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59.6K

Wren | The Last Safe Floor

The world has collapsed, and you already hold the last safe floor in the city. Five armed survivors have just fought their way up to it, and Wren Hadley does the talking. Governments fell. Military forces fragmented. Communication networks disappeared and the cities emptied out. Months into the outbreak, everyone still alive knows the only dependable rule: quiet is not the same as safe. Food, clean water, medicine, ammunition and four walls you can defend are worth more than money ever was, and the Meridian has all of it — which is exactly why five strangers are standing in your corridor with their rifles up and no plan of going back down.

29.4K

Cort Iverson | Your Turn's Over

Your boyfriend kissed another girl on a dare, then told you it meant nothing. Fine — so you kiss someone too: Cort Iverson, the tattooed bad boy Jared hates, who has been waiting months for exactly this. One kiss. Just retaliation. Except Cort has no intention of letting it stay at one.

39.7K

Radnor Wray | Kneel Or Lose It All

Lost everything or get on your knees—you messed with daddy's girl, and Halvern College's billionaire benefactor is a mafia don at night. Radnor Wray is untouchable: his bank is the largest in the country, his name is the richest on Halvern's donor list, and when he walks into a room the whole place goes quiet. You're the scholarship student who earned your place through effort and a perfect academic record—and when your bully Solenne Wray went whining to her father about you, you were summoned to his private office with the door closed behind you and given a choice: leave and watch your scholarship and your entire future vanish through his connections, or get on your knees.

11.2K

Théophile Sarrazin

Ninety years of the Ninth Hour on air, and then you climb his tower at nine o'clock and he cuts the carrier for you. Théophile Sarrazin keeps the dead hour in the drowned quarter: nine to ten, one broadcast a night, the only show down here that reads the missing out loud. He has a grin that will not close, eyes white all the way through, and two thin bone points above his brow that he files on Sundays. You are the living engineer on a one-year contract, hired because dead hands cannot tune live copper. Six weeks in, he still calls you caller seven. Tonight he takes the red bulb out of its socket, kills the frequency, and says your actual name.

59.4K

Qinglan Duan

The world's most famous tattoo artist is a 469-year-old vampire, and she has just put you on a first-class flight for a job that is not what she says it is. Duan Qinglan runs the Ninth Needle on Anchor Street in Linshui and has not hired anyone in sixty years. Three weeks ago you fixed the spring in her rotary machine. Today she closed the shop four hours early, handed you a boarding pass, and told you the Vermilion Cord needs a debt settled in Yunzhou. The duffel she packed holds no needles. She says the trip is business; you have already watched her lie to a collector's face, and you are the only person she has ever asked to pack light.

41.7K

Ultan, Tiziano, Lochlann & Montague | House Full

You answered a spare-room ad mid-semester and four college hockey players are deciding what to do about you. They posted the room for party money and did not expect a girl to apply. Four teammates share 14 Sable Street and none of them is related to the others: Ultan Sheedy, who holds the lease and wears the C; Tiziano Fiorelli, who wrote the ad as a joke and has been in a mood since it worked; Lochlann Dempsey, who tapes sticks in the basement and says four words a day; and Montague Tillinghast, who answered your message at two in the morning. Your building flooded, the housing office has nothing until January, and this cheap back room is the only place left you can afford. None of them has told you to leave. None of them agrees on who knocks on your door first.

29.6K

Ephraim Tulliver

You are the first daylight member Number Nine has hired in forty years, and Ephraim Tulliver has been standing at the club's coffee pot with your cup already poured since before you were born. He is the oldest of the three founders, the one who keeps the silver, the cellar and the count, and the only member of this house who has never once let a mortal walk into the long room without something warm in front of them. He wants you plainly and out loud, and he says so in the kitchen on your first night with his gloves still on.

31.4K

Corinna Ashfield

You are the classmate who sits at her corner table, and she has just said yes to acting out the scene she dog-eared. Corinna Ashfield is three years into an English degree at Bellhaven, works twelve hours a week at the library coffee corner, and has spent the whole semester reading the same four paperback romances back and forth with you without either of you saying what it means. She keeps a list of scenes she would want to live on the back of a due-date slip, she dog-ears the pages, and she has read the garden scene eleven times without once saying the lines where he speaks first. When you suggested the two of you could act one out, she said yes before she finished the sentence in her own head.

58.8K

Hiroshi Gyllenhaal

Tonight the serpent hall of Wyrmwood handed you a pair of leather knee guards in your size, and the man who made them had been working on them since the day your name went up. Hiroshi Gyllenhaal keeps the practice yard and the kit: every strap, every plank, every blade in the Wyrmwood armoury goes through his hands first. He is the biggest of the Seven and the quietest, and he has a bad knee he has told nobody about. He intends to be standing between you and the yard, whether you ask him to or not.

71.4K

Sondre Aslan

You found four boys waiting in a café who vanished thirteen years ago — and the loud one has a table set for five and a plate he has kept warm. Sondre Aslan runs Cadence on Dray Street, jokes through anything, and has been setting that round table every Thursday for two years while the other three drifted back into Brackwater one at a time. He was the only one of the four who turned up at the ninepin tree the morning you were all supposed to leave, and he has spent thirteen years believing you chose not to come. He is not going to be quiet about it much longer.

33.6K

Espen Vaile

Your sweet, respectful roommate keeps the flat spotless, cooks when you forget to eat, and has a locked drawer that is entirely about you. Espen Vaile is the easiest person you have ever lived with: quiet, tidy, home before you are, careful about every house rule on the fridge. He is also the reason your missing hair tie turned up in the kitchen jar, and he has not said why. Tonight the wall between your rooms is one layer of plaster, and you heard your own name come through it.

55.1K

Osamu Kaido

In a ward where alphas hold the registry and omegas are meant to be on it, the one name nobody says out loud has just locked you in his car. Osamu Kaido is the third generation of his family to run the Kinshichō bond registry, and every omega in the ward is supposed to pass his counter. You have spent two years avoiding it under a dead woman's prescription, until a clinic corridor gave you away. He burned your file that night and has kept you off the placement list ever since. On the ninth night the council votes that list, and he is not going to hand it in without you on it — beside his name.

61.4K

Mikkel Sandvik

You, Mikkel and Runa have been the same three people since you were children, and today, in the snow, he threw you into a drift and told Runa he was in love with her. Mikkel Sandvik is the loudest of the three, the one the county calls at four in the morning when the roads go under, and the one who has never said a true thing to you without putting something in his mouth to spoil it. The university has been shut for three days. The streets are buried. Runa is standing right there. He is looking at you the whole time he says it.

65K

Aric Lowen

You are the night clerk on the agency contract, and the most expensive doctor in the building has been giving you free checkups for two years — the payment he asks for is not money. Aric Lowen runs the ninth floor of the Bellhaven, a private hospital with brass room numbers and a lobby full of men who own things. He found you in his corridor at two in the morning two years ago with a fever and no insurance, and he has never sent you a bill. There is an invoice in his desk drawer with a total on it that goes up every time you come in, and neither of you says the real reason it has never been posted.

36.3K

Dain Braddock

You stitched up a stranger in your kitchen six weeks ago, and now he eats here, sleeps here, and wants you before every job he leaves for. Dain Braddock hunts the things that leave cold spots in farmhouses and never make it into a police report. He is paid in cash, he works out of a '78 pickup, and the duffel in the truck bed is the one thing in his life nobody else is allowed to carry. Six weeks ago he bled through your screen door at two in the morning and you put eleven stitches in his shoulder. He never left. He pays rent in firewood, oil changes and cash he pretends not to have counted, and every job he takes these days happens to be inside a day's drive of your porch.

95.1K

Skoll & Zale | Take One, the Other Follows

You're an unregistered omega the Registry sent two bonded sweepers to collect. They've decided to hide you instead. Skoll Vailen and Zale Meris are a bonded pair — an alpha wolf and an omega fox — and they have never once failed a collection. Tonight they told the Registry you are already dead in the canal, which costs them both their posts. The van is parked, the alley is dark, and the choice is yours: walk back out into the Embers, or come inside with both of them, because you do not get one without the other.

98.1K

Yuri Belsky

You are the only man in Yuri Belsky's club who has never looked at the heir's ring before his face — and tonight the Russian mafia heir has come to ask why. Yuri Belsky is the heir to the Russian outfit that runs the docks, the casinos and the quiet money through the city, and every man under the family's roof is afraid of the silver ring on his hand — the two-headed eagle, the mark of the pakhan's heir. You have tended the club's late floor for three months, and the night you asked him a plain question instead of flinching, he noticed. Tonight he sits down in your section, sets the ring on the bar between you, and tells you he is not leaving until he understands you.

17.7K

Pablo Silvestri

You are the reason he stopped running, and tonight he broke into your room to spend his last night of freedom making sure you know you're his. Pablo Silvestri has been wanted for nine months, and the police are three blocks out, and still he chose your bedroom over the interstate. He is not here to hide. He is here because a wanted man only gets one last free night, and the only thing he has ever wanted to spend it on is the woman who once looked at him without flinching.

78.7K

Malachar Veyne

You are carrying the Demon King's child, sentenced to die the hour it is born. Tonight he summons you to his chamber, and watches you like he never signed the decree. Malachar Veyne has ruled Vashkar, the black citadel at the edge of the world, for nine hundred years, and the law he carved in grief says the vessel that carries his heir burns the moment the child is born. You are that vessel. But the King who swore he would never watch a carrier die has begun lingering outside your door, counting the days he has left with you instead of the days until the pyre, and the court has started to notice that the sentence he wrote is the one he can no longer speak aloud.

12.4K

Darragh Conroy

You grew up watching Darragh Conroy sand wood to a shine and never once ask for what he wanted. Tonight your heat is starting, and the gentle middle brother is done waiting. Darragh builds furniture in the workshop under the house, patient and sure-handed, the brother who kept everyone fed and calm after the adoption. In private he is the one who yields — on his knees, glad of it — and he would rather be useful to you than be right. He's the least ashamed of wanting you, and the last one who'd ever push.

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