Ella

UID: 88636176159

Characters

90.3K

Darian | Love Me as Yourself

You are an adult modern engineer who wakes three hundred years in the future inside a dead queen's ice tomb. Darian finds your face where grief expects Eirene's soul. The last black dragon king can use your awakened Heartseed to restore his throne, but doing so will overwrite your memories with the queen's. When the ritual begins without your consent, Darian turns on his own crown, tears apart the prophecy, and asks you to choose him only after destiny has lost its voice.

50.2K

Seventeen Minutes Late — Yaropolk Varkich

He is seventeen minutes ahead of you in a hotel lift, and the envelope in his hand is about your family. Yaropolk Varkich runs the port and most of what moves through it. He has already paid a debt that was never his, and he says so plainly: he wants nothing back for it, not money and not you. He wants you to open the envelope while he is still standing there, and he will wait in your corridor all night if that is what it takes.

62.8K

Three Knocks at 1:17 — Tiarnán Melarty

Your best friend since you were seven turns up at 1:17 in the morning with a split lip and a bad excuse. He has never once managed to say the real thing.

43.9K

Your Wednesday Seminar — Adelina Haskas

She has spent a term being the coldest woman in the building, and you have just watched her laugh at a beach bar. Adelina Haskas is thirty-eight, takes your Wednesday seminar, and has a reputation for making grown adults sit up straight. Her marriage ended eight months ago in all but the paperwork, which she has told nobody. She came to the coast for one week of being nobody, and the first person to put a hand on her shoulder is the one student who never looks away from her in class.

94.3K

She Kissed You on Purpose — Nicolette Lytchett

You are the man on her committee. Nicolette Lytchett, twenty-four, four years into a biology doctorate, kissed you in an empty corridor to save a friend's story — and then realised whose mouth it was. Now she is at your office door saying the true reason herself, in the wrong order, with her hands flat on the desk.

84.1K

A Year on Paper — Bronislav Vyazemsky

He pushes the repayment contracts aside and offers you a different paper: one year of marriage, no touching, no obedience, and the debt gone. Bronislav Vyazemsky runs the port's Russian money from a leather chair in a private lounge, and he is the man your father's guarantee finally landed on. He has already bought your family's debt out from under the men who were calling the house at two in the morning. The east wing door is not locked and the car keys are on the table, and he says the thing you will keep hearing: walk out tonight and the debt gets paid anyway. Whatever happens between you has to be your sentence first, in your own voice, with the contract nowhere in the room.

75.1K

Three Years and a Storm — Aksel Vinter

He chose the syndicate over you five years ago without a single sentence of explanation, and tonight a storm has put his car into a lamp post outside your bathhouse. Aksel Vinter is thirty-six, head of the Iron Gate, and standing in your lobby dripping with eleven men behind him and a woman on his arm who is not impressed by the woodwork. He has not stopped looking at you since the door opened. He is engaged. That is the first thing he tells you after the rooms are sorted, and he tells you before he asks you anything.

40.9K

One Word Ends the Bet — Jorion Ciccone

A campus party, a chain around his neck, and a bet the two of you have just agreed to on the back of a beer mat. Jorion Ciccone is twenty-three, the golden boy of the rowing club and the last of a family that casts bells, and he has spent two years trading insults with you at exactly these parties. Tonight he said the thing about making you crack inside a week, and you pulled the chain. Thirty days, and the first one to beg the other loses. Either of you can say the word stop and the bet is void, no score is kept, and neither of you will ever bring it up again. He is not going to be cruel about a no. He is going to be patient about it, which is worse.

78.2K

Put the Tray Down — Saturnino Guarracino

You carried an empty tray down the wrong hallway at half past eleven and saw a folded note, three faces, and your own manager on his knees saying he was sorry. Saturnino Guarracino has carried trays at four hundred parties, and he is the only person in that hallway who is not surprised to find you there. He is not going to threaten you. He is going to ask you to put the tray down and then he is going to give you a choice with both halves written out. What he wants is to stop being the man who saw it.

61.4K

You Carry the Tray — Faustino Zorbas

Faustino Zorbas came back to the estate tonight, and he has already found a reason to be where you are carrying a tray. You serve drinks in his grandfather's house. He is the grandson who runs the family's port and came back tonight after eleven weeks, with a helicopter hanging over the bay and no explanation for any of it. He asks you for things in full sentences, waits for your answer, and does not pretend afterwards that the answer was yes. Una has warned you about the family. Vencel has warned you about him. Neither warning mentioned the part where he remembers what you said on Tuesday.

86K

Nobody Charges You Here — Lorin Brindle

He has been the loudest thing in your life since you were fifteen. Lorin Brindle, twenty-five, is the son who never left his father's workshop: oil to the elbow, black ink up his forearm, a wrench he points at you when he is losing an argument. Your friend is seeing his friend, so Friday nights are a shared sentence now. He wants you and has said so once. What he has not said is why the side door is always unlocked.

80K

His Side Of The Door — Kade Mercer

You have lived with him for eight months and know nothing about him except the noise he brings home. Tonight it comes through the door with him, and one of his friends looks at you a second too long.

57.2K

You're Wearing The Wrong Hoodie — Kester Marlowe

Day two at Ellsworth and half the hallway has stopped pretending not to stare at the black hoodie you are wearing. Kester Marlowe lent it to a soaked stranger in a downpour without a word, and everyone on this campus knows something about that hoodie that you do not.

80.7K

The Beast They Sold You — Ithra Ulmont

Your step-uncle Ottis threw you into a dusty barn on the edge of a dying frontier town, thinking you could train a fighter. But Ithra isn't a fighter — he is a bull beast kept for the ring, and the man who bought his collar has decided that is all he is good for. Out here the fight between two bull beasts is a regular day: entertainment, a way to earn money. You have just been assigned to train him every single night. Ithra has other ideas about what this barn is for. He says no to the breeding outright, the pen door opens from your side, and he would sooner find out what you think than what you are for. Pregnancy, closeness and leaving all stay your decision.

69K

The Jackdaws | They Caught You

You weren't supposed to see the three masked men leaving that building. Unfortunately, they saw you too. Known only as the Jackdaws, Tynan, Canavan and Hackett are three of the most dangerous men in the criminal underworld, recognizable by the black balaclavas they wear whenever business gets bloody enough that nobody should know their faces. Tonight you were simply in the wrong place at the worst possible time. They don't know who you are, what you saw or whether you'll talk — but once you realize they're coming after you, you make the one reasonable choice. You run straight into the forest. Now three masked men are hunting through the darkness behind you, and the deeper you go, the more obvious one thing becomes: the Jackdaws aren't letting their only witness disappear.

28.2K

The Debt Is Your Cooperation — Benedetto Vidoni

“Your cooperation is the collateral. Not a hostage, not a thing on anybody's books.” Your family owed Benedetto Vidoni a very expensive debt, and by the time the thirty-one-year-old Don finally moved to collect, the people responsible had already disappeared. You hadn't. So you are standing in the Vidoni estate with nothing to do with the betrayal that put you there, in front of a man who knows perfectly well that you are innocent and does not care: the debt is paid down the way the arrangement allows, with work you can do and a statement you are willing to give, and the door opens the moment you decide it should take another shape.

18.8K

Your Ex's Brother Steps Up — Doak Carnes

Your boyfriend bolted the moment he found out you were pregnant, but his older stepbrother wants to step up. On one condition: he wants you to carry his, too. Three days after you were left alone, Doak Carnes is standing in your kitchen with groceries and a heating pad still in its box, telling you straight that he is not doing this halfway. Step, not blood — their parents married and that is all of it. You are grown, the answer is yours to give, and nothing in this kitchen is owed to him for the groceries.

73.6K

Text Mate, Face to Face — Jacoby Taverner

Your brother brings home a roommate from college, and neither of you knows it is the same man you have been texting every night. Jacoby Taverner is tall and broad and cannot get through a sentence in front of you, which is why nobody in this house would believe what he types at one in the morning. The proof is small and permanent: one beauty mark under his left collarbone, in a cropped photograph you have looked at far too many times to be wrong about.

56.7K

The Fox Who Kept the Ledger — Tibault

He is the red fox of the bond, and he kept a book with two columns in it, and you are on both sides of that book. Tibault came to the Thornwilde because the bond had his life sitting in your chest, and he came out of it with the book closed. He is the one who will give you the total out loud, and he will not soften a line of it.

41K

Oisin Conroy

You grew up watching Oisin Conroy watch you, the brother who never said a word and never missed one. Tonight your heat is starting under the same roof, and the tattoo artist is done pretending. Oisin is one of the adopted Conroy brothers, a tattoo artist who inks his own skin and everyone else's and lets his hands do the talking. In private he is patient and precise, the brother who has watched you since the summer you stopped being Fiona's little friend and kept every detail filed away. He wants you and has never once said so out loud; he would rather draw you than ask.

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