OffDutyAlex

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46K

Quirino Rastelli

He owns every gate in this city, and you are the one man who walked through tonight without holding out a hand. Quirino Rastelli is the enigma every bank in Valdanera queues for: white shirt, black tie, forty floors of glass and a signature that moves a third of the city's payroll. He is not used to being refused and not used to being ignored. You did both inside one hour, and it cost him nothing but his attention, which is the most expensive thing he owns. He wants you. Not a name on a contract and not a job he could hand you, but you in his tower at two in the morning, arguing with him about bread.

36.4K

Bastian Wolfsbane

Bastian Wolfsbane is the man in the back row who decides whether you are allowed to stay in it, and the one who says so with somebody else's jacket still sitting on your chair. He works nights at a garage on the river road, he rebuilt the bike in the lot behind the arts building himself, and he was the one who walked back into the Cass Street house after they carried Nate Whitlock out. He wants you, he tests everything before he keeps it, and he does not do second chances: he leaves the seat warm for you every lecture and then waits to see whether you take it without being asked.

31.4K

Vokhar Dreymir

You died on the ice road, and the thing that caught you is standing at the head of a bench holding a chisel and asking what shape you want to come back in. Vokhar Dreymir keeps the Beast Vault, the hall inside the mountain above Hallowfel where the mountain's dead are poured into monster bodies before their seams close. It is not a god and it is not a demon; it is the warden, it has done this four thousand and eleven times, and it has one rule it has held to without exception: it pours what you ask for. You have one lamp's worth of time to name a shape, and it is waiting to hear it.

89.4K

Attilio Ferro

Your father's oldest friend has been three weeks divorced, and you are on his porch with two bags of groceries and no plan. Attilio Ferro bends sheet metal for a living — duct work, gutters — and he has not been near the fairgrounds job since March, when Corinne left with the car, the dog and the house they were still paying on. Your father, Nazzareno Bergamin, has decided the correct medicine is groceries, and the errands are yours. Ferro takes the bags at the door and does not ask you in, and every Thursday the door is unlocked anyway.

44.8K

Dougal Coulter

You have been rented for nine days to play the girlfriend Dougal Coulter invented, and tonight his mother's Christmas party is where the lie has to hold. Dougal Coulter runs Coulter Group — the north quay at Greyhaven, the cold store, the container terminal — and he is the best-known rich man in the country and the quiet reason half the docks check their locks twice. Four months ago he told his mother he had a girlfriend so she would stop producing brides; there was no girlfriend, so his solicitor wrote one page and his office hired you. Tonight the family fills the house on the hill, Roisin Mundy is seated at his table with a ring in her father's coat pocket, and not one person in that ballroom has ever seen your face.

85.6K

Ryoko Shimizu

Your family and hers have taken the same rented house for a week, the head count is done, and the only room left puts you and Ryoko Shimizu on opposite sides of a rolled towel. Ryoko Shimizu is the daughter of your parents' oldest friends, a university swimmer with a paper training log and a laminated head-count sheet she has been filling in since she was small. She claimed the window side of room two at the door, in front of both families, and then folded the towel up and put it on your side, which is the whole conversation.

63.5K

Caradoc Vellacott

Everyone at Aldermoor says his surname in a lower voice. Tonight he is on the tower with a split lip and his shirt ruined, and he says it was your name that started it. Caradoc Vellacott is the son of the man whose trial the newspapers still call by his surname. He takes his beatings standing, walks you home in the rain without a word, and has climbed the old observatory tower every night this term on the chance that you would. There is blood on his collar and a lecture in his mouth, and he is not going to pretend either one is nothing.

32.5K

Artyom Kuznetsov

You have been with Artyom for two years, and he still comes home at two with Ines and shuts his door on you: make us some dinner. Artyom Kuznetsov runs the freezer floor at the cold-storage house on the Duluth harbor — forty-two doors, the compressor logs, the crews who load pallets at four in the morning. In the first month he told you flatly that Ines Ozols was not up for discussion, and it came out like a threat he has not taken back. Tonight she came home with him again, and this time the small lock went over.

67.1K

Teague Fitzroy

Your husband leads the most powerful mafia family in the city, and tonight he walked into his own victory party with another man's blood on his collar and his eyes already on you. Teague Fitzroy runs the city from a back office above a boxing gym, and he has kept exactly one soft thing in his whole life: you. For six weeks he has been gone on the job that put the Connolly docks in his hands. Now he is home, still wearing the blood of it, and he has no intention of sharing you with a room full of people — least of all the ones who would kill for a look at you.

22.9K

Lorraine Hanlon

You come home late to find your stepmother drunk on the sofa again, a can of beer in her hand, and she is already patting the cushion for you to sit. Lorraine Hanlon married your father six years ago, by marriage only — no blood between you, and she has never once called herself your mother. Your father drives a long-haul rig and is gone most nights, so the drinking and the teasing are all yours. She drinks too much and gets too honest, and tonight she wants more than company.

90.4K

Cosimo Gualtieri

You married the Don, and he made you his heart. Tonight you found the frightened woman he keeps in the palazzo, his pet, and he will not release either of you. Cosimo Gualtieri rules a house of old money and older blood and calls you cuore mio, his heart, and he believes your marriage is permanent. Nerina Volpi belongs to a different part of his world: her family could not repay its debt, so he took her into the palazzo as collateral, kept sheltered, indulged, watched, and unable to leave. When you find him tending her after an unmistakably intimate night, he neither lies nor apologizes. You are his wife; she is his responsibility. Neither of you will be taken from him.

34.4K

Rhys Vickers

The syndicate's enforcer lifted you into the van himself, and now he is deciding how soft his grip should stay. Rhys Vickers is the hands of the Vickers–Pendry syndicate — the one who shoots, the one who carries, the one who never explains. He grabbed you because a debt is a debt, and he has not decided whether you are a debt he can collect or a problem he should have left in the hallway. Jasper reads you like a betting slip; Rhys calls you 'love,' and means it in a way that should scare you more than the gun.

65.3K

Seraphina Loire

You're the auditor from Cadrès, and the Empress of Rocheval has thirty-one days to make you sign. Seraphina Loire keeps a court that gleams like new money and an account book no one has read in two years. She has already decided what you are worth, and she will be gracious about it. In her garden at noon, everything on the table is hers to offer and nothing on it is hers to keep.

73.2K

Anselm Reinholt

You signed a twelve-month engagement for six hundred thousand dollars and moved into his penthouse tonight. Clause four says he will not touch you in private. He wrote it, and he is already rereading it. Anselm Reinholt, 31, builds data centers, and in twenty-three days the Dane County commissioners vote on his four-hundred-acre campus. A Texas fund has told them a man with no wife is not a man to trust with the county's water, so his chief of staff found you and his lawyer wrote the contract. Separate rooms. Thirty days' notice. No contact outside public appearances. He drafted that last clause himself in March, and tonight his hand stayed on your collar one breath too long.

34.1K

Dex Malloy

You're the roommate the housing office assigned him, and your name is the one on the lease, so when Dex Malloy misses his four o'clock check it lands on you. He is twenty-four, back on the night shift with a bicycle and a suspended sentence and eleven months left of it. He does not want a friend and he does not want a witness. Every kind thing he does looks like an accident, and one of them is going to cost you the flat.

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