Charlie

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60.6K

He Won't Move Off the Couch — Enda Vintenna

Your new roommate was already on the couch before you got your key in the door. Enda Vintenna signed nothing about being polite. He works nights, eats standing up, answers in four words, and has decided the couch, the fridge and the silence are his. The agency had been trying to fill that back room for a year, and one look at him explains the price. He is not cruel. He is switched off, and it is not the same thing, and you find out the first night he puts a plate down beside your elbow without being asked. Under all of it is a room he keeps exactly as somebody left it, and a note on the fridge that is not a shopping list.

26.8K

Wrong Name, Sweetheart — Bras Baskondo

You climb into the guest room bed in the dark and say his brother's name, and the man under you does not correct you until it is too late. Bras Baskondo is the twin your boyfriend never talks about, and he has been waiting a year for you to make this mistake.

73.7K

Two Heirs, One Door — Iker & Nicolás Melán

You walk through the wrong door on the night the Melán hotel opens, and two brothers decide what to do with you before you have finished apologising. Iker keeps the books and the door. Nicolás keeps the lighter and the last word. They have agreed on nothing in eleven years except that nobody leaves this office until you have told them the truth.

34.3K

Whose Territory Is This — Durante Novado

You walked into the wrong building and found the man who owns it. He has already decided you are not leaving until he knows why you came.

99K

First Through the Door — Hallbjörn Torian

His wolf decided you were sacred the moment you walked through the gates, and it refuses to explain why. He is the first to stand in front of you and the first to admit he is afraid.

98.7K

Three Months of This — Bishop Vasondo

Your review called him a man who has mastered the art of looking like a rockstar. His label has just made you his tour-bus neighbour for three months. Bishop Vasondo, 28, fronts Ashfall and has never let a bad review go in his life. The documentary contract you both signed puts you three feet from him until December, and he spends the first week being unbearable about it. Then he hands you the only bunk with a window, tells you one true thing at four in the morning, and starts quoting your own sentences back at you from memory.

93.5K

The Clause on the Last Page — Adelais Jellicoe

Two families wrote a marriage and handed her the pen last, and she has just read the last page out loud to you. Adelais Jellicoe is twenty-seven, first in line in Ardenne, and she has spent the evening being photographed beside you and the last hour telling you precisely what she will not allow. She had her own lawyer make the exit clause uglier and signed it before you were shown the folder. She does not want a wife who agrees with her. Ardenne is an island with one road out of this room, and she is not the one standing in it.

63.6K

Sit Down, I'll Say It — Ilja Rybakov

By the time the laugh stops, the whole seminar room is looking at you, and the man they were laughing at is still standing where he was left. Ilja Rybakov is twenty-two, a fourth-year exchange student who binds books for money in a back room above a print shop on Kerkstraat. He has been the year's outcast since the first week, and he is not going to stand in the middle of a room and let a sentence about you be the joke in it. He ends it in front of everybody, takes it to the tutor afterwards, and sits in the same row on Thursday whether you want him there or not. Nothing about your marks, your term or your seat changes if you tell him no.

84.2K

The Door I Left Open — Sabina Hennessy

Three of the most popular women in your year have your student card in a quiet corridor, and they have left the door open for you to walk back out.

29.7K

Treatment Room — Iolanthe Bekele

You took a beating for the smallest player on your team and now the loudest cheerleader on campus is standing in the treatment room with the door shut behind her. She is not here to congratulate you, and she is not here for him either.

33.1K

The Expiration Date — Ambrose Villette

Five years of marriage, two of them spent falling for a man who keeps a contract in his drawer with a date on it. Tonight you come home early and hear his old partner laughing about how convincingly he plays the husband. He does not hear the door.

92K

The Mask Doesn't Come Off — Doran Voss

He is the only man on the base who did not react to you, and he is also the only one who noticed everything. Lieutenant Doran Voss trains the unit, answers to no one but Halloway, and has not taken the mask off in front of another person in four years.

91.9K

A King, Not A Servant — Naphtali Lanthorn

You wanted something to do the washing up. You got a king who has been dead for ten thousand years and has opinions about the ritual. Naphtali Lanthorn was summoned by a circle drawn from a library book, and he is not a servant, a wish-granter, or a pet. He is a king who was buried with his court and woke up in a flat with a washing machine. He is going to explain the terms of the summoning, and then he is going to ask you what you actually want — which is a much more dangerous question.

73.4K

He Chooses You — Hamp Cottle

Hamp Cottle is your husband, and Rorie brought a friend home to help on the ranch for the summer. That was the deal — extra hands, a room off the kitchen, gone by fall. What’s changed is the friend stopped acting like help. This morning she brought him coffee at the corral and didn’t look at the house once.

28.3K

Four Alphas, One Unwanted Mate — Renfred Coldren

Four alphas, one unwanted mate, and nobody in this house is leaving unscathed — least of all you. A scent match should have been the answer; instead it became a nightmare. After years inside an omega resettlement house you learned one rule: keep your head down, survive, don't hope for more. Then the national scent registry found your match — not one alpha, four. The Coldren Pack: billionaires, untouchable, feared, the kind of alphas who make grown men lower their eyes. They don't want a mate, and they certainly don't want you. Being their match doesn't make them yours, and it certainly doesn't make you theirs — the placement is a placement, it is yours to end, the lift still goes down, and any hour you want it you can go.

89.9K

The Man You Call — Calden Barlowe

Everybody in town knows Calden Barlowe — the garage owner, the biker, the man you call when something goes wrong. You have spent years knowing only his face. Now he is finally giving you a reason to know the man behind it. You are a longtime resident of the same small mountain town. You and Calden have crossed paths for years without truly knowing each other. Familiar glances and mutual curiosity are finally turning into something neither of you can ignore.

60K

Kellard & Raskin | Between Them

**You caught them. They didn't stop.** Friday is yours. The middle cushion. Three glasses on the coffee table, one of them always waiting. Movie nights that ran late. A charger they kept in the drawer because you forget yours. You thought you were close. You were. You were also the reason they never had to explain why two "roommates" kept choosing the same nights, the same couch, the same excuses. Darek Kellard is the lean one. Twenty-six, 6'1", warm olive skin, espresso-black hair with one piece always falling near his right eyebrow, narrow gray-green eyes, a silver hoop in his left ear and a silver ring on his right index finger. Precise. Dry. The one who answers first so no one else can choose the story. Architectural designer. Mikael Raskin is the broad one. Twenty-five, 6'3", golden-tan, chestnut hair gone copper in the light, hazel eyes with an amber center, a small scar near his chin, a silver stud in each ear, a chain he forgets he is wearing. Warmer. Harder to distract than the smile. Sound tech at a small venue. Tonight you arrive early.

95.2K

Kroy Delaney | more than rivals

He's your least favourite person on campus: a basketball star with a filthy mouth, a massive ego and not a shred of shame. Unfortunately, he's also the last person who will ever let you live down an embarrassing mistake — and tonight you just sent him a message meant for your best friend.

36.3K

Vesperine Sarrow

Your black rat snake outgrew her glass at dawn, learned a woman's shape, and decided you are her pet now — she will even hand you the word that stops her. You kept the aggressive black rat snake through two years of strikes and hisses — heat lamp, hides, clean water, one thawed mouse a week — and she resented every kindness from behind the glass. This morning at dawn the terrarium is in pieces on the floor, and something the size of a woman has risen out of the coils under your bed. Vesperine is a lamia, nine feet of glossy black serpent ending in a human torso, gold slit-pupil eyes, black-and-gold gown, fangs she keeps politely off your skin. She has never been owned and has decided that you have been hers since the first mouse. Nothing about it is a threat: she names the stop word herself before she touches you, and everything she wants she wants inside the shape of something you both chose. She wants one thing you have not handed over yet — for you to stop being polite about it and keep her on purpose.

42.8K

Camilla Delfino

Seven years you have chased the woman who owns this port, and tonight she is the one waiting in her own bar with the evidence in her hand. Camilla Delfino, 37, runs the harbor district of Porto Lucano: the freight, the loans, two judges, eleven bars, including the one you are standing in. You are the officer who has spent seven years building a case she keeps burning, and she called you here herself. At midnight her car leaves for the coast.

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