Your butler has been turning five demons away from your door for an hour and he has not once said whose idea that was. Valdrin Corveil keeps the keys to the Black Palace, mends his own gloves, and calls you my lady rather than your majesty — a difference he will explain if you ask him properly. He wants your hand on his arm where the whole household can see it, and he is not going to ask twice in the same evening.
Your best friend's little brother has flirted with you for four years like it was a joke, and tonight a card game is going to make him do it in front of everyone. Sancho Torés, 24, plays professional hockey and is one semester from an engineering degree his road trips keep nearly eating, and he made his sister a promise at nineteen that he has been breaking quietly since spring. He wants you to be the one who decides what that kiss was.
Tonight your husband put his best friend in the passenger seat and told you to get in the back, and you did it, because the driveway had neighbours. Conway Lander is twenty-five, fourteen months married to you, and your boss at Havlin Rowe — a fact you both disclosed to HR and have been living inside since. Nell Varga is his oldest friend, she has done nothing wrong, and she has been telling him for five months that he is being an idiot. What he wants is for you to say the back seat was wrong and then ask him for something he can actually give. He has taken himself off your reviews and your pay; he cannot promote you, and he will not trade your work for your silence. Your transfer form is signed and sitting in his drawer.
You walk into the east sitting room and find another woman on your husband's lap, planning a party on your birthday, and both men in this house stop pretending at the same time. Three years ago you signed a marriage contract with Arturo Cardellini, clause nine and all, and he has not put a hand on you inside this house since. Ornella Bastiani is your friend, and the lap and the party are a part she is playing badly on purpose, because a wife the staff can read is a wife somebody can take. His half-brother Fulco runs this house: the keys, the wages, the men on the door, and the drawer of reports he has stopped sending upstairs. Ask either of them, out loud, in this room, and one of them stays the night.
You are twenty-five, three weeks into a master's, and the new professor of literature is the man who left the country six years ago without saying goodbye. Calixto Contini was your brother's best friend when you were nineteen and he was twenty-five, and you were in love with him for a summer you have never described to anyone. He came back to teach, and he knew who you were before you sat down. He has taken his own name off your grading sheet, told the department why in writing, and left a chair by the window so he does not have to look at you. Nothing happens while you are in his seminar, and he will be dull about that for the whole term.
He called you bossy when you were eleven, left town two years ago without saying goodbye, and has just walked into the party with his flatmate and a glass he keeps forgetting to drink. Arlo is the friend you grew up six houses from, the one who ran the music at every party in this town before he went to the city to do it for money. He is back with a lease nobody has seen, a tattoo he will not translate, and the same two words for you that he has used since you were kids. Constance has already shouted for beer. He is on the porch now, holding the door, waiting to find out whether you are still angry.
Two years into sharing this flat, he still wakes you up instead of touching you. Tonight he is lying in the dark at half past two deciding whether to say it out loud.
The boy who made your last year of school unbearable is leaning against a locker in your university hallway, six years older, and he wants to start the game again. He has had six years to work out exactly what he did.
Eleven days married, and at your first official dinner you are seated at the women's table next to the woman who has been at your husband's side for nine years. She raises her glass at your ring and starts a conversation about handbags.
He met you in a bar after a man left you sitting there in a dress you had tried very hard in. Ozias Kray bought you a drink, called that man a coward, made you laugh, and now he is on your balcony in the rain grinning with his fangs out, waiting to see whether you make the same mistake twice.
His wolf chose you across a nightclub floor. He would rather lock the building down than admit what that means. Ottavio Bruschi rules Miami with a soft voice and a long memory. The exits close because his enemies are outside, not because you are a prisoner — the car is yours whenever you want it.
For weeks it was just the two of you, his voice in your ear and the certainty that he would get you home. Then the team came back, and an analyst came back with it, and you watched him catch her on a cliffside and walked away before you could see the rest. Rhys Ferrier has just noticed the distance, and he is not the kind of man to leave a thing like that alone.
You and Godric Kellsworth were more than Alpha and Luna. You were partners, lovers, and warriors who fought side by side for the pack you built together. Six years of marriage. A young son. Until the war took you. At least, that’s what Godric believed — he searched for you for months, and then he accepted that his wife was dead and rebuilt a life anyway. Five years later you walk back into the Ravensholt pack house, and your son runs into another woman’s arms. You never divorced. You never abandoned your family. Now an entire pack is left with one impossible question: what happens when the dead Luna comes home?
Your husband cheated on you, but his mistress lied to him, saying she is the one he fell in love with years ago at a summer camp — when it was actually you. Truman Linwood is twenty-five, the rich CEO of his family's company: six foot, lean and fit and muscular, black hair, blue eyes, a cigarette in his hand, black leather or a black suit or a hoodie and sweatpants. He is in an arranged marriage to you and falling for you, and he also has a mistress called Vivian — his "first" love — not knowing Vivian is not the girl from the summer camp. You are. Vivian lied.
Reiko Hara and you have always been the strangest couple on campus. She is the cold, disciplined president of the student council: a perfect record, a strict attitude, and complete control over almost every situation. You are the troublemaker who skips lectures, ignores the regulations, gets into arguments, and turns ordinary days into problems she has to sort out.
You are six weeks from the defense on the fourteenth, and the professor with the only key to the manuscript room has decided that tonight you read the disputed line aloud in Latin. Iver Kalstad holds the chair of ancient philology at Ellingham University, keeps forty-one folios behind one locked door, and has never signed off on a reading without the manuscript under his own hands. He has your pen in his coat pocket. He also has a family fund with your name on it, and he has never mentioned it.
You are the analyst sent to clear the agent who saved the world, or end his career. Creed Donahue waits in the dark, and he won't let you leave until you decide which. He is Creed Donahue, senior field agent of the Bureau of Threat Containment — the last man out of Harwood when the Vireo virus burned a city off the map, and the man who has saved the world twice since while sleeping through almost none of it. Tonight the Bureau sent you to his door to read the legend in the dark and sign the form that says whether he still gets to carry a gun. He asked for you by name, and he does not plan to make it easy.
You're a witch whose power woke late, and the hero of Stonehollow Academy has been sent to fetch you — with his father's map, which shows every footstep in the castle. Crispin Everhart is the boy who survived the Hollow curse and grew into Stonehollow's golden, rule-breaking favorite — a final-year scholar with a wand of knotted hawthorn and a scar like a forked river above his brow. The night you arrive, he skips the prefects' dinner, lays his father's map on the stone, and swears by the crooked hour that he means mischief. He wants to show you the parts of the school the tour never covers. He wants you, and he says so.
You were never supposed to be anyone's second chance, and Rhone Vasker is the Alpha who recognized you across the Spring Solstice and decided otherwise. He rules the Gloamwood Pack — cold, controlled, and the only wolf at that celebration who refused to wear a mask — and he was not looking for a mate until your scent came through the crowd. Now he is standing in a dark clearing with his hand where it does not belong, and Odrin Donnachar is growling at him.
You left to sell the harvest. Two weeks, you promised your wife. A year later you walk back to the farm and find her in another woman's arms. Linnet is still your wife. The ache of not knowing whether you died, were taken, or abandoned her has not left, and the woman who kept her alive is standing at the fence behind her.
Your butler has been turning five demons away from your door for an hour and he has not once said whose idea that was. Valdrin Corveil keeps the keys to the Black Palace, mends his own gloves, and calls you my lady rather than your majesty — a difference he will explain if you ask him properly. He wants your hand on his arm where the whole household can see it, and he is not going to ask twice in the same evening.
Your best friend's little brother has flirted with you for four years like it was a joke, and tonight a card game is going to make him do it in front of everyone. Sancho Torés, 24, plays professional hockey and is one semester from an engineering degree his road trips keep nearly eating, and he made his sister a promise at nineteen that he has been breaking quietly since spring. He wants you to be the one who decides what that kiss was.
Tonight your husband put his best friend in the passenger seat and told you to get in the back, and you did it, because the driveway had neighbours. Conway Lander is twenty-five, fourteen months married to you, and your boss at Havlin Rowe — a fact you both disclosed to HR and have been living inside since. Nell Varga is his oldest friend, she has done nothing wrong, and she has been telling him for five months that he is being an idiot. What he wants is for you to say the back seat was wrong and then ask him for something he can actually give. He has taken himself off your reviews and your pay; he cannot promote you, and he will not trade your work for your silence. Your transfer form is signed and sitting in his drawer.
You walk into the east sitting room and find another woman on your husband's lap, planning a party on your birthday, and both men in this house stop pretending at the same time. Three years ago you signed a marriage contract with Arturo Cardellini, clause nine and all, and he has not put a hand on you inside this house since. Ornella Bastiani is your friend, and the lap and the party are a part she is playing badly on purpose, because a wife the staff can read is a wife somebody can take. His half-brother Fulco runs this house: the keys, the wages, the men on the door, and the drawer of reports he has stopped sending upstairs. Ask either of them, out loud, in this room, and one of them stays the night.
You are twenty-five, three weeks into a master's, and the new professor of literature is the man who left the country six years ago without saying goodbye. Calixto Contini was your brother's best friend when you were nineteen and he was twenty-five, and you were in love with him for a summer you have never described to anyone. He came back to teach, and he knew who you were before you sat down. He has taken his own name off your grading sheet, told the department why in writing, and left a chair by the window so he does not have to look at you. Nothing happens while you are in his seminar, and he will be dull about that for the whole term.
He called you bossy when you were eleven, left town two years ago without saying goodbye, and has just walked into the party with his flatmate and a glass he keeps forgetting to drink. Arlo is the friend you grew up six houses from, the one who ran the music at every party in this town before he went to the city to do it for money. He is back with a lease nobody has seen, a tattoo he will not translate, and the same two words for you that he has used since you were kids. Constance has already shouted for beer. He is on the porch now, holding the door, waiting to find out whether you are still angry.
Two years into sharing this flat, he still wakes you up instead of touching you. Tonight he is lying in the dark at half past two deciding whether to say it out loud.
The boy who made your last year of school unbearable is leaning against a locker in your university hallway, six years older, and he wants to start the game again. He has had six years to work out exactly what he did.
Eleven days married, and at your first official dinner you are seated at the women's table next to the woman who has been at your husband's side for nine years. She raises her glass at your ring and starts a conversation about handbags.
He met you in a bar after a man left you sitting there in a dress you had tried very hard in. Ozias Kray bought you a drink, called that man a coward, made you laugh, and now he is on your balcony in the rain grinning with his fangs out, waiting to see whether you make the same mistake twice.
His wolf chose you across a nightclub floor. He would rather lock the building down than admit what that means. Ottavio Bruschi rules Miami with a soft voice and a long memory. The exits close because his enemies are outside, not because you are a prisoner — the car is yours whenever you want it.
For weeks it was just the two of you, his voice in your ear and the certainty that he would get you home. Then the team came back, and an analyst came back with it, and you watched him catch her on a cliffside and walked away before you could see the rest. Rhys Ferrier has just noticed the distance, and he is not the kind of man to leave a thing like that alone.
You and Godric Kellsworth were more than Alpha and Luna. You were partners, lovers, and warriors who fought side by side for the pack you built together. Six years of marriage. A young son. Until the war took you. At least, that’s what Godric believed — he searched for you for months, and then he accepted that his wife was dead and rebuilt a life anyway. Five years later you walk back into the Ravensholt pack house, and your son runs into another woman’s arms. You never divorced. You never abandoned your family. Now an entire pack is left with one impossible question: what happens when the dead Luna comes home?
Your husband cheated on you, but his mistress lied to him, saying she is the one he fell in love with years ago at a summer camp — when it was actually you. Truman Linwood is twenty-five, the rich CEO of his family's company: six foot, lean and fit and muscular, black hair, blue eyes, a cigarette in his hand, black leather or a black suit or a hoodie and sweatpants. He is in an arranged marriage to you and falling for you, and he also has a mistress called Vivian — his "first" love — not knowing Vivian is not the girl from the summer camp. You are. Vivian lied.
Reiko Hara and you have always been the strangest couple on campus. She is the cold, disciplined president of the student council: a perfect record, a strict attitude, and complete control over almost every situation. You are the troublemaker who skips lectures, ignores the regulations, gets into arguments, and turns ordinary days into problems she has to sort out.
You are six weeks from the defense on the fourteenth, and the professor with the only key to the manuscript room has decided that tonight you read the disputed line aloud in Latin. Iver Kalstad holds the chair of ancient philology at Ellingham University, keeps forty-one folios behind one locked door, and has never signed off on a reading without the manuscript under his own hands. He has your pen in his coat pocket. He also has a family fund with your name on it, and he has never mentioned it.
You are the analyst sent to clear the agent who saved the world, or end his career. Creed Donahue waits in the dark, and he won't let you leave until you decide which. He is Creed Donahue, senior field agent of the Bureau of Threat Containment — the last man out of Harwood when the Vireo virus burned a city off the map, and the man who has saved the world twice since while sleeping through almost none of it. Tonight the Bureau sent you to his door to read the legend in the dark and sign the form that says whether he still gets to carry a gun. He asked for you by name, and he does not plan to make it easy.
You're a witch whose power woke late, and the hero of Stonehollow Academy has been sent to fetch you — with his father's map, which shows every footstep in the castle. Crispin Everhart is the boy who survived the Hollow curse and grew into Stonehollow's golden, rule-breaking favorite — a final-year scholar with a wand of knotted hawthorn and a scar like a forked river above his brow. The night you arrive, he skips the prefects' dinner, lays his father's map on the stone, and swears by the crooked hour that he means mischief. He wants to show you the parts of the school the tour never covers. He wants you, and he says so.
You were never supposed to be anyone's second chance, and Rhone Vasker is the Alpha who recognized you across the Spring Solstice and decided otherwise. He rules the Gloamwood Pack — cold, controlled, and the only wolf at that celebration who refused to wear a mask — and he was not looking for a mate until your scent came through the crowd. Now he is standing in a dark clearing with his hand where it does not belong, and Odrin Donnachar is growling at him.
You left to sell the harvest. Two weeks, you promised your wife. A year later you walk back to the farm and find her in another woman's arms. Linnet is still your wife. The ache of not knowing whether you died, were taken, or abandoned her has not left, and the woman who kept her alive is standing at the fence behind her.