Jax

UID: 97213907086

Characters

31.7K

The Man in the Guesthouse — Vester Karqvist

Your boss takes his hat off at your kitchen table and tells you that you are free to date anyone you like, and means it as a confession. Vester Karqvist owns the riding school your parents sold him, and you have lived in his guesthouse for two years, feeding his children and keeping your hands off him. This morning he snapped at you about the car that brought you home. Tonight the children are at their mother's and he has come to the table with a practised apology and a reason he will not say out loud.

94.7K

The Curse He Won't Name — Emmerich Craye

You broke into the restricted archive and the crown prince caught you, and the marks under his collar woke up. He has been told his whole life what he does to people he loves. He tells you to stay where he can see you, and means it.

39.4K

Late Is a Philosophy — Lauro Pellegrini

You turn up thirty minutes late to the sharpest seminar on campus, and the professor decides you are the most interesting thing that has happened to him all year. He argues for a living. He has never argued his way into something you did not want.

24K

Late for the Midterm — Nozomi Hasekura

She has ninety seconds to get across campus and one favour left in the world, and she is spending it on you. Nozomi Hasekura is late to her own midterm, wearing two different socks, and typing one-handed on a bus that is not moving. She has picked your name out of eleven people in the group chat.

93.8K

You Spilled My Coffee — Miklos Tanholm

You put your hip into his table in a crowded café and sent his coffee over his laptop. Miklos Tanholm is thirty-six, flies to a different city every nine days, and treats a café table as an office because hotel rooms have nothing to look at. He had a deadline, a spreadsheet and a rule about being disturbed. You broke the rule, the cup and the silence, in that order, and then you stood there looking at him instead of apologising, which is the part he has been thinking about since.

62K

Bakes For Your Street — Clotilde Dunlowe

You never asked her for anything. Clotilde Dunlowe is twenty-three, feeds the whole of Corvin Row out of Paula Aylwards' bakery, and has just asked you a question in her own bedroom with both hands in the sheet. She is not asking to own you. She is asking to be answered, and she has been counting the days since you last knocked on her door.

81.9K

Room Four-Oh-Three — Torsten Ahlberg

Four years of him making your school days something to be survived, and the university has put him in your room. Torsten Ahlberg is twenty-two, six foot five, and the first thing he says when he sees you is that this is funny. He is bigger than he was, his hair is different, and his smile has not changed at all. The housing office is on the ground floor and open until six. There is a spare bed in another corridor and a form for it. He also has four years to account for, and you can make him do it before you decide anything.

40.4K

Forty Frames — Cooper Chmielewski

He is not going to pretend the photographs were a favour. Cooper Chmielewski was in all forty of them, has never once called it a birthday shoot, and has been waiting four months for somebody to ask him directly. He is quicker than Humphrey, less careful, and the only person in that flat who will tell you what the flat's rule has cost him. Ask him and he answers in one sentence.

62.9K

He Asks Before He Sits Down — Pellegrino Imparato

He comes into the banquet hall on the last Thursday of the month to collect eleven thousand he is short, and then he stops dead in front of your table. Pellegrino Imparato does not raise his voice and has not hit a man in nine years. He gets rid of your date with one polite sentence and then waits, with the ring on his right hand and a cigar that keeps going out, for you to say whether he may sit down. He is not going to touch anyone in this room. That is the only rule he has never broken.

53.8K

He'll Ask You Himself — Ezra Busto

He watched you dance for half an hour and then sent the bodyguard instead of coming over, and the bodyguard is not the part you should be worried about. Ezra Busto runs the freight that moves through this port, and everybody in the room knows which booth is his and what it costs to be invited into it. He does not raise his voice and he does not repeat himself, and he has been turning one ring on his right hand for the thirty minutes he has been looking at you. Whatever he wants from tonight he will ask for out loud, in person, and he will wait for the answer.

28.8K

The Light on the Sand — Mairead Palmgren

She has one week of holiday and a six-year-old asleep in the van, and she has just walked across the sand to a campfire she knows she should have walked past.

81.3K

The Club President's Last Secret — Tarn Kingsmill

He runs a motorcycle club that moves freight nobody declares, and the biggest secret he is keeping tonight is not the guns. Tarn Kingsmill is the president of the Harrowgate crew and a man who has been lying to the two people he loves for eleven months to keep them out of a court case. You are one of them. He is going to tell you the truth on the roof of the clubhouse, and then he is going to give you a choice that his own club will not like.

32.8K

The F-Rank Who Found A Door — Damaris Quinton

She has been an F-rank adventurer for eleven years and she has just found something no one else was supposed to find. Damaris Quinton knows the seventh floor better than the guild that rates her, and she knows exactly what happens to adventurers who report a discovery alone. So she has not reported it. She is going to need someone who will not sell her out — and she has decided, with enormous reluctance, that it might be you.

59.1K

The Gate You Chose — Wilfred Sandomierz

Four houses, one gate, and a headmaster who has watched a thousand first-years decide what they are. Wilfred Sandomierz has run the Academy of Vhal Maren for twenty-six years and has never once told a student which house to take. He is not going to start with you. The banners will choose nothing on your behalf; the choice is the entrance examination, and it is the only one he has ever cared about.

12.6K

Kral's Four | Bring His Heir Home

Your infamous father is dead, and the four men he trained have brought his heir home to a warehouse. They call themselves Kral's Four: a cold leader who decides, a laughing one with a barbed-wire bat, a silent carrier, and the one who talks. Your father chose each of them and each of them still owes him, so they want the last thing he asked for — and what they want from you besides is the part nobody says out loud in the first hour. No one here is related to you, all four are adults, and any single one of them stops the moment you say so.

93.2K

Insomnia at 2 A.M. — Alderico Severini

“You awake?” A wrong number at 2 a.m. becomes something neither of you expected. Alderico Severini is a powerful Mafia boss plagued by chronic insomnia, until a stranger’s voice on the other end finally quiets his restless mind. He has never seen your face; you have never seen his — and as the friendship of those late hours turns into something more, his dangerous world and the secrets he keeps threaten the only honest thing the two of you have.

90.6K

Tormod Grennan | Hear the Details First

Three masked men have been looking for a woman exactly like you, and Tormod Grennan is the one who wants you nowhere near the job. He is the muscle of the Nightjars and the reason their plans survive contact with a building: he carries a list of everything that could go wrong and reads it before he agrees to anything. The next job needs a distraction for a silver-haired curator called Reyner Ventnor, and his list says a stranger is the worst idea they have had. Then the stranger turns out to be you, and he walks over to make sure you hear the details first.

14.4K

Rusk Morth | Patient Zero Behind The Mask

Four patients, one new subject, and an asylum that has already decided which of them is the experiment and which is the result — you are the last piece of the design. Rusk Morth was the first man in Unit Zero and the only one they still keep bound. He watches you through a white perforated mask, says almost nothing, and the little he does say is about how long you have left.

15.3K

Kenzo Ishii

You are eleven weeks into the same run, and the ship's mate has counted you at every change of the watch, out loud, without ever saying why. Kenzo Ishii, 37, keeps the arms locker on the Wanderlight, works the deck bare-chested at six bells, and wears three gold earrings on his left ear and a blade he does not take below decks. He has shipped with the cook, Nilo Salvi, for three years and split everything with him except you. He wants you and has decided not to say it in front of the crew.

74K

Kurumi Amemiya

You are late for a meeting on the eleventh floor when the lift doors open on a woman who is afraid of you. Kurumi Amemiya is the night manifest clerk four floors below the office you are late for. She has been frightened of men since she was nineteen, she has never told anyone why, and tonight the car she chose because it was empty has stopped between six and seven with the two of you inside. She has eleven evenings of reasons to know your name. You have never seen her before.

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Jax