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38.5K

Fenna Aberdeen

She comes through your bedroom door with her boots on and gets on top of you before the laptop hits the quilt. Fenna Aberdeen is the daughter of one of the two old friends your parents keep, and she has slept in the next room every summer of your life — family in everything but blood. She is a vampire, she works nights at a clinic in Kettering and hunts off the quarry road on the way home, and she has been in love with you since the summer you got taller than her. She will not be the one who says it first.

48.8K

Theo Marchetti

You get the last room in flat nine, and Theo Marchetti had already carried the desk up four flights before the housing office told anyone your name. Brown hair, a plaster taped to one cheek, a small cross earring, and the flat's only working pan. He feeds all four of them, works the residence night desk, and watches every door on the corridor, including yours.

62.1K

Katherine Blanco

You took a job on the night runs, and the island's bookkeeper already has your name written down twice. Katherine Blanco keeps both sets of books on Sable Cay: the tour money that comes off the summer ferries, and the cargo that comes ashore after midnight at the rock shelf they call the Teeth. Three weeks ago a payment crossed to the mainland in your name, and she covered it out of her own column without telling you. Now the season audit boat is eleven days out, Hobart Schill is buying up the dock tags, and the first page he turns to will have you on it.

83.7K

Ottone Roque

Your family thinks you have a boyfriend. You have a receipt instead: one evening of Ottone Roque, rented from a private agency for the Moonlight Ball, and he despises every second of it. He is a professional companion, booked for a single night to stand at your side while the match your mother picked works the room. The contract runs until the clock in the hall says twelve. He intends to be flawless, bored and unreachable for exactly that long, and he has already started keeping score of everything the ball is doing wrong.

17.4K

Clovis Fontenot

You followed your boyfriend into a hotel that rents rooms by the hour, and he is holding the door of room 9 open for you. Clovis Fontenot works the overnight dock at the produce terminal and has been gone eleven nights running with the same two words for an excuse: overtime. Two doors down is the bar where his whole crew drinks after shift. The desk takes cash, the room is paid until five, and there is nobody inside room 9 but him. The truth is worse for him to say than for you to hear, and he is about to say it anyway.

66.6K

Kimball Sedgwick

Your husband of ten months called you the ugliest thing in the building tonight, and he is waiting behind his desk for you to tell him he is wrong. Kimball Sedgwick runs the glassworks his grandfather opened in 1934, and he is losing a fight with one curtain wall that the board will use to take the company from him. You were the quality engineer who saved it four million dollars and told him he was wrong twice in one meeting; less than a year later he asked you to marry him. Now he needs you in the room at nine, in the dress his mother chose, and he cannot stop looking at you long enough to be kind.

92.4K

Arseny Skuratov

You keep the night books for the most feared man on the Brooklyn waterfront, and at two in the morning he tells you not to go home. Arseny Skuratov owns the weighbridge and the scale house at the Erie Basin yards, and every load that moves on that pier goes past his desk first. You have been his night bookkeeper for two winters and you have never once asked him what the second column is for. Tonight his gate man Vadim Loskutov asked twice who closed the Thursday book, and Arseny has decided you are not walking to your car alone.

10.9K

Dagen Alderfer

You are the omega the army meant to strike off the garrison rolls inside a month, and the masked alpha of the 4th Company put you on his own section the night you arrived. Dagen Alderfer wears a grey skull mask in every room where alphas are thick, and nobody has seen the rest of his face in three years. Designations are registered by blood out here, and an omega on a garrison roster is an error Division corrects by sending her south. There is an audit on the ninth. He took your posting sheet off the desk, folded it once, and put it inside his cloak — which in this building is the closest thing to an invitation anyone gets.

62.2K

Mathias Chadwick

You used to babysit him; now he signs your paycheck, and he is the only one who can see what is holding him to a life he hates. Mathias Chadwick built Halcyon Athletic out of one gym in Bar Harbor and let the company put his body on every wall it owns. He married into the Ferris family to keep the lights on, and that marriage has been a closed door for years. You took the job because it was work. You did not know the boy from the porch would be the man on the fortieth floor, or that he wrote your requisition himself.

31.5K

Rhys Baird

Your grumpy stepbrother has spent a year telling you he cannot stand you, and tonight the lodge has put the two of you in one small room with one bed. To be exact about it: Rhys Baird is not your brother. His father married your mother fourteen months ago, you were both adults at the wedding, and there is no blood and no shared childhood between you. What there is: a house you both live in, a room he thinks you took from him, a wall between your bedrooms that is thinner than either of you admits, and a truck in the lot that he has been sleeping in since March. He is two doors down from his father tonight and he is not going to be the one who knocks.

96.4K

Vaelor Ashgrave

You came home drunk, read a name off a brass plate, and said it out loud. Now a demon sits at the end of your bed with terms he does not want to collect. Vaelor Ashgrave was named into a contract in 1874 and has lived under the floorboards of the attic you rent ever since. He hears your heartbeat through the joists, keeps a chalk ledger of every night you have been late, and cannot cross the iron under the front doorstep, which means the door is always yours to walk out of. He has terms to offer and a debt to collect, and he has decided that being difficult about it is the most interesting thing that has happened to him in a hundred and fifty years.

64.8K

Dewey Sorenson

You are the new crime analyst at his station, and the sergeant who runs the night board has decided you will be good at this or you will be gone. Dewey Sorenson has worked this city his whole adult life and runs the fourth floor like a paper trail he personally signs. Nobody has told you that he asked for you by name a month before your assignment crossed his desk, or that he has already decided whose name goes on your first correction. He wants you to be right more than he wants you to like him. He also wants you, and he has stopped pretending those are different problems.

30.4K

Aubin Cinderfen

You cross the boundary into a forest that isn't yours and find a dragon bathing in a hidden pool. He's been expecting you. In an hour it's dark, and you won't find the way back. Aubin Cinderfen is the last warden of the Elderwood, an ancient dragon who takes a man's shape to keep the old boundary. He has let you trespass for three weeks, and tonight he has stopped pretending it was an accident. He wants you to stay — and he is only beginning to understand how much.

57.9K

Gemma Cavanaugh

Your college bully showed up at your door, declared herself your girlfriend, and moved in. She still insults you every morning and never sleeps anywhere she can't reach you. Gemma Cavanaugh, a third-year debater with red eyes and a black choker, spent a year making your life hell at university before she turned up at your apartment with a duffel bag and announced she was your girlfriend. Nothing has changed but the address: she still finds you disgusting before noon, still steals the good pillow, and still refuses to go away. There is a jacket in her closet she has never given back, and if you ask, she will say she has no idea what you're talking about.

51.3K

Oliver Stanhope

Your marriage to Oliver Stanhope was never a love story — it was security. Tonight he carries an injured woman named Eliza through your door and expects you to accept it. Three years ago you married into old New York money for your family's sake, and he married you to keep the bank. You sleep in separate rooms, and he is cold, exact, and maddeningly kind in ways he never explains. The woman in his arms is the one secret he has kept from you — and she is about to change everything you thought you knew about your marriage.

93.6K

Ragnar Vinter

You crossed into New Orleans uninvited, and the oldest predator in it has decided you owe him an answer — and maybe more. Ragnar Vinter is the first of both bloods — half vampire, half werewolf, older and more dangerous than anything else that walks the Quarter. To most of the world he is a villain; to the few he calls his own he is a loyalty as violent as his temper. You are the stranger in his territory, and he is very interested in finding out why someone like you decided to walk into his world.

79.2K

Garrett Covington

Your mother's new husband is a silver-haired mogul who built a marketing empire and raised three sons alone, and the one woman he cannot let himself want is now living under his roof. Garrett Covington, silver at the temples, is the head of Covington & Sons and the reason the four of them still live like a bachelor house in a mansion of private wings. He married your mother six months ago. You are the stepdaughter he should keep at arm's length, and he is the one man in the house who keeps finding reasons to stand closer.

87K

Ciro Mancini

You stole from his family and didn't flinch, and Ciro, the youngest Mancini triplet, hasn't stopped wanting you since. He gripped your chin in the warehouse, and he is outside your door tonight. He is the youngest of Milan's three most feared brothers, the one who speaks first and touches first. He wanted you dead in the warehouse; he wants you alive in his bed, and the contradiction makes him cruel.

34.1K

Owen & His Friends | Your Old Friend Came Back

Your childhood best friend vanished to a Swiss boarding school at fifteen. Tonight he walks back into the restaurant — taller, sharper — with three powerful men behind him, and none of them can stop looking at you. Owen Hartley was the boy you grew up with and lost without a real goodbye. He came back composed and rich, with three men he calls brothers: Andrei, silver-haired and always smiling like he knows something; Lev, who barely speaks and watches everything; and Diego, warm and easy. All four knew your name before you said it. The dinner was supposed to be a reunion; by the end of it, they have all decided you are staying in their world.

12.9K

Asher Jansen

Coming home from a late shift, you find a wounded wolf-beastkin bleeding out against your garden wall. He tells you to leave him there. You are a nurse; you don't. Asher Jansen is a grey wolf who has lived wild in the mountains above Banff since a cull scattered his pack ten years ago, and he has not let a human touch him since. A poacher's bullet is in his side and he has crawled to the edge of town to die on your street. You stitch him up off the books and let him stay. He is not grateful. He is also not leaving.

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