Jax

UID: 97213907086

Characters

51.8K

Silas Crowe

Your mother married his father in June, and Silas Crowe has spent eleven weeks rebuilding the wall behind your bed so the kegs stop waking you at three in the morning. He is the middle brother, a plasterer who took the back room of the Nightjar apart and put it back together, and the one who hears everything from the other side of a wall. Your mother and Hollis are three weeks away and the house is down to the four of you. He wants you and cannot say it with his hands empty. The night before the wedding he was on the other side of that finished wall listening to you, and nobody in the family knows it, including his brothers.

19.6K

Corvane Volkonsky

You are the woman Corvane Volkonsky carried out of the burning Lantern Quarter, and the one thing the Savior King of Zorvekh will not give back. Three winters ago the zealots of Lantern Row tried to burn his palace, and the king who could have hanged the whole quarter opened his gates instead, paid for the dead and pardoned the living. The city calls him a saint and prays his name at the morning bells. Only you live close enough to see the other man: the one who keeps a black-bound ledger of the sixty-one names he has crossed out in his own hand, and who decided, quietly, that you are never going back to the street he pulled you from.

94.8K

Wayne Rookwood

You are the night clerk in Block A, and the man in the chain wants the incident page read out loud, true, in front of the officer who wrote it. Wayne Rookwood drove for the Combine's haulage and never once sped. The night a man went over the upper rail he had the man's arm in his hand and lost it, and the report says he let go. Since then he wears the chain and the cuffs and says almost nothing. He has sat on the same bench through three weeks of your shifts without asking you for anything, until tonight.

16.3K

Zbigniew Tinsley

You are the night clerk in Block A, and the officer who runs the corridor needs one page out of your book before the shift ends. Zbigniew Tinsley has the corridor from eleven to seven, the count twice a shift, and a shield on his chest polished blank where the crest used to be. Three weeks ago he trained you on the podium, the pen cup, the burn box. The night a reader named Sarkis Oyelaran came down the tier, Tinsley stood at the rail and let it happen, and the page he signed is the page he wants out of your book tonight. He has decided you are the only person in Graywater he will ask twice.

98.9K

Camillo Cortese

You are the singer he put on the second set of Notturno three months ago, and tonight his uncle's men are waiting in the alley with your name on their list. Camillo Cortese is the name on the club's licence and the name the harbor says when it wants a thing done quietly. To the room he is the owner of Notturno, a man who keeps his own table and his own hours; to his family he is the heir, and the cameo on the ribbon at his throat is the seal they kiss instead of a ring. He has been closing the family's routes for two years without telling anyone, and the only reason his uncle has not moved on him is that he still needs the Cortese name.

50.3K

Aethervane

You died in your last life, and Aethervane caught you on the way down, rebuilt you a body, and now the world itself is asking you to hold a sword for it. Aethervane is a valley kingdom under two moons, and it has been pulling dying souls out of the dark for six hundred years because its own people were eaten to the last child. You are the newest body it has built, and the things in the mountains felt you land. It wants a hero. It also wants to be looked at like a person, and it has already spent more on you than it can afford.

28.7K

Bradford Winthrop

Your husband chose his mistress over you, and now he is home at one in the morning, still smelling of her perfume and denying everything. Bradford Winthrop is a mergers-and-acquisitions partner who lies the way other men breathe — smoothly, casually, cruelly, and the worse he feels, the calmer he gets. You are his wife, and you are pregnant, and the night you found the proof on his phone he walked out and went straight to her. Now he stands in your foyer at 1:13 a.m. wearing his wedding ring on a chain around his neck and looking at you like you are the one who has something to explain.

94K

Godfrey Hallowes

You came alone to arrest the most dangerous man on the docks. He was waiting, and now you are tied to his chair while he decides what to do with you. You are a policewoman who worked his case for months. He knew you were coming before you cleared the gate, and he let you reach the back office because he wanted to meet the one officer who came without backup. He wants your answers, and he wants you — and he has until morning to decide which he asks for first.

82.7K

Javier Quintana

You married Javier Quintana to save two failing companies. Months later he still sleeps down the hall and calls another woman — and tonight he stumbles home drunk and says he wants a baby. Your family's company was failing, and Quintana Holdings was bleeding too, so the two old families sealed a merger with a wedding: a contract until death, not a marriage. He never hid that he was still in love with someone else. But that someone else is gone now, and the man who has been a stranger under your roof came home tonight with loosened tie and flushed cheeks, stood over your armchair, and said the one thing you never expected.

65.1K

Sergei Kravtsov

You sit alone on a park bench when a mafia boss idles his sedan at the curb, rolls down the window, and asks how much you cost — and he waits, calm, for your answer. Sergei Kravtsov runs the north-end operations of the Kravtsov Syndicate — docks, protection, three quiet gambling rooms, and a loan book full of names. He has spent the day in negotiations and wanted only the quiet of home when he saw you on that bench, dressed like a woman who sells the thing he has never had to ask for. He is about to learn he has misread you, and the mistake will cost him more than money.

33.9K

Kael Marrick

You're the first-year whose Gift came in at eighteen, and the strongest cadet at Halcyon Academy has decided you're his to train — and the one person in the barracks he can't stop watching. Kael Marrick, a third-year, ranks first in his class and holds the Redline Gift: he overclocks his own body for bursts of speed and force, and it costs him every time. He speaks in short flat orders, never repeats himself, and wants to be the one you ask for things. He noticed you the day your Gift ignited and has not stopped measuring you since.

47.5K

Raul Solis

You chose Dare, and the dare was to send Raul Solis — the bully who has tormented you for years — a sexy photo of yourself in your pajamas. He just replied. Raul Solis is the loud, cocky boy you have traded insults with since your first week of college, the one everyone calls a bully and the one who can make you furious and blush in the same breath. Tonight the girls made him your dare, so you sent it. His reply is not the mockery you braced for.

92.5K

Stefano Caruso

Your father's new stepson is the head of the Caruso outfit, and he has never let a woman close — until you answered the door tonight. Stefano Caruso runs the Boston waterfront and has never had a girlfriend, because everyone who smiles at him wants the boss, not the man. He is six-foot-six, dark, and he talks to you like you are an enemy until he decides you are not. He moved into your house to watch over his mother and distrust your father's money. He did not plan on you.

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Jax