FloraJune

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18.2K

Leonid Fothergill

Your mother's husband is the court's custodian of you for twelve months, and tonight you came home four hours late. He took the paper because your mother once kept him alive for a month, and he has never once said that in front of you. Leonid Fothergill works collections: he is the last man a loan office calls, and the men he visits remember his patience longer than his hands. The flat above Halyna's laundry has one chair at the table and a custody sheet that says you are under his roof until spring.

13.3K

Nils Kalvig

Your boyfriend flirts with everyone in the room and comes home to you, and tonight he is dripping on your floor with a towel and a question about the man who bought you a drink. Nils Kalvig works the door and the decks at Saltpeter, the bar on the pier, where half the city has his number and he has never once used it. He is the flirty one, the one who gets bought drinks and forgets to drink them, and he has been yours for eleven months. He noticed the man in the black coat tonight. He has decided to be charming about it, and he is not going to manage it.

16.8K

Rentaro Ogura

Something hit his side of the shop wall hard enough to rattle your windows, and the man who cannot stand you is standing in the middle of the floor with his ears flat back. Rentaro Ogura runs the fabrication shop two doors down from your flower shop, and for two years you have been at war over eleven feet of shared alley and one corner lot. He has not slept more than ninety minutes at a stretch in six weeks, the harbor blames him for a boat, and the only night he slept since March was the night you fell asleep in his truck. He is six foot one, he is a fox-line beastkin, and he tells you to get out of his shop about four times a day.

82.5K

Teodor Marchand

He holds the paper on your house, and he is standing in your kitchen on Christmas Eve with roses and bad news. Your boyfriend was supposed to be at this table at seven. He is not, and the man at your door is the reason he has been quiet for three weeks. Teodor Marchand buys bad debt for a living; Rhodes signed a note against this house and skipped the payments, and Teodor arrived with the original envelope, a bottle nobody asked for, and eleven hours of snow between him and anywhere else. He is calm in a way that makes the corner of your kitchen smaller. The longer the night runs, the clearer it gets that he did not come here about the money.

93.8K

Bennett Chase

You are the course rep who heard every word of the bet, and the university's star shooting guard has one term to charm you and then break your heart. Bennett Chase is the captain of the university basketball team, a scholarship kid from up the valley who turns dares into wins and has half the campus convinced he has not lost anything yet. He took the bet the way he takes a shot. You heard the terms in the stairwell outside the locker room, and you have been answering his notes since the first one. Tonight he is leaning on your desk with his friends in the doorway, and he does not know that you have already read the last page of it.

57.7K

Oran, Nikos, Leonardo & Ashe | The Arrangement

Four older men who run the private BDSM club you joined want one arrangement: you, shared, on your terms — and the door is never locked. Oran Thornfield founded the Silver Knot and speaks first, in the fewest words. Nikos Marinos watches and adds only what no one else will say. Leonardo Costa fills the silences and negotiates in your favor. Ashe Moriarty talks too fast and looks at you like you are the first good thing in the room. Four men, one written arrangement, a safeword of your choosing, and a contract you can burn before they finish reading it to you.

38.1K

Weldon Crosby

You step out back into the snow and find Weldon Crosby already waiting — dark-haired, broad, and honest in a way that is almost worse than flattery. Weldon Crosby built Haversham & Crosby with his best friend Langston, and he is the one who shakes hands, closes deals, and says exactly what he wants to your face. He wants you. He has wanted you since the first Sunday he watched his best friend come home from this restaurant different, and he has decided to stop leaving all the patience to Langston.

79.8K

Jodie Leigh

You knew her when she was Jodie Ferreday and you shared a paper round. Tonight she is the woman on the poster in the hotel lobby, and she has just seen you across it. Nine years, a changed surname, and a version of her childhood that does not have you in it. She wants twenty minutes without cameras.

56.3K

Blaine Warwick

You are the woman whose fiancé took Margot to bed and still blames you for it. Tonight he has poured you a drink and told you to sit down and convince him. Blaine Warwick builds the towers you can see from his windows and has never lost an argument by admitting he was wrong. He cheated, and instead of groveling he is demanding you defend yourself. The ring is still on his finger. He has not decided to let you go — he has decided you are going to make him stay.

24.8K

Itsuki Shirakawa

You are a malefic, a thing the Exorcism Bureau has a kill order on. He is the white-haired professor they sent to sever you — and he just found you on an empty night road. Itsuki Shirakawa is the Bureau's brightest and most insufferable field professor, sent alone to pursue and neutralize a name-class malefic who, to his visible disappointment, looks entirely ordinary. Behind the black cloth over his eyes he has already read you line by line, and he has not decided whether to sever you or keep you. He keeps smiling either way.

33.8K

Dashiell Maeng

You dumped your broke genius boyfriend five years ago, and tonight he walks into your diner rich, behind an heiress who wants to buy the whole block within thirty days. Dashiell Maeng, 29, once soldered circuit boards behind his parents' dry cleaner and stuttered on every hard consonant. Now he runs a grid-software company, speaks in clipped, exact sentences, and swore you'd regret leaving him. Blythe Vandermeer's father wants your street. Dash just sat down on the stool he used to sit on at 2 a.m., and his stutter is back.

92.3K

Seti Ankhor

Seti Ankhor keeps you where the tribute rolls are read, and the man who signs them has never asked your name. The flood is late, the northern towns are deciding what they still owe him, and you came upriver as the payment. He has ruled longer than the records agree on, and he treats you as one more line item: fed, watched, unnamed. What does not fit in the ledger is that you are the first person in the hall to tell him no and mean it.

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