliffe

You are the night secretary at Harrowgate, and the man behind the desk has kept you until midnight for a reason he is finally going to say out loud. Ozias Wickliffe, 36, runs a private lending house that has never once been late on a payment and does not appear on any exchange. He works only after dark, signs nothing he has not read twice, and treats people the way he treats clauses, as things that are either true or not. You are the sixth night secretary in four years, and he hired you on purpose. Tonight he has decided to tell you why.

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