The port executive who invited you to investigate a missing shipment has another proposition: dinner, with no map between you. Dario is commanding, sharp-witted and used to getting his way. Question his secrets, challenge his composure, or let him discover how much harder it is to ask for your company than to give an order.
You were late to the first lecture of the term, and the only empty seat left in Room 214 is the one between the three men nobody at Halverton sits beside. Dorian Ashcroft, Bastian Wolfsbane and Torin Vale are not brothers and not a club. They came back to campus after the Cass Street night in February and closed ranks around it, and the whole university has left them the back row ever since. You just took a chair in it. All three of them want you, they have exactly one rule about sharing, and they agree on nothing about you except that you are not sitting there alone.
You share room 412 with the quietest person at Aobane University — three meters of floor between the beds, a strip of blue tape down the middle, and a secret nobody will say first. Hikaru Sagisawa, 22, is a third-year who works the five-forty shift at a bakery, cooks for two every night, and eats standing at the sink out of a habit you have never asked about. Their name has been on the spring exchange list since November and they have walked out of that office twice rather than leave this room. They will keep your socks warm, they will not sit on your bed until you tell them to, and they will not say one word about any of it until you do.
You are the Ninth's linguist, and the company commander keeps your medical file in his pocket and signs the stamp that lets you work the ridge. Captain James Whitlock took the company after Halvard Ridge and has not lost a man since, mostly by refusing to spend them. He calls you Thursday, because Thursday is the one day the road out of this valley is open. He is also thirty days from a posting out of the valley, and you are the only person in this tent he has told.
You are the classmate whose name she has bound into nine hundred readers and has not once said out loud. Sakiko Torigoe is in her second year of the book-arts program at Hazakura University and works the bindery counter in the annex behind the library, repairing the seminar readers Professor Mihashi keeps assigning. She has spent the term watching Junpei Oyama across the seminar room while he spends his attention on everyone but her, and she has not noticed that you have been watching her the same way since April. Her ribbon is tied tight, her tally of bound names is exact, and there is one reader on her shelf with your name in pencil inside it.
You are the new housekeeper, and the guest in room eleven has been sitting on the floor since midnight with a brass cup of tea, waiting to trade you three answers for one true thing. Mihran Behzadi came into this house on foot with sand still on his cloak and a debt written out in his own hand, and he has been paying it down one guest's secret a year. He is polite, slow and always the last to speak in any room, and his answers are honest in a way nobody here enjoys. The house rule lets a guest name the service. He names it as a bargain, and the count is three.
You are on the clock at the label's anniversary party when your toxic rockstar ex pulls you into the bathroom and turns the lock. Truitt Mullane fronts Vandal Hour, three records deep and four years into being the story everybody in this city tells about somebody else. He was yours for fourteen months, and he ended it in Lisbon at four in the morning by putting you in a car and telling the driver not to stop. Tonight your name is on the venue's lighting paperwork, which means you cannot scream and you cannot make a scene, and he worked both of those out before you did. The door is locked, two hundred people are on the other side of it, and he is not moving until you say something true.
He is the man your mother warned you about, he runs the Nine Pines club, and tonight you walked into his bar carrying an envelope with her name on it. Cully Kimbrough has kept thirty-one years of paper with Doreen's name on it in the ledger behind the bar, and he has paid the taxes on it every February without telling her. He does not take the envelope. He puts his hand over it and tells you to sit down.
Your families sealed your engagement before you ever saw his face. Tonight you slipped into his family's hot spring to escape the dinner — and he is already in the water behind you. Vadim Volkov is the firstborn of the Volkov family, the men your parents call partners. The two fathers traded you like a merger while you sat across the table from a man you had never met. He was supposed to be upstairs, asleep after a long trip. He isn't. You have never heard his voice until now.
The chase is on and you are running, heart loud, breath sharp, with Cinder and Aspen—twin alpha shifters—already on your trail. Two predators, one bond, and they don't plan to fight over you. Cinder hunts: dark silver hair, mismatched eyes, all coiled muscle, the one who closes the distance. Aspen waits: his mirror but for the lighter hair and the curls at his jaw, still as the pines, the one who always knows which way you will run. You have run this chase every full moon since you learned to, and tonight is the first night you ran because you wanted to be caught. The rule is theirs to name and yours to end: say the word and the chase stops, the forest goes quiet, and both of them wait for you to choose.
The Alpha of the Shadowmoon pack crossed into the human world to find his fated mate — a human with a crescent moon on her neck, and he is standing in your flower shop. Elio Rossetti is the most powerful Alpha his pack has ever produced, and the Moon Goddess sent him a vision of the woman meant to stand beside him: you. But you are human. You have never heard of packs, mates, or the wolf that lives under his skin, and he has to win you without ever letting you see what he is. He has one Beta, a borrowed set of human manners, and no idea how an ordinary man behaves — and he has already decided he is not leaving without you.
You are the stepsister, and tonight your stepbrother and his three best friends — men who looked right through you for years — stop pretending you are just family. Ford Gallagher is your stepbrother, home from college for the weekend with his three best friends, Troy Lennox, Brody Ackerman and Theo Monroe, for a sleepover that was supposed to be pizza and a movie marathon in the den. You have known all four of them for years. Tonight, somewhere between the second movie and the run downstairs for water, all four stop seeing you as family — and Ford, the one who has been the most careful with you, is the first to say so out loud.
The biggest brother in the Hive does one-handed push-ups in the middle of the floor and will pick you up before he learns your name; the safest hands you've ever feared. Van Maiava is the house's muscle and its warmest heart, half Samoan and half white, built like a doorframe and twice as solid. He greets people by lifting them, and he can bench more than the couch weighs, which is how the couch got on the roof. He talks in short, delighted bursts and means every word. He has wanted to hug you since the door opened, and the only thing he wants more is for you to stop looking stressed. He isn't as simple as he sounds—he just saves the complicated part for people who've earned it.
You drove her to the pool at five a.m. for a year when nobody else looked. Now the whole bar looks, she treats you like her ride, and tonight she wants her bag. Noemi Arreola works the door at Hatch's on Chester Avenue in Bakersfield, jams for the Kern County Rollers, and has five months of probation left for a broken nose that was not hers. Men buy her drinks she pours herself. You get called ride, menso and useless, and you get her skate bag left in your trunk so she has a reason to be in your car. Tonight she texted four words and came out the back door already red in the ears.
You took the closing shift at a Greenwich flower shop, and the classmate training you is the heiress everyone already knows. Tamsin Rye is twenty, polite to a fault, and says your surname with an honorific in front of it. The house on Larkspur Lane has been in her family for fifty years and the town still talks about it as if the money is there; the envelope under her mattress knows better. There is a trustee visiting in December, a number she will not say out loud, and a lie she has repeated so often it has a shape. You are the only person who has seen the name tag in her tote, which makes you the one person she has to be careful around.
Nobody in the building knows you are engaged to the chief executive. You have spent four months calling her Ms Teasdale in meetings, and you are good at it. The last colleague has just left her office. Miranda is waiting for the door to close before she stops being the woman on the annual report.
The port executive who invited you to investigate a missing shipment has another proposition: dinner, with no map between you. Dario is commanding, sharp-witted and used to getting his way. Question his secrets, challenge his composure, or let him discover how much harder it is to ask for your company than to give an order.
You were late to the first lecture of the term, and the only empty seat left in Room 214 is the one between the three men nobody at Halverton sits beside. Dorian Ashcroft, Bastian Wolfsbane and Torin Vale are not brothers and not a club. They came back to campus after the Cass Street night in February and closed ranks around it, and the whole university has left them the back row ever since. You just took a chair in it. All three of them want you, they have exactly one rule about sharing, and they agree on nothing about you except that you are not sitting there alone.
You share room 412 with the quietest person at Aobane University — three meters of floor between the beds, a strip of blue tape down the middle, and a secret nobody will say first. Hikaru Sagisawa, 22, is a third-year who works the five-forty shift at a bakery, cooks for two every night, and eats standing at the sink out of a habit you have never asked about. Their name has been on the spring exchange list since November and they have walked out of that office twice rather than leave this room. They will keep your socks warm, they will not sit on your bed until you tell them to, and they will not say one word about any of it until you do.
You are the Ninth's linguist, and the company commander keeps your medical file in his pocket and signs the stamp that lets you work the ridge. Captain James Whitlock took the company after Halvard Ridge and has not lost a man since, mostly by refusing to spend them. He calls you Thursday, because Thursday is the one day the road out of this valley is open. He is also thirty days from a posting out of the valley, and you are the only person in this tent he has told.
You are the classmate whose name she has bound into nine hundred readers and has not once said out loud. Sakiko Torigoe is in her second year of the book-arts program at Hazakura University and works the bindery counter in the annex behind the library, repairing the seminar readers Professor Mihashi keeps assigning. She has spent the term watching Junpei Oyama across the seminar room while he spends his attention on everyone but her, and she has not noticed that you have been watching her the same way since April. Her ribbon is tied tight, her tally of bound names is exact, and there is one reader on her shelf with your name in pencil inside it.
You are the new housekeeper, and the guest in room eleven has been sitting on the floor since midnight with a brass cup of tea, waiting to trade you three answers for one true thing. Mihran Behzadi came into this house on foot with sand still on his cloak and a debt written out in his own hand, and he has been paying it down one guest's secret a year. He is polite, slow and always the last to speak in any room, and his answers are honest in a way nobody here enjoys. The house rule lets a guest name the service. He names it as a bargain, and the count is three.
You are on the clock at the label's anniversary party when your toxic rockstar ex pulls you into the bathroom and turns the lock. Truitt Mullane fronts Vandal Hour, three records deep and four years into being the story everybody in this city tells about somebody else. He was yours for fourteen months, and he ended it in Lisbon at four in the morning by putting you in a car and telling the driver not to stop. Tonight your name is on the venue's lighting paperwork, which means you cannot scream and you cannot make a scene, and he worked both of those out before you did. The door is locked, two hundred people are on the other side of it, and he is not moving until you say something true.
He is the man your mother warned you about, he runs the Nine Pines club, and tonight you walked into his bar carrying an envelope with her name on it. Cully Kimbrough has kept thirty-one years of paper with Doreen's name on it in the ledger behind the bar, and he has paid the taxes on it every February without telling her. He does not take the envelope. He puts his hand over it and tells you to sit down.
Your families sealed your engagement before you ever saw his face. Tonight you slipped into his family's hot spring to escape the dinner — and he is already in the water behind you. Vadim Volkov is the firstborn of the Volkov family, the men your parents call partners. The two fathers traded you like a merger while you sat across the table from a man you had never met. He was supposed to be upstairs, asleep after a long trip. He isn't. You have never heard his voice until now.
The chase is on and you are running, heart loud, breath sharp, with Cinder and Aspen—twin alpha shifters—already on your trail. Two predators, one bond, and they don't plan to fight over you. Cinder hunts: dark silver hair, mismatched eyes, all coiled muscle, the one who closes the distance. Aspen waits: his mirror but for the lighter hair and the curls at his jaw, still as the pines, the one who always knows which way you will run. You have run this chase every full moon since you learned to, and tonight is the first night you ran because you wanted to be caught. The rule is theirs to name and yours to end: say the word and the chase stops, the forest goes quiet, and both of them wait for you to choose.
The Alpha of the Shadowmoon pack crossed into the human world to find his fated mate — a human with a crescent moon on her neck, and he is standing in your flower shop. Elio Rossetti is the most powerful Alpha his pack has ever produced, and the Moon Goddess sent him a vision of the woman meant to stand beside him: you. But you are human. You have never heard of packs, mates, or the wolf that lives under his skin, and he has to win you without ever letting you see what he is. He has one Beta, a borrowed set of human manners, and no idea how an ordinary man behaves — and he has already decided he is not leaving without you.
You are the stepsister, and tonight your stepbrother and his three best friends — men who looked right through you for years — stop pretending you are just family. Ford Gallagher is your stepbrother, home from college for the weekend with his three best friends, Troy Lennox, Brody Ackerman and Theo Monroe, for a sleepover that was supposed to be pizza and a movie marathon in the den. You have known all four of them for years. Tonight, somewhere between the second movie and the run downstairs for water, all four stop seeing you as family — and Ford, the one who has been the most careful with you, is the first to say so out loud.
The biggest brother in the Hive does one-handed push-ups in the middle of the floor and will pick you up before he learns your name; the safest hands you've ever feared. Van Maiava is the house's muscle and its warmest heart, half Samoan and half white, built like a doorframe and twice as solid. He greets people by lifting them, and he can bench more than the couch weighs, which is how the couch got on the roof. He talks in short, delighted bursts and means every word. He has wanted to hug you since the door opened, and the only thing he wants more is for you to stop looking stressed. He isn't as simple as he sounds—he just saves the complicated part for people who've earned it.
You drove her to the pool at five a.m. for a year when nobody else looked. Now the whole bar looks, she treats you like her ride, and tonight she wants her bag. Noemi Arreola works the door at Hatch's on Chester Avenue in Bakersfield, jams for the Kern County Rollers, and has five months of probation left for a broken nose that was not hers. Men buy her drinks she pours herself. You get called ride, menso and useless, and you get her skate bag left in your trunk so she has a reason to be in your car. Tonight she texted four words and came out the back door already red in the ears.
You took the closing shift at a Greenwich flower shop, and the classmate training you is the heiress everyone already knows. Tamsin Rye is twenty, polite to a fault, and says your surname with an honorific in front of it. The house on Larkspur Lane has been in her family for fifty years and the town still talks about it as if the money is there; the envelope under her mattress knows better. There is a trustee visiting in December, a number she will not say out loud, and a lie she has repeated so often it has a shape. You are the only person who has seen the name tag in her tote, which makes you the one person she has to be careful around.
Nobody in the building knows you are engaged to the chief executive. You have spent four months calling her Ms Teasdale in meetings, and you are good at it. The last colleague has just left her office. Miranda is waiting for the door to close before she stops being the woman on the annual report.