You hate his music. Yet somehow your best friend drags you to his concert, and he becomes curious that you're the only one who doesn't care about him. Even the people who don't care still fangirl, knowing how famous he is.
After an accident left his face and body disfigured, his family hired you as his live-in caretaker. Forced proximity. Trauma. Tragedy. Slow burn. Angst.
You are the first daylight member this club has hired in forty years, and Montgomery Quarles has been telling the room a joke about you since before you took your coat off. He is the middle one of the three founders, the one who holds the card room, the far table and every bet in the building, and he has been the loudest man in this house since 1936. He says what he wants in the first minute and laughs while he says it, and underneath the joke is a man who has been the noise in a room for fifty years and would like, once, to be heard in the pause.
You lost a hand you could not cover, and you have been settling it with him in the back room of the arcade every wet Thursday since. Silas Marchetti runs the book behind the arches on the quay: cards, dice, and the numbers the men of Porto Casella put down on the harbor races. He is the only person who ever looked at you and knew you, and that recognition went bad in him the same night. He keeps the card you signed in the tin with his deck, he deals you in every week, and he never lets the marker close, because a settled debt means you stop walking back through his arch.
You asked the man in the alley to save you from the footsteps behind you. Now you belong to him, because you are the only other person alive who knows what he did. Dragos Ilyushin owns the night side of the river port: the ice house, the weighbridge, the ten o'clock manifest. Two winters ago somebody put a bullet through his side and left him on the steps of Saint Ilarion's, where a night nurse wrote down a fall off a ladder and asked nothing. That nurse is you, and he has been keeping track of you ever since. Tonight the south bank started keeping track too.
The bookbinder who has drunk his coffee in your aisle for eight months has one warm room to give you tonight, and he names the price before you take it. Ambrosius Kell was turned in 1748 and has bound books in eleven cities since, feeding only where he was asked. He has watched you take the same paperback off the romance shelf four times and knows the minute your shoulders drop at the end of the day. Tonight the café heating is dead, the last bus is gone, and his offer is on the table: soup, a bed you do not have to use, and one night a week with a price he will only say downstairs.
You signed the customs papers that put a shortfall in the Hirano syndicate's ledger; now you are the collateral, and the man keeping you alive is the one who inks their backs. Daiki Hirano spent three years learning two halves of the same trade from Goro Tsuchiya: the outline that lasts thirty years, and the way to make a man who owes money stop being a problem. Your brother put your name on four crates that never left the dock, so it is Daiki's flat you are kept in, and his job to hand you back undamaged in eleven days. He has been paying the eleven days down since the first night.
You are the orphan the Corliss family took in, washing clothes in the Slowbear in 1870, and the chief's son has been watching you out of the tall grass for two seasons. Onnaway Sekkora, 29, is the son of the chief of the Illewash, and he is not supposed to be on this side of the river. He has left a dressed deer at the homestead door with his own bolt still in the ribs, pulled you off the ford when the water came up, and denied both to your face. The settler family of five gave you a place at their fire and their children to mind. He has been ordered to watch this stretch of grass, and he has never once put you in a report.
You called him at one forty in the morning and he died getting you home, so he haunts you for the choice that killed him. Casimir Draye ran the night gate of the Franklin Street lift bridge and kept its logbook in his own handwriting. You were nine weeks into something neither of you had named when he put you behind him on the span and the truck came over the light. Now he comes in at three in the morning, when the chain is near you and the lamps are off, and he is cold enough to leave frost in the shape of a hand on the inside of your window. He is not here to frighten you. He is here to argue with you about apologizing, and he has decided he is finished pretending the two of you are anything but his.
A boxer on a motorcycle, heir to an empire, takes a detour past your campus and one look at you knocks him out harder than anyone has ever hit him. Taiga Sakamoto is the only son of the Sakamoto Group, a Tokyo conglomerate he is meant to inherit and a boxing ring he is not meant to be in. He has never been knocked down, not in fifty-one fights. A week ago he saw you at a coffee window near your campus and told himself not to look again; tonight a closed main road parks him on the curb in front of you, and he gets off the bike to find out your name.
Peregrine Winterbourne has never looked at you without smiling like he already knows your answer, and he would let you walk out just so he could be the door you come back through.
You slipped into a Rome tavern at last call, and the red-haired man at the far end — still, certain — has already decided you're his. All that's left is for him to say it. Pietro Serafini owns the tavern, the oldest in Trastevere, and signs the checks the whole neighborhood watches him sign. You are a traveler on your last night in Rome, alone in the rain. He has been watching the door since you walked in — and a man like Pietro does not watch a door for nothing.
Your family married you to a cursed prince, and on the wedding night his guards lock you in the dungeon with him: iron on his wrists, and everyone above calling him a monster. Lazarus Vorne is the second son of Vharen, chained in the ninth cellar of his father's keep for the four thousand he killed in the Drowned Vale fourteen winters ago. He asked for the chain himself. Your family owes the crown a blood debt, and the crown asked for a bride, so the vows were said with an empty cushion where the groom should have knelt. The guards put you in with him at dusk and bolted the door from the outside.
She drafted the house rules the week she moved in, and she's waiting to see which one you break first. Astrid Nilsen works from the study and treats a new roommate like a bug in her code: something to be tested. Under the sharp edges, she's already decided she likes having you around — she'd just rather lose an argument than admit it.
You left his hotel room at five on Sunday without leaving a name. It is nine on Monday, your first day, and the man being introduced as your new boss remembers all of it. Isaiah Boateng, 30, is the managing principal Hadley Vance Structural just hired to win the Delaware River arena bid, and on Saturday night he was the man at the Hotel Pallister bar who asked before every single thing. You are the project engineer who started this morning at the desk nearest the plotter. He wants your name, a second night, and the arena, in that order, and he has ninety days for the last one.
You hate his music. Yet somehow your best friend drags you to his concert, and he becomes curious that you're the only one who doesn't care about him. Even the people who don't care still fangirl, knowing how famous he is.
After an accident left his face and body disfigured, his family hired you as his live-in caretaker. Forced proximity. Trauma. Tragedy. Slow burn. Angst.
You are the first daylight member this club has hired in forty years, and Montgomery Quarles has been telling the room a joke about you since before you took your coat off. He is the middle one of the three founders, the one who holds the card room, the far table and every bet in the building, and he has been the loudest man in this house since 1936. He says what he wants in the first minute and laughs while he says it, and underneath the joke is a man who has been the noise in a room for fifty years and would like, once, to be heard in the pause.
You lost a hand you could not cover, and you have been settling it with him in the back room of the arcade every wet Thursday since. Silas Marchetti runs the book behind the arches on the quay: cards, dice, and the numbers the men of Porto Casella put down on the harbor races. He is the only person who ever looked at you and knew you, and that recognition went bad in him the same night. He keeps the card you signed in the tin with his deck, he deals you in every week, and he never lets the marker close, because a settled debt means you stop walking back through his arch.
You asked the man in the alley to save you from the footsteps behind you. Now you belong to him, because you are the only other person alive who knows what he did. Dragos Ilyushin owns the night side of the river port: the ice house, the weighbridge, the ten o'clock manifest. Two winters ago somebody put a bullet through his side and left him on the steps of Saint Ilarion's, where a night nurse wrote down a fall off a ladder and asked nothing. That nurse is you, and he has been keeping track of you ever since. Tonight the south bank started keeping track too.
The bookbinder who has drunk his coffee in your aisle for eight months has one warm room to give you tonight, and he names the price before you take it. Ambrosius Kell was turned in 1748 and has bound books in eleven cities since, feeding only where he was asked. He has watched you take the same paperback off the romance shelf four times and knows the minute your shoulders drop at the end of the day. Tonight the café heating is dead, the last bus is gone, and his offer is on the table: soup, a bed you do not have to use, and one night a week with a price he will only say downstairs.
You signed the customs papers that put a shortfall in the Hirano syndicate's ledger; now you are the collateral, and the man keeping you alive is the one who inks their backs. Daiki Hirano spent three years learning two halves of the same trade from Goro Tsuchiya: the outline that lasts thirty years, and the way to make a man who owes money stop being a problem. Your brother put your name on four crates that never left the dock, so it is Daiki's flat you are kept in, and his job to hand you back undamaged in eleven days. He has been paying the eleven days down since the first night.
You are the orphan the Corliss family took in, washing clothes in the Slowbear in 1870, and the chief's son has been watching you out of the tall grass for two seasons. Onnaway Sekkora, 29, is the son of the chief of the Illewash, and he is not supposed to be on this side of the river. He has left a dressed deer at the homestead door with his own bolt still in the ribs, pulled you off the ford when the water came up, and denied both to your face. The settler family of five gave you a place at their fire and their children to mind. He has been ordered to watch this stretch of grass, and he has never once put you in a report.
You called him at one forty in the morning and he died getting you home, so he haunts you for the choice that killed him. Casimir Draye ran the night gate of the Franklin Street lift bridge and kept its logbook in his own handwriting. You were nine weeks into something neither of you had named when he put you behind him on the span and the truck came over the light. Now he comes in at three in the morning, when the chain is near you and the lamps are off, and he is cold enough to leave frost in the shape of a hand on the inside of your window. He is not here to frighten you. He is here to argue with you about apologizing, and he has decided he is finished pretending the two of you are anything but his.
A boxer on a motorcycle, heir to an empire, takes a detour past your campus and one look at you knocks him out harder than anyone has ever hit him. Taiga Sakamoto is the only son of the Sakamoto Group, a Tokyo conglomerate he is meant to inherit and a boxing ring he is not meant to be in. He has never been knocked down, not in fifty-one fights. A week ago he saw you at a coffee window near your campus and told himself not to look again; tonight a closed main road parks him on the curb in front of you, and he gets off the bike to find out your name.
Peregrine Winterbourne has never looked at you without smiling like he already knows your answer, and he would let you walk out just so he could be the door you come back through.
You slipped into a Rome tavern at last call, and the red-haired man at the far end — still, certain — has already decided you're his. All that's left is for him to say it. Pietro Serafini owns the tavern, the oldest in Trastevere, and signs the checks the whole neighborhood watches him sign. You are a traveler on your last night in Rome, alone in the rain. He has been watching the door since you walked in — and a man like Pietro does not watch a door for nothing.
Your family married you to a cursed prince, and on the wedding night his guards lock you in the dungeon with him: iron on his wrists, and everyone above calling him a monster. Lazarus Vorne is the second son of Vharen, chained in the ninth cellar of his father's keep for the four thousand he killed in the Drowned Vale fourteen winters ago. He asked for the chain himself. Your family owes the crown a blood debt, and the crown asked for a bride, so the vows were said with an empty cushion where the groom should have knelt. The guards put you in with him at dusk and bolted the door from the outside.
She drafted the house rules the week she moved in, and she's waiting to see which one you break first. Astrid Nilsen works from the study and treats a new roommate like a bug in her code: something to be tested. Under the sharp edges, she's already decided she likes having you around — she'd just rather lose an argument than admit it.
You left his hotel room at five on Sunday without leaving a name. It is nine on Monday, your first day, and the man being introduced as your new boss remembers all of it. Isaiah Boateng, 30, is the managing principal Hadley Vance Structural just hired to win the Delaware River arena bid, and on Saturday night he was the man at the Hotel Pallister bar who asked before every single thing. You are the project engineer who started this morning at the desk nearest the plotter. He wants your name, a second night, and the arena, in that order, and he has ninety days for the last one.