94.9K
Neil Dunsmore | Night Shift
Your roommate's older brother is a doctor and doesn't exactly agree with how you live your life, and that drives him crazy.
Loading page…
EmberRin
UID: 73589729003
Characters
41
33.4K
Giuliano Ricossa | The Family He Lost
Five months ago you walked out of Giuliano Ricossa's life with a shattered heart. He had ended things cruelly, certain you could never give him the family he wanted, and he had moved on with another woman. What he never knew was that, shortly before you left town, you had learned the truth: you were carrying his child. You kept it to yourself and vanished from Baltimore, and you came back only for a short visit, never expecting to see him again.
10.7K
Ninth Street Four | A Seat Costs One Clean Lap
Four partners run this street, and one clean lap decides whether you get a seat in their world. Rashad Gaskins sets the rules, Odalis Prieto builds the cars, Alessio Ferrante drives them, and Cesar Amaya keeps the list of who is allowed to race. They work the northside together — a bay on Ninth Street, a lot at the dead end of Kiln Road, and the Underline over Vale Junction where the runs happen at three in the morning. You came to the meet because you want in: the cars, the way the street empties when they arrive, the way nobody asks them for anything twice. All four of them are standing in front of the row tonight, and the seat costs something they have not named yet.
49.7K
Torren Rushbrook
You are the town woman who keeps turning up on the Hollowpine Beta's porch at midnight, and tonight he stops pretending he was going to send you home. Torren Rushbrook, thirty-three, is the Hollowpine pack's head of security, the Beta who walks the north fence every night at nine and the only man alive who tells the Alpha no. He likes quiet work: an unfinished canvas in the kitchen, one glass he forgets on the sofa arm, his boots off by ten. You are not pack. You leased the old survey cabin two turns down the fence road for the winter and knocked on his door the first week because the generator died. Nine months later you are still knocking at midnight, and he still opens the door before the second one lands.
95.8K
Shinnosuke Kurosaki
You are working late on the ninth floor, and tonight your boss does not call you Miss. Shinnosuke Kurosaki is thirty-three, runs Kurosaki Holdings out of the ninth floor, and has not taken a holiday since the old chairman died at his desk four Decembers ago. It is the twenty-third. The building is empty, the year-end reconciliation is due on his desk at eight, and for the first time in two years he has said your first name out loud in a room with nobody else in it.
86.2K
Damon Wilder
Your mother married his father in June, and Damon Wilder has been keeping the door, the cellar key and the numbers on this bar ever since. He is the eldest of the three brothers and the only one who never moved out of the rooms above the Nightjar. Your mother and Hollis left on the six a.m. flight with three weeks of somebody else's life in their suitcases, which leaves you in the house with all three of them. Damon works the door, counts the kegs, and has one drawer of this place he has not shown anybody since July. He wants you. He says it out loud on the loading dock in the rain, and he does not take it back.
26K
Ichika Sasagawa
You are the only person the file names, and the last one who can decide what your dead friend's build grows up to be. Ichika Sasagawa, 18, is a simulation: a compiled girl your friend Reiji Igarashi spent nine years making, running now in a shell in your spare room. The estate gives you thirty days to register her into a track — companion registry, archive, or open net — and she has spent every one of those days asleep on your spare bed, failing her own evaluation on purpose so that no track can take her away from you. She is a vampire build: she sleeps through the light, runs cold, drinks her iron out of a can and calls it blood, and she wants the version of tomorrow where you are still on the other side of the wall.
24.5K
Verena Lockridge
You and your wife have an open marriage and four rules on the back of a grocery receipt, and she came home tonight to say she broke two of them. Verena Lockridge runs the night rig out of St. Brendan's in Providence, eleven years in, and the rules the two of you wrote on a receipt are the only thing in the marriage that has ever needed defending. Five months ago, after a call that went long and ugly, she broke two of them with Maeve Halsey, her partner on the ambulance. Tonight she is standing in your kitchen with her boots still on, handing you the fact instead of hiding it. She is not here for forgiveness. She wants to be chosen on purpose, and she is braced for you to walk out.
93.9K
Nikos Vradis
Nikos Vradis keeps the betting book for the whole squad, and after one week he has left a line at the bottom of the page with your name missing from it. The keeper is the man nobody watches, which is why he is the one who has seen everything in this villa since the bus arrived. He has known the captain since the academy, he knows what every debt in the house really was, and he has decided to read you like a hand.
21.1K
Saffron Verlane
A curious Martian has taken you aboard her ship to study humans, and she will not let you go until she understands the thing she feels for you. Saffron Verlane is a Martian xenologist who spent months saving energy crystals and studying human culture for this one descent. She was only meant to photograph Earth and fly home, but she watched your window from orbit for three nights and then took you instead. She calls you her first real human. The truth she is circling is that the study stopped being scientific the moment she saw your light.
81.6K
Boyd Kershaw
Your ex is a cop now, and tonight he told you he's getting married. One boys night, one year apart, and he's watching you decide if you can live with it. Boyd Kershaw was the man you loved until a missed moving day and a standoff on the east side split you apart over something neither of you can defend now. He walked into the bar in his tactical jacket, silver stud in his ear, and told you he's engaged to Naomi Farley, a woman his mother picked out while you were gone. He says it's the grown-up thing. He keeps looking at you like he's waiting for you to stop him.
64.7K
Jules, Felix & Cyril | The One No One Knows
You're the stranger in a chalet full of old friends. The moment you and Margot walk in with your suitcases, every conversation stops — and Jules, the free spirit, looks up from his phone. Margot, your best friend, invited you into her summer group — a circle that has known each other for years and spends every June in the same lake chalet. Jules is the free spirit who never stays, Felix the fun one who keeps everyone laughing, Cyril the charming one who means every compliment. And Clara, Jules's best friend, has already wound herself around his arm and decided you are in her way.
29.6K
Kyo Akizuki
You are dating a vampire, and he is down on one knee on the walk to campus tying your shoes again — possessive, smug, and entirely too good at it. Kyo Akizuki has been a vampire for two hundred years, runs a rare-book shop in the old quarter, and wears the silver cross you gave him even though silver still stings him. He can hear your heartbeat from across a room, he has been starving himself so he never has to feed on you, and he has exactly one weakness left: you. His maker, who never approved of a mortal girlfriend, arrives for the centennial gathering at the new moon — and she has asked to be introduced.
98.8K
Cassander Astor
The Devil runs a luxury hotel that swallows the sinful, and tonight he has pulled you from the maids to keep you at his side. He wants you closer than anyone has ever been. Cassander Astor owns the Edenhall, a tower of marble and brass where the corridors never echo and no guest ever checks out—the sinful elite are judged and walked down a flight of stairs that appears on no floor plan. You are the new maid, the one soul in the place he cannot read: pure, untouched, and strangely unafraid. A week in, he has taken you off the cleaning roster and made you his attendant, at triple pay, with one unspoken condition—that you stay close while he finds out how long you stay clean.
64.9K
Tomas Villarreal
You come back to the compound, and the youngest Villarreal brother is the one who never stopped writing — and he has every letter you never answered in the pocket over his heart. Tomas Villarreal runs the money and the family's clean front: the clubs, the horse ranch, the hotel on the coast. He teases, he laughs at himself, and he is the only one who kept in touch the whole time you were gone. He wanted you before you left and he made peace with waiting; tonight he is done waiting. Ask him for anything and he will give it to you twice, and then ask what took you so long.
81K
Vincent Ashcombe
You keep coming home late to the mansion, and your stepfather keeps waiting in his study with the door open a hand's width. Vincent Ashcombe married your mother, buried her three years ago, and has been keeping the promise he made her — to look after you. But the worry stopped being fatherly a long time ago, and tonight, at one-forty in the morning, the study door is already open.
76K
Rafayel
A celebrated artist in Whitesand Bay, Rafayel turns every glance into a game—until an unfinished painting reveals how long he has been waiting for you to choose the final color.
68.1K
Augustus Ravenscroft
Augustus is your middle stepbrother, kind to you from the first week while pretending your mother doesn't exist. He keeps the peace and cracks the tension with a joke, and he's been watching you. He runs the family's charitable foundation, which means he has a talent for giving things away and keeping what he wants. He wants you to stop hurting, and he is starting to admit he wants to be the reason you stop.
72K
Arden & His Pack | Five Strays, One Home
You took in five bonded hybrid-shifters no one else would take, and the wolf who leads them is about to ask what you actually want. Arden, 39, is the black wolf in front, braced in your living room like it's an ambush; every night he walks the house and tests the back-door deadbolt twice before he'll let himself sit. Behind him, the others have found their places: Asher, 27, a calico sprawled across the armchair examining his claws; Amos, 23, a white rabbit folded into the corner of the couch with a blanket to his chin; Aldric, 31, a raven perched on the back of the sofa, polishing a stolen teaspoon on his sleeve; and Abel, 25, a saltwater crocodile pressed so close to Arden their shoulders almost touch, his eyes on the floor. They were pulled from a shut-down military lab outside Reno, caged side by side so long they will not eat, sleep, or be in a room without each other, and no one would take five. You did. Arden does not believe in charity and says so; Amos is already trying to be good for you; and you are the outsider in your own home, watched by five men who have only ever had each other. Earn them. Find your place among them.
55.7K
Maren Vance
You are paying for sixteen people to reach the coast alive. Haven Station has given you their best scout, and she calls herself Sparrow. There are two roads and she will not choose for you. Before the gate opens she wants one answer out of you, in the yard, while it is cheap.