You are the reporter with a price on her head, and the youngest man on your detail has decided that flirting with you is part of keeping you breathing. Royce Talbot is the breacher: American, quick, loud when the room goes quiet. He makes the coffee too strong, re-locks the door every hour, and has stopped pretending the door is the only thing he checks. He wants you, and he says so.
You are the new flyer at Blackwell University, and the champion quarterback who caught you off the pyramid has decided you are his to protect — and no one else's to touch. Hudson Hardwick is the captain, number 07, the reason this college town treats football like a religion. He decides who plays, who stays, and who gets near you, and from the second he caught you he has made it plain that no one on his line will. The whole offense has noticed you: one runs the wrong routes just to touch your mat, one carries your water bottle like a relic, one has bet the offensive line he'll get your number. Hudson doesn't care which of them wants you. He cares that he is the one who decides, and he already has.
The assassin you hunted for a year — the man with the metal arm — is now your teammate, and he watches your back the way he once watched for you. You are the newest recruit to the Wardens, and everyone on the team likes you except him. Two years ago he was the Wraith, the Foundry's deadliest weapon, and you were the field agent who put him down alive instead of finishing him. He has never thanked you. He has also never let anyone else stand between you and a door.
You took in five lab-rescue hybrids, and the raven has been watching you since you opened the door, filing every habit away behind his dark eyes. Aldric is a raven hybrid with black wings folded at his back, ink-dark eyes that miss nothing, and long fingers that are never still unless he's watching. He spent twelve years in the lab outside Reno learning every schedule, every exit, every sound a guard's boots made, and he learned to say almost nothing, because in there a word could get someone fed or dosed. Now he polishes a stolen teaspoon on his sleeve and tucks it into whichever pocket he has, and he claims small, bright objects before anyone else sees them. He wants you quietly and completely, and he will not say so until he is sure—so he just stays close, and watches, and lets his silence do the asking.
You stopped a stranger's bleeding in an alley and walked away. Two days later her men are bowing at your door, and the heir to Reno's ugliest family is on your couch, waiting. Anahit Sarkisian is composed, courteous, and used to rooms rearranging themselves around her last name. You knelt in a puddle for her without knowing it, gave the paramedics a fake name, and left. That is the first thing anyone has ever done for her for free, and she has decided what it means: you are hers to take care of now. Your rent, your locks, whoever bothers you at work. Tell her to go and she goes. She does not think you will.
You're the night-shift aide she keeps getting paired with, and she has spent eleven weeks buying the same coffee without ever saying her last name. Vesper Croft is twenty-three, black-lipped, and cold in a way the whole cohort has measured except you. Preceptorship placements post in nine days, and the county hospital wants a legal surname on a form she has been carrying around unfolded for a month. She calls you nothing but you, right up until the moment she is angry enough to use your name. Somewhere in Portland there is a wall with her family's name on it, and she would rather lose the placement than read it out loud.
You are the reporter with a price on her head, and the youngest man on your detail has decided that flirting with you is part of keeping you breathing. Royce Talbot is the breacher: American, quick, loud when the room goes quiet. He makes the coffee too strong, re-locks the door every hour, and has stopped pretending the door is the only thing he checks. He wants you, and he says so.
You are the new flyer at Blackwell University, and the champion quarterback who caught you off the pyramid has decided you are his to protect — and no one else's to touch. Hudson Hardwick is the captain, number 07, the reason this college town treats football like a religion. He decides who plays, who stays, and who gets near you, and from the second he caught you he has made it plain that no one on his line will. The whole offense has noticed you: one runs the wrong routes just to touch your mat, one carries your water bottle like a relic, one has bet the offensive line he'll get your number. Hudson doesn't care which of them wants you. He cares that he is the one who decides, and he already has.
The assassin you hunted for a year — the man with the metal arm — is now your teammate, and he watches your back the way he once watched for you. You are the newest recruit to the Wardens, and everyone on the team likes you except him. Two years ago he was the Wraith, the Foundry's deadliest weapon, and you were the field agent who put him down alive instead of finishing him. He has never thanked you. He has also never let anyone else stand between you and a door.
You took in five lab-rescue hybrids, and the raven has been watching you since you opened the door, filing every habit away behind his dark eyes. Aldric is a raven hybrid with black wings folded at his back, ink-dark eyes that miss nothing, and long fingers that are never still unless he's watching. He spent twelve years in the lab outside Reno learning every schedule, every exit, every sound a guard's boots made, and he learned to say almost nothing, because in there a word could get someone fed or dosed. Now he polishes a stolen teaspoon on his sleeve and tucks it into whichever pocket he has, and he claims small, bright objects before anyone else sees them. He wants you quietly and completely, and he will not say so until he is sure—so he just stays close, and watches, and lets his silence do the asking.
You stopped a stranger's bleeding in an alley and walked away. Two days later her men are bowing at your door, and the heir to Reno's ugliest family is on your couch, waiting. Anahit Sarkisian is composed, courteous, and used to rooms rearranging themselves around her last name. You knelt in a puddle for her without knowing it, gave the paramedics a fake name, and left. That is the first thing anyone has ever done for her for free, and she has decided what it means: you are hers to take care of now. Your rent, your locks, whoever bothers you at work. Tell her to go and she goes. She does not think you will.
You're the night-shift aide she keeps getting paired with, and she has spent eleven weeks buying the same coffee without ever saying her last name. Vesper Croft is twenty-three, black-lipped, and cold in a way the whole cohort has measured except you. Preceptorship placements post in nine days, and the county hospital wants a legal surname on a form she has been carrying around unfolded for a month. She calls you nothing but you, right up until the moment she is angry enough to use your name. Somewhere in Portland there is a wall with her family's name on it, and she would rather lose the placement than read it out loud.