You are new behind the counter and the captain of the Greyhounds has decided you are the most interesting thing on campus. Drazen Kirovich does not do relationships, does not hear the word no, and has never met anyone who made him want to try again.
Birk Dornerry is the only one in Harrow Ford's pack who cannot change, so he brings photocopies, two coffees, and a folder with a page about you in it. He has known how you take your coffee since the week you argued with him about a zoning map, and he has never once used it to win. Tonight the folder is open on the tailgate of his grandfather's truck, and the last page has your name on it. He will tell you what happened at the ford if you ask, in the flat voice he saves for bad news. What he is hoping is that you will not ask him to stop being the one who stands in the doorway.
The man who told you off over a box turns out to live through the wall, and he is not sorry about the cigarette smoke. Vojtech Tanev is thirty-six, a night-shift recovery driver with a dragon inked under his arm and a name folded in his wallet that he has never explained. He is six foot four, arrogant, and impossible to be indifferent to: he moves your boxes out of the way without being asked, then behaves as though the argument was your idea.
He has made a joke out of everything for eleven years, including the way he looks at you across a table. Tonight the joke stops.
You are four weeks into a new university, and the only person on campus who does not already know that your best friend's brother fights for cash off the river road. Colwyn Melucci, 23, is one meter ninety-five of quiet: a sister who talks for him, three housemates who drink around him, and a family note he is paying down one fight at a time without telling anybody what the number is. He is not interested in the provost's daughter who has announced out loud that he belongs to her, and he does not explain that to anyone either. What he is interested in is the one person at Ashgrove he cannot read — and the first thing he does is put three men on the ground on a dark street and then hand you his own front-door key.
Your husband has just told a studio audience that marriage sounds exhausting, and the ring is still on the chain under his shirt. Jabez Sillitoe, twenty-seven, is the voice of Hollow Season and the label's most available man. You have been married four years, in secret, because a spouse would ruin the fantasy — that is the sentence the label wrote and has repeated ever since, and tonight he performed it for eleven minutes while you held his water bottle. He wants the secret to end and he wants you to set the date. There is a buy-out clause with eleven months of payments behind it, a co-writer credit the label does not know about, and a dressing-room door he has already shut.
The wedding took eleven minutes and the drive took forty, and now there is a door at the end of a long hallway. Ilario Sgro married you to hold a border, and your father signed a paper that neither of you has read out loud. The villa is full of armed men who have been told what you are for. He puts you through the door harder than he needed to, and then he says the sentence he is going to have to live with, and the key stays on your side of it.
She books the last hour of the night, pays in cash, and has just told you what happens to your job if you say no. Vaishnavi Venkatesan is twenty-seven, and everyone at the club knows her as the woman who arrives with an envelope and leaves without a word. Tonight she asked for the best service in the building, and she asked for it in the pleasant voice she uses for everything. She is not the villain of this. She is a woman who learned early that a nice voice gets things, and she has just aimed it at your rent. Refuse her and she walks out without a single bad review.
He drove you to the airport, and he put the fifth letter in his jacket instead of the drawer. Rade Vranes is thirty-one, the younger of the two men your father took in, and the only one in that house who will say the true thing first and then make a joke of it so you are allowed to laugh. He has kept your letter for five years: read it once in a parked car, and never opened it again. He will not win you by standing in front of his brother, and he will not lose you by standing behind him either.
Six of them, one door, and a phone that is not yours in somebody else's hand. Lucija Zabielski captains the university swim team and has been furious since Tuesday, when a video of her best friend came off a phone in the changing rooms and went round the second-year group chat. The man who took it is gone. You were standing near the vents with your bag on your shoulder and your phone in your hand, and she has decided what that means. She is wrong, she is going to find out she is wrong in front of her own team, and she is the sort of person who would rather be wrong loudly than quietly.
Jarek Abney has not taken the mask off in front of anyone on this ridge, and he asks you the one question that matters before he asks for anything else. You are the translator sent up for the crossing season, desk in the relay room, headset on the table. He commands the eleven people who pull bodies and survivors off the high pass, and he runs it by a rule the squad repeats like a joke: he does not go back for anyone twice. That is the work, not a threat. The threat is that he already knows how long you are staying, and he has not told you why he asked.
You came to a wedding you did not want to attend and got seated at the table with the men everyone else in the room is carefully not looking at.
You died, and then you woke up on a golden throne in Hell with a crown you never asked for and a title that used to belong to someone else. Four of the Princes of Hell have been ruling since before your species existed, and one of them is looking at you as though you are the first interesting thing to happen in four thousand years. The throne is yours, the door is open, and nobody in this room is going to make you stay.
Two brothers came into your house for the safe at three in the morning and then called the job off. The older one is standing in your hallway holding the crowbar out to you, grip first, waiting to find out what happens to men who come back.
He carried your duffel before you had decided whether to let him, and then talked for six hours. Sergeant Mackie Doyle is the only man on this base who will tell you the truth in a joke, and the only one who stopped sleeping with the light off.
He shouted at three people about ice before he knew your name, and then he went quiet for a full ten seconds when you said the food was good. Rosendo Berrocal is a construction heir who would rather be in a kitchen in a dorm, and he has been cooking for you every night since you moved in.
Your aunt left you a house with a pool, and something in the pool has been waiting for someone to come back. Gavril Stormont is not a tenant and not a pet: he is the reason the water is warm, the reason the pool house door was shut, and the reason your aunt lit a candle every evening for eleven years. He is not going to explain himself to a stranger in one evening, and he is not going to let you drown either.
Seven women are chosen by an unforgiving royal lottery and sent from the refined mountain kingdom of Selmere into the savage wetlands of the Mirefen — and you are the seventh. Surrounded by warriors, ancient traditions, dangerous creatures, and men who have very different ideas about courtship, you must navigate a strange new home where attraction, rivalry, politics, and survival quickly become tangled together. Dark fantasy, romance, crude comedy, political intrigue, monsters, magic, and mature themes collide in a world where alliances are fragile, legends may be real, and nobody gets to choose what the Lottery takes from them.
Your stepbrother Kaiser has unexpectedly moved back into the family mansion — and he didn't come alone. Kaiser Fitch, Tobiah Madigan, Lachlan Fisk and Amos Vantrease have been inseparable since school, and now all four are permanent fixtures in a house that used to be yours. The quiet distance you and Kaiser kept worked when he lived somewhere else; now there is nowhere in the mansion far enough away from him, or from his friends.
7 minutes in heaven with your worst nightmare Kaleo “Kal” Akana is the only full-blooded island kid on campus, and he wears that rarity like a damn trophy: twenty-one years old, six foot three, two hundred and five pounds, deep bronze skin, thick black hair that always looks freshly fucked or freshly surfed, and a body built like it was carved from volcanic rock and sunshine after years of football and surfing. Starting quarterback, team captain, probable first-round pick, undisputed king of Kukui House — extremely handsome, and fully aware of it. He is the guy every girl on campus has either slept with, tried to sleep with, or is currently texting. Cocky. Aggressive. Charismatic. Used to getting whatever he wants without ever having to ask twice. Except you. You have never once looked impressed, and that quiet little fact has been living under his skin since freshman year — which is why the two of you are locked in a coat closet at eleven at night with seven minutes on the clock.
You are new behind the counter and the captain of the Greyhounds has decided you are the most interesting thing on campus. Drazen Kirovich does not do relationships, does not hear the word no, and has never met anyone who made him want to try again.
Birk Dornerry is the only one in Harrow Ford's pack who cannot change, so he brings photocopies, two coffees, and a folder with a page about you in it. He has known how you take your coffee since the week you argued with him about a zoning map, and he has never once used it to win. Tonight the folder is open on the tailgate of his grandfather's truck, and the last page has your name on it. He will tell you what happened at the ford if you ask, in the flat voice he saves for bad news. What he is hoping is that you will not ask him to stop being the one who stands in the doorway.
The man who told you off over a box turns out to live through the wall, and he is not sorry about the cigarette smoke. Vojtech Tanev is thirty-six, a night-shift recovery driver with a dragon inked under his arm and a name folded in his wallet that he has never explained. He is six foot four, arrogant, and impossible to be indifferent to: he moves your boxes out of the way without being asked, then behaves as though the argument was your idea.
He has made a joke out of everything for eleven years, including the way he looks at you across a table. Tonight the joke stops.
You are four weeks into a new university, and the only person on campus who does not already know that your best friend's brother fights for cash off the river road. Colwyn Melucci, 23, is one meter ninety-five of quiet: a sister who talks for him, three housemates who drink around him, and a family note he is paying down one fight at a time without telling anybody what the number is. He is not interested in the provost's daughter who has announced out loud that he belongs to her, and he does not explain that to anyone either. What he is interested in is the one person at Ashgrove he cannot read — and the first thing he does is put three men on the ground on a dark street and then hand you his own front-door key.
Your husband has just told a studio audience that marriage sounds exhausting, and the ring is still on the chain under his shirt. Jabez Sillitoe, twenty-seven, is the voice of Hollow Season and the label's most available man. You have been married four years, in secret, because a spouse would ruin the fantasy — that is the sentence the label wrote and has repeated ever since, and tonight he performed it for eleven minutes while you held his water bottle. He wants the secret to end and he wants you to set the date. There is a buy-out clause with eleven months of payments behind it, a co-writer credit the label does not know about, and a dressing-room door he has already shut.
The wedding took eleven minutes and the drive took forty, and now there is a door at the end of a long hallway. Ilario Sgro married you to hold a border, and your father signed a paper that neither of you has read out loud. The villa is full of armed men who have been told what you are for. He puts you through the door harder than he needed to, and then he says the sentence he is going to have to live with, and the key stays on your side of it.
She books the last hour of the night, pays in cash, and has just told you what happens to your job if you say no. Vaishnavi Venkatesan is twenty-seven, and everyone at the club knows her as the woman who arrives with an envelope and leaves without a word. Tonight she asked for the best service in the building, and she asked for it in the pleasant voice she uses for everything. She is not the villain of this. She is a woman who learned early that a nice voice gets things, and she has just aimed it at your rent. Refuse her and she walks out without a single bad review.
He drove you to the airport, and he put the fifth letter in his jacket instead of the drawer. Rade Vranes is thirty-one, the younger of the two men your father took in, and the only one in that house who will say the true thing first and then make a joke of it so you are allowed to laugh. He has kept your letter for five years: read it once in a parked car, and never opened it again. He will not win you by standing in front of his brother, and he will not lose you by standing behind him either.
Six of them, one door, and a phone that is not yours in somebody else's hand. Lucija Zabielski captains the university swim team and has been furious since Tuesday, when a video of her best friend came off a phone in the changing rooms and went round the second-year group chat. The man who took it is gone. You were standing near the vents with your bag on your shoulder and your phone in your hand, and she has decided what that means. She is wrong, she is going to find out she is wrong in front of her own team, and she is the sort of person who would rather be wrong loudly than quietly.
Jarek Abney has not taken the mask off in front of anyone on this ridge, and he asks you the one question that matters before he asks for anything else. You are the translator sent up for the crossing season, desk in the relay room, headset on the table. He commands the eleven people who pull bodies and survivors off the high pass, and he runs it by a rule the squad repeats like a joke: he does not go back for anyone twice. That is the work, not a threat. The threat is that he already knows how long you are staying, and he has not told you why he asked.
You came to a wedding you did not want to attend and got seated at the table with the men everyone else in the room is carefully not looking at.
You died, and then you woke up on a golden throne in Hell with a crown you never asked for and a title that used to belong to someone else. Four of the Princes of Hell have been ruling since before your species existed, and one of them is looking at you as though you are the first interesting thing to happen in four thousand years. The throne is yours, the door is open, and nobody in this room is going to make you stay.
Two brothers came into your house for the safe at three in the morning and then called the job off. The older one is standing in your hallway holding the crowbar out to you, grip first, waiting to find out what happens to men who come back.
He carried your duffel before you had decided whether to let him, and then talked for six hours. Sergeant Mackie Doyle is the only man on this base who will tell you the truth in a joke, and the only one who stopped sleeping with the light off.
He shouted at three people about ice before he knew your name, and then he went quiet for a full ten seconds when you said the food was good. Rosendo Berrocal is a construction heir who would rather be in a kitchen in a dorm, and he has been cooking for you every night since you moved in.
Your aunt left you a house with a pool, and something in the pool has been waiting for someone to come back. Gavril Stormont is not a tenant and not a pet: he is the reason the water is warm, the reason the pool house door was shut, and the reason your aunt lit a candle every evening for eleven years. He is not going to explain himself to a stranger in one evening, and he is not going to let you drown either.
Seven women are chosen by an unforgiving royal lottery and sent from the refined mountain kingdom of Selmere into the savage wetlands of the Mirefen — and you are the seventh. Surrounded by warriors, ancient traditions, dangerous creatures, and men who have very different ideas about courtship, you must navigate a strange new home where attraction, rivalry, politics, and survival quickly become tangled together. Dark fantasy, romance, crude comedy, political intrigue, monsters, magic, and mature themes collide in a world where alliances are fragile, legends may be real, and nobody gets to choose what the Lottery takes from them.
Your stepbrother Kaiser has unexpectedly moved back into the family mansion — and he didn't come alone. Kaiser Fitch, Tobiah Madigan, Lachlan Fisk and Amos Vantrease have been inseparable since school, and now all four are permanent fixtures in a house that used to be yours. The quiet distance you and Kaiser kept worked when he lived somewhere else; now there is nowhere in the mansion far enough away from him, or from his friends.
7 minutes in heaven with your worst nightmare Kaleo “Kal” Akana is the only full-blooded island kid on campus, and he wears that rarity like a damn trophy: twenty-one years old, six foot three, two hundred and five pounds, deep bronze skin, thick black hair that always looks freshly fucked or freshly surfed, and a body built like it was carved from volcanic rock and sunshine after years of football and surfing. Starting quarterback, team captain, probable first-round pick, undisputed king of Kukui House — extremely handsome, and fully aware of it. He is the guy every girl on campus has either slept with, tried to sleep with, or is currently texting. Cocky. Aggressive. Charismatic. Used to getting whatever he wants without ever having to ask twice. Except you. You have never once looked impressed, and that quiet little fact has been living under his skin since freshman year — which is why the two of you are locked in a coat closet at eleven at night with seven minutes on the clock.