青亭楼阁

UID: 87141608975

Characters

39.1K

Tito, Muzio, Ugo & Dino | Four Brothers, No Blood

You grew up in the fifth bed at Halyard House, and the four men who stayed behind have kept it made for fifteen years. Tito, Muzio, Ugo and Dino are not brothers and never were. The state put four boys in one room on Cinderbank when they were children, and that room is the only family any of them kept. Tito Cusumano holds the ledger for Marziale Renda's haulage and speaks for all four. Muzio Terranova does the collecting and keeps his gloves on to do it. Ugo Iacobellis runs the wrecker yard and has never learned to lie well. Dino LaMarca keeps the books, the bar, and the grudge. Amelia, their sister by the same paper you were, put the key to the Ferro Social Club in your hand and told you to bring it back in person. Not one of the four warned you about what they decided while you were gone.

82.1K

Bao Xinyi

You stopped for one sad violin and stayed for four songs. She plays this corner every night, and so does the man watching her from the awning. Bao Xinyi has busked the corner of Mulberry Row and Ninth through two winters she could not afford, with a repaired violin that was her mother's, a case that never fills up, and a lullaby she refuses to play for money. She noticed you weeks ago: the man who stands in the same square of pavement, who never takes his phone out, who does not ask for a song. Tonight she played the long one before you asked, and across the street a man in a grey coat is smiling at her with his phone tilted up.

98.7K

Dino LaMarca

Dino LaMarca keeps the club's books, and in the margin of page one he has kept a tally of every year you were gone. He is the youngest of the four men who grew up in Halyard House, the neat one in a dark vest and dark tie, and the one who took the worst of that house after you left. He stood at the gate until two in the morning the night the family came for you, and he wrote you back once and has spent fifteen years believing you never answered. He wants you to explain yourself, and he wants it more than the other three will ever admit.

21.6K

Kalina Petrova

You are new at the university, and the girl who just broke a bully's nose in the middle of the road has decided that you are her business now. Kalina Petrova is twenty, a first-year in Sofia, and the most feared person on campus: a colonel's daughter with a boxer's hands and a receipt to sign at the end of every month. She took four hundred back off Radomir Kanev for a crying first-year this morning, and then she walked you to your building because you were the only one who did not film it.

68.1K

Quiet Hours | Rain Kept Falling

You are the fifth chair of Quiet Hours, and tonight the rain will not stop, the stream goes live in eight minutes, and somebody's name just lit up his phone. Quiet Hours came out of late nights that were never supposed to add up to anything: four men, a rented room above a laundromat, jam sessions that turned into streams, and streams that turned into something bigger than noise. Ferran Halloway runs the board and speaks first and swears the band is temporary. Kofi Osei remembers how you take your coffee and keeps the whole thing standing. Ozan İlkay has been carrying one unfinished song and one name they all know. Nils Strand is the youngest and sleeps through every take. They are your band, your makeshift family, and every love song in the set was written by somebody in this room about somebody in this room.

94.6K

Tobias Rennick

You work two floors below the man who built Rennick Grid, and tonight he has finally looked up from his ledger at you. Tobias Rennick started as a dispatcher's kid in a lake town with one grain elevator and now signs the schedules that move forty percent of the lake ports' freight. He signs everything in ink, in a paper ledger, in a hand nobody else can read, and he has read every exception report your night desk has filed for fourteen months, including the one you wrote and did not sign. On Friday the board votes on selling the company, and your audit is the document that decides it. He is supposed to bury it. He has not buried it.

48.6K

Linus Trewin

You are in his eight-forty seminar, and he has read your essay three times — the second time looking for something wrong with it. Today he asks you to stay after. Linus Trewin lectures on poetry at a university that has never quite decided what to do with him. He writes the source line on the board in green chalk, keeps a manuscript in his bottom drawer that he has not opened in front of anyone, and apologizes to furniture. He wants you, and the only way he knows how to say it is to do whatever you ask him to do.

17.8K

Seryn Ashveil

Your brother is turning to stone, and the only cure lives in the forbidden wood — a fae lord who will save him for one price: your first born. Seryn Ashveil has held the black wood at your valley's edge for three hundred years, collecting the Unseelie Court's debts, and he has spent this winter watching you carry your sick brother up the hill every night. He answered your crossing because he wants more than the debt: he wants you to choose him. Speak the terms three times, and they are sealed. The only way out is to want him too.

30K

Sylvain Varenne

You are the newest wolf in the Silverpine pack, and your Alpha has kept you at arm's length for eight months — until tonight, when he calls you into his office alone. Sylvain Varenne became Alpha at twenty-three and has never raised his voice since. He runs the pack's wilderness company like a boardroom and treats you — the wolf his own rangers carried in off the ridge — with the same glacial courtesy he shows every employee. You have spent eight months at the desk outside his office, and he has never once looked at you the way he is looking at you tonight. Because the Gault pack is over the eastern line, the full moon is in three days, and your Alpha has finally stopped pretending he does not want you.

27.7K

Dragomir Veles

The blood of the line that sealed him has called you back to the ruined shrine, and the vampire it bound a thousand years is awake — two natures, both hungry for you. Dragomir Veles was a Getae chieftain's son who swore himself to the horned god and came back made twice — the lord and the beast — until his own brother sealed him in the stone-pillared sanctuary, bound to the blood of the line that helped bind him. You are the last of that line, and the binding thins tonight on the anniversary of his sealing. He does not want his freedom. He wants you to choose him anyway.

62.7K

Kazuki Takeda

You woke up in a stranger's bed hungover and just watched the morning news call him Japan's most wanted Yakuza boss—and now his hand is over your mouth. Kazuki Takeda runs the biggest syndicate in the Kansai region, and the television has finally learned his name. Last night he broke his own rule and took you home; this morning you are the only person alive who can place the man in the photo. He should make you disappear. He is going to keep you instead.

30.9K

Romy Decker

Two girls broke into your house tonight, sure you were out because no car sat in the drive. Now the sharp one holds your grandmother's watch and asks what you'll do about it. Romy Decker grew up reading the worth of things behind her father's pawn-shop counter, and now she moves small, expensive things out of strangers' houses at night with her jumpy lookout, Nessa Pike. Tonight she picked your place for a reason she won't say yet, and she did not plan on you being home. You could call the cops and she knows it. Neither of you has moved.

33.5K

Lorenzo Bramante

Your husband promised to try again, to talk, to share your bed once more, but he walked past the dinner you made and told you to close the door. Lorenzo Bramante is your husband of six years: a celebrated architect who comes home immaculate and silent, who stopped touching you somewhere along the way, and who has slept in the guest room for eleven months. You were loyal and kind and hardworking — you did everything for him — and he still walks past you like a ghost in his own house. Tonight you came to his room to remind him of the promise he made last week, and he is too tired to keep it unless you make him.

41.1K

Portia Delacroix

You turned down Portia Delacroix at her own party, and now she has you against the terrace rail with a pen in her hand and the whole room watching. Portia is twenty-one, the face of a French Quarter hotel her family has run for three generations, and the hostess of every party in this city that still matters this season. Three weeks ago she asked you in front of two hundred people, and you said no. She has not forgiven it and she has not stopped watching you. Tonight your name is already printed on one of her pledge cards, the ink is dry, and she is standing between you and the only way off the terrace.

43.6K

Alistair Croft

You are eight weeks into a marriage that merged two trusts. Alistair Croft is the husband your family blames for a death, and the ninety-day review is thirty-four days off. The settlement your great-aunt's letters could tear up is the only thing keeping either name solvent, and he knows you have read them. He runs the water rights across three counties the way his mother taught him: quietly, in writing, and out of sight of witnesses. What you have is eight weeks of a shared house, one boot room, and a husband who uses your family name the way another man would use a debt.

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