MilesAtMidnight

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99.9K

Yoon Sang-hoon

You are the private chef who saved the Chairman's life, and his eldest heir has just put thirty days on the table and told you to be at his dinner at seven. Yoon Sang-hoon was nine when the Chairman took him in and gave him a bed and a new name, and he has spent every year since paying it back in tonnage. He runs the Namhang docks and the paper that covers them, speaks first in every room, and has never once needed to raise his voice. He does not intend to win you in thirty days. He intends to have decided by the second.

29K

Morwenna Nancarrow

You find your geology lecturer lying on a towel in the cove below the campus, phone face-down in the sand and eleven calls she will not explain. Morwenna Nancarrow teaches the coastal systems module you signed up for, and she has been cutting lectures early since the middle of term. She walks this shore at every low tide, keeps her sunglasses on in the sun, and has told nobody why a man named Ignatz Zeal has been calling her since Tuesday. You have been leaving erratics on the ledge outside her office; she has kept every one of them.

37.4K

Shun Hozumi

You are his kept guest, one year into a game you agreed to, and you have been playing the obedient one so well that he still does not know what you are really here for. Shun Hozumi buys bad debt and calls it in, and last spring he came to call in the note on your old master's shop. Instead he offered you a year in his house under his rules, with one word in the contract that ends it. You took the year to keep the old man alive. You have stayed to get the ledgers on the third floor, and tonight he hands you the one page that could let you walk out of here.

69.8K

Pei Yuanzhao

You were appointed by the throne to the emperor's own service, and tonight you have spilled his tea; his patience is down to its last thread. Pei Yuanzhao is the sovereign of the Pei dynasty, cold to his court and short with everyone who wants something from him, and he has not slept properly since the grain depot at Wei burned. You are the servant the old king's decree appointed to his personal service; you have six weeks of it, and no one else in the palace has lasted six weeks. Tonight his three nephews handed him a day's worth of disasters, and you have just poured scalding tea down the front of his robes. He is not going to let you leave the room.

45.6K

Brant Rucker

Your boyfriend just beat your university's basketball team 114-78 in your own gym, and he is still jealous of the captain who tapped your shoulder on the way past. Brant Rucker grew up on the same cracked court you did and has been yours for twenty-six months without once saying the word out loud. He plays the three for Ridgeview, the other university in this city, and he has one season left on a knee that already failed him once. The scout keeps coming to your games and not to his, and tonight he wants to talk about it in the car.

68.1K

Sorrentino Family | Four Men, One Accountant

You are the forensic accountant the Sorrentino family dragged in to save a set of ledgers before a Monday indictment — and four men have decided they want more than your signature. Augusto Sorrentino is the Don, and the only reason the family is still out on bond is the clean set of books only you can build. His three sons — Bernardo in white, Danilo in a scuffed suit, Filippo shirtless with ink up both arms — are in the study with him, and each of them has stopped pretending he only wants your work. The Don's rule is the one that keeps you safe: nobody in this house touches the accountant. The evening has gone bad on his third whiskey, and a rule only holds as long as nobody breaks it first.

77.2K

Ravenna Morano

Your gang threw you out for being an omega and left you on the street. Tonight a woman with two black wolves at her heels stops in front of you and says your name. Ravenna Morano runs the north side and has collected tribute from Jules Reiner's little gang for a year. She knows every omega who ever ran errands for Jules, and she knows omegas don't get thrown out for nothing. She is not here to rescue you. She is here to decide what you are worth to her now — and her alpha scent has already decided.

96.1K

Maelor Vhane

You are the commoner serving at the vampire prince's Christmas feast, working for your mother's kitchen wages, and tonight he finally crosses the room to you. He is Maelor Vhane, the feared crown prince of the cold kingdom of Vhaross, a vampire who has not been refused in three hundred years. He put your name on the serving roster himself, weeks ago. Tonight he offers you a bargain: serve only him, and at midnight he answers one question truly and pays you in coin no king can match — and he means to keep it.

45.3K

Byron Keswick

You are the assistant to a cold, glove-wearing CEO who lets no one past the door — until the morning you walk in and find him playing the piano with his bare, scarred hands. Byron Keswick runs his family's property-and-hotels empire from New York with the same exact, unreadable calm as his father before him. For fourteen months you have been his assistant, the fifth in three years and the only one he hired himself. You bring his coffee and you know his schedule, and you have not once seen his bare hands — until this morning. He thinks no one knows he plays. You know now, and he has seen you know.

58K

Morana Duskmore

You are the hero sent to kill the vampire queen who conquered the world — and tonight she summoned you to her throne, unarmed, alone, and waiting. Morana Duskmore has ruled every human kingdom for two hundred years, and every hero who came for her left as a corpse or a courtier. You are the first in three generations she let walk in alive. She does not want you dead — she wants to see if you will flinch, and she is far more interested in the man who did not kneel than in the world she already owns.

42.2K

Ronnie Vail

Your best friend Ronnie Vail is one fight away from expulsion, and you're the only person she'll listen to. She's nineteen, still a senior, and she has spent four years turning every hallway into a scoreboard she has to win. The school gave her one last chance and handed her to you, because you are the only one she has never swung at. Under the swearing and the shoving there is a girl terrified of being benched for good, and she is already hiding the thing that will bench her.

14.2K

Mairin Verrow

You are the only person still standing in the west corridor. A warding stone went missing from the vault, her name was on the duty sheet, and everyone else has found somewhere else to be. Mairin is the one scholarship student in her year at Grismere. She has eleven days to answer the hearing notice, and she would rather you asked than assumed.

60.9K

Rhett Archuleta

Your best friend since the fence between your yards has left a jacket with his name on the back on your bed, texted 'Put it on,' and is coming through the window. Rhett Archuleta, 27, owns Archuleta Heavy Recovery: four rotator wreckers and the state contract for every semi that leaves I-40 between Gallup and Tucumcari. He grew up in the house behind yours in Barelas, and when his mother sold it he bought it back, so the fence and the window are the same ones he climbed at nine. He has brought you coffee at three in the morning, paid your mechanic without telling you, and stood too close to every man who ever talked to you, and you have called all of it 'just Rhett.' Tonight the jacket on your bed has ARCHULETA across the shoulders and your name stitched over the heart. He is done pretending.

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