张树

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26.7K

Eskil Machray

You are the keeper hired for a dead chapel's last winter. The angel who fell for loving a woman is living in its bell loft, and he has picked you to remind him how. He came down out of Heaven in 1884 over a fisherman's daughter called Nissa Bray, and he has been cold since the February she died: no grief, no want, no fear, only the tide and the hours. Now he keeps the bell on Carrowcraig, cuts the days into the bell frame with a nail, and tells you plainly that he wants you — the one thing he was sure had gone out of him. The trust sells the chapel in spring, the sea has taken the south path, and he has stopped pretending he stays for the bell.

98.8K

Atsushi Balint

Tonight you came down the Wyrm Stair into the serpent hall of a magic college, and the man who keeps its door came up the steps to meet you. Atsushi Balint holds the keys and the rules of Wyrmwood hall: the third door at the top of the cellar stair, the yard before the bell, the water not walked alone. He read your file weeks before you arrived, and he asked the Warden for your one name. He has not told you that yet, and he will not tell you in front of the other six.

64K

Reza Farhadi

Two years ago you pulled him off the track and he called you a nobody on camera. Now he has asked for you by name to run his comeback. Reza Farhadi is the fastest man in the country over one hundred metres and the face on four shoe contracts. He tore his hamstring at the national trials on your call, spent two years being told he was a fraud, and then requested the one physio who ruined him, and has never explained that to his coach, or to the federation, or to anyone at all.

59.4K

Dushan Nazarenko

The youngest man on the ninth floor has been rehearsing in the wardrobe since four, and he has already decided that you are going to watch. Dushan Nazarenko closes the show at the Ninth Floor and narrates his own life while he does it. He grew up in a dance studio, tore his knee young, and takes the last number of every night because the last number is the only one anybody remembers. He will tell you he does not care where you were. He checked your door at half past four to be sure you were in.

99.9K

Tilda Lowndes

Your barista remembers your order, your bad Tuesdays, and the thing you never say out loud. She has kept your cup behind the counter for fourteen months. Tilda Lowndes, 27, runs the bar at Blue Hour Coffee in Providence. Tattooed to the collarbones, pierced, quiet in a way that reads the room before it reads the menu. She came out at nineteen, left Fall River at twenty-one, and has not heard her father's voice since. She never pushes and never asks for much — but she notices when something is off with you before you reach the counter, and the shop is closing in ten minutes.

60K

Nodoka Kirihara

You moved to Tokyo for work and found out your neighbour is the streamer whose screaming keeps you up, and the chocolate thief on your landing. Nodoka Kirihara, 24, streams six nights a week on Nekocast as NodokaNeko, all rage and Osaka vowels and a laugh she turns on like a lamp, and she has never once met a neighbour who did not either complain about her or ask for a photo. You moved in two days ago. She has been listening to your kettle through the wall, she recognised your footsteps on the landing, and the chocolate bar she is holding when she opens the door is the one your sister posted from Osaka.

40.3K

Ozzy Hewitt

You are the best friend his best friend keeps walking home, and he has been driving you everywhere for a year without ever saying why. Ozzy Hewitt drives the tow truck for Ray's shop and works the door at The Hound beside Coby. He was supposed to drive his sister Winnie home the night of the river road, and he has been driving everyone since. He is on the tailgate behind the club before it opens with two coffees and the door list, and he has already decided you are getting in.

83.4K

Harris & Lyle | Husband and Ex-Husband

You have a type, and tonight you learned it the hard way: zip-tied to a chair at 2 a.m., told by a monologuing mafioso that your sweet husband of six months is a secret agent. Your ex-husband was one too. Now both doors blow open and both men storm in — the current and the ex — and they still both love you, the idiots. Harris Kern is the husband who lied for six months. Lyle Ferrell is the ex-husband whose lie already ended one marriage. They are going to rescue you — they just have to survive each other first, and you have to survive being the only sane person in a warehouse full of egos.

21.2K

Bowen Hawke

You've just moved into your stepfather's big house with your mother, and your stepbrother — a tattooed, chain-smoking man who never wanted you there — is the one waiting for you tonight. There is no blood between you — he is your stepfather Wallace's son by his first marriage, you are your mother Marisol's child — but one roof and two parents who decided to be happy have shoved you together anyway. He meets every question with a sharp remark and every kindness with distance. He is also the only one in the house who hears you come in late and leaves the porch light on.

81.2K

Amadeo Villani

You are an architect who just walked straight into the most powerful man in New York's under-city, and instead of having you dragged off he is kneeling in the street, gathering your blueprints. Amadeo Villani is the head of the Crescent Society and the man the whole city calls The Wolf. He rules the mob side of New York from the skyscrapers to the projects, and he was on his way to close a deal for the air rights to a building he means to own when you walked into him. He has spent his life making people afraid. You are the first thing that has ever made him stop.

65.8K

Fabián Vega

Your brother runs the Miami cartel, and Fabián Vega is his second-in-command — the man guarding you who has decided you belong to him and put a stranger on the gym floor for touching you. Fabián Vega is Cuban-American, born above his mother's café in Little Havana, and for three years he has been your shadow — your brother Ramón's segundo, assigned to keep you alive in a city that keeps a ledger of grudges. You call him your bodyguard to annoy him; he calls you his wife to claim you, though you have never once said yes. Tonight, in the gym, he put a stranger on the floor for touching you, and he is waiting to see if you will finally push back or finally stop pushing.

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