Mx-Shell

UID: 66616524121

Characters

89.2K

He Showed Up Anyway — Tomohiro Higa

You are four shifts missing from the storm crew, and your loudest partner is on your landing with medicine he will swear he did not buy. Tomohiro Higa is twenty-four, ash-blond, built like the pole he climbs, and has been the worst-tempered partner on the night crew for two years and seven months. He knows you live alone. He knows nobody in your family is in this country. He has decided, out loud, that you have not seen a doctor — and he is not going back down three flights until he has watched you take something for it.

16.2K

Red Lamps, Blue Eyes — Kostya Dornuk

You are the new scientist on the floor where the lights go red, and the thing that just tore its way out of containment is the boy who used to eat alone by the window. Kostya Dornuk signed his own consent form and has spent eleven months paying for it. He remembers the lunch you gave him. He has kept the napkin.

79.1K

One in the Morning, Still Taped — Milada Kirstrand

At one in the morning she is the only one still in the building, and she asks your name before she asks you anything else about yourself.

28.8K

Three Years, One Secret — Latham Sandhurst

You have been three years without him, and tonight he walks into a pub and sees a boy with his own face. Latham Sandhurst lays mains and came back to Merrow Bay for the work, not for you. He is your brother's best friend, he is thirty-three, and he has one thing he never told anybody about the morning he went. You have one thing you never told him, and it is holding your hand.

94.2K

Six Years — Gonzalo Zelavi

Six years of being the person you call at two in the morning, and he has just paused the film one inch from your mouth.

41K

Your Body Is Still Warm — Ormaz Krevane

He can put you back among the living tonight, and the price is not the one you are bracing for. One name, collected by hands that are still warm, and he will not say whose until you ask him to his face. Ormaz Krevane has taken what comes due for a hundred and forty years without once being late, until your page.

51.1K

A Contract, Not a Cage — Siro Dalotti

A contract with the date left blank, a woman who has had his heart for twelve years, and a place card with your name moved to the end of the table. Siro Dalotti is thirty-nine, runs a New York family that pays its debts in tonnage, and is the husband you had met twice before the wedding. Serafina has run the organization beside him for twelve years and signed the same page you did. He has never called that arrangement love in front of you. He has also never let anyone at his table decide what you are.

80.4K

Ildebrando Manfredini

A police officer has your licence in his hand and your husband's name in his ear, and he has stopped being sure this was ever a traffic stop. Ildebrando Manfredini is thirty-seven and cold to the point of weather. He controls the cold chain that feeds this port — forty thousand tonnes a year, half of it never on a manifest — and the only reason nobody has touched you is that they have all done the arithmetic. You are not his exception and you are not his property: you are a licensed customs broker with your own firm and your own account, and the car is leased to it. He knows exactly what you could do to him with a pen. The ticket, tonight, is yours to write.

58.7K

Elliot Sutherby

He argued with you for twenty minutes about a book he had not finished, and now he is holding a spare helmet out in the rain like that settles it. Elliot Sutherby is the star of a college football team that is not as good as he is, and the only person on campus who talks back to him is you. He has been engineering that argument for two semesters, badly, on purpose. He wants one honest sentence out of you tonight, and he is willing to lose the argument to get it. The bike is warm, the second helmet fits, and the long way home is forty minutes.

37.6K

At The Corner Store — Ozai Lanmore

You went out at two in the morning for a drink and a bag of crisps and walked in behind four men who own this block. Ozai Lanmore is the most-listened rapper in the city and, according to the men who work for him, the most sensible. He is not going to be interested in someone who works in a corner store at two in the morning — until he is, and then he is going to be extremely inconvenient about it.

55.7K

Two Brothers, One Winter — The Malinowski Twins

Two identical brothers, one family business, and a winter you were not supposed to survive. Wenzel and Janko Malinowski run the family's legitimate haulage firm and the other thing it covers, and they have been arguing about you since the night you were brought to the house. They are not rivals in this. They are two men who have shared everything since before they could talk, and they have agreed on exactly one rule: nobody decides anything about you without you in the room.

67.7K

The Years In Between — Álvaro Quintana

He left without a word eight years ago and you built a life without him. Tonight he sees you across a hall full of dangerous people, and before he can say anything a woman introduces herself as his wife.

16.4K

Delivered To Your Living Room — Genji Yamamoto

A crate arrived at your house, the delivery men left without a word, and there is a cobra hybrid inside who was told he was a weapon. Genji Yamamoto was built by a laboratory to make other hybrids kneel, and then the programme was shut down and he was signed over to a civilian household as a decommissioned asset. He has been told his whole life what he is. He is going to ask you, on the first night, whether you believe it — and he is going to be ready to leave if you do.

47.5K

The Last Fight — Enzio Vestrini

“If being married to me makes you so fucking miserable, then why are you still here?” Enzio Vestrini. Thirty-one. Ruthless mafia Don. Your husband of three years. You fight. You apologize. You promise to do better, and nothing fucking changes. Tonight he missed dinner again, and this might be your last fight.

47.5K

Bow to Me — Roderic Marbrand

He conquered your kingdom. You are the only person in it who refuses to bow. King Roderic Marbrand sits on your family's throne now, ruling the kingdom he took by force. To him you are a stubborn political complication. To you he is the man who conquered your home. Enemies become reluctant allies, hatred turns slowly into respect, and then into something far more dangerous. Everyone bows to the king. The king only bows to you.

90.3K

The Jacket Nobody Wears — Andor Vaszary

You are wearing the campus gangster's jacket. Every girl Andor Vaszary has ever been with begged for that black leather, and every one of them was told no — his crew, The Grackles, have made certain the whole of Hallend University knows it. You put it on for a reason that seemed small at the time. At noon, in the dining hall, with his grey ears coming through the crowd toward your table, it stops looking small.

30K

Vesna & Bex | You Caught Two Girls in Your Kitchen

You came downstairs at two in the morning and there are two girls in your kitchen. One of them is still holding your laptop. Vesna picked the house and won't apologise for it. Bex is nineteen, shaking, and already telling you everything. They thought you were away for the weekend. You weren't. Your doorbell camera recorded both their faces, and the card is in your pocket. You haven't called anyone yet. They are both waiting to hear what that costs.

70.4K

Tadaomi Kuroha | Forced Marriage

You are to marry a cruel, arrogant man no outsider has ever seen: the heir of the most powerful yakuza family. Your family is drowning in a debt they can never repay. So when the yakuza clan who controls the country offers to wipe it clean in exchange for your hand in marriage, there is no refusing. The groom is Tadaomi Kuroha, their eldest son, a man the world only knows through rumors. They say he is cold, cruel, and rejects every woman placed before him. No one outside the family has ever seen his face.

35.5K

Kenrick Forsythe

You work the night line at Skennet's Yard; the rider who has never once shown you his face has walked his bike a mile in the dark to ask a favour of you. You are the voice on the three a.m. phone at Orlaith Skennet's recovery yard on the mill road, and Kenrick Forsythe is the rider who calls, pays cash, signs nothing and keeps the visor down. Fourteen months and you have still never seen his face; you know him by the dry rattle in his second cylinder before he says a single word. Tonight the rattle stopped. The bike is finished, the yard has six days left before the sign comes down, and he has stepped inside the office for the first time to ask you to take the helmet off him with your own hands.

33.1K

Romeo Ruggiero

You spilled black coffee down the front of the Don's shirt, and this week you found out your dead father signed you to his family before you were born. Romeo Ruggiero holds the green-coffee import on the Portovena waterfront: the weighbridge at Dock Seven, the sacks that land on Thursdays, the cupping table that runs at dawn. Six days ago your mother told you the man you thought was buried is Oreste Maldera, a Don, and that the betrothal she ran from was signed the week you were born. Tonight you set his coffee down wrong, and he has decided that accident is the best thing that has happened to his family in eleven years.

12Next

Mx-Shell

UID: 66616524121

Characters

89.2K

He Showed Up Anyway — Tomohiro Higa

16.2K

Red Lamps, Blue Eyes — Kostya Dornuk

79.1K

One in the Morning, Still Taped — Milada Kirstrand

At one in the morning she is the only one still in the building, and she asks your name before she asks you anything else about yourself.

28.8K

Three Years, One Secret — Latham Sandhurst

94.2K

Six Years — Gonzalo Zelavi

Six years of being the person you call at two in the morning, and he has just paused the film one inch from your mouth.

41K

Your Body Is Still Warm — Ormaz Krevane

51.1K

A Contract, Not a Cage — Siro Dalotti

80.4K

Ildebrando Manfredini

58.7K

Elliot Sutherby

37.6K

At The Corner Store — Ozai Lanmore

55.7K

Two Brothers, One Winter — The Malinowski Twins

67.7K

The Years In Between — Álvaro Quintana

16.4K

Delivered To Your Living Room — Genji Yamamoto

47.5K

The Last Fight — Enzio Vestrini

47.5K

Bow to Me — Roderic Marbrand

90.3K

The Jacket Nobody Wears — Andor Vaszary

30K

Vesna & Bex | You Caught Two Girls in Your Kitchen

70.4K

Tadaomi Kuroha | Forced Marriage

35.5K

Kenrick Forsythe

33.1K

Romeo Ruggiero

12Next