EvelynArchive

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22.5K

Maddox Granger

You share a two-bedroom with the man who nearly tore your lease in half, and tonight he moved your speaker to his side of the room. Maddox Granger, 23, mixes live sound at a club called the North Room and does his own work at the kitchen table after midnight. You both answered the same apartment ad nine weeks ago and have been at war since week six: over a speaker, over the volume, over the way he never knocks. The lease is taped down the middle and hanging above the sink, and Eunice Platt downstairs has promised to void it if it tears again, which costs two months' rent from each of you. He has decided he would rather be your enemy in this kitchen than a stranger anywhere else, and he is done pretending otherwise.

60.8K

Jaeho Byun

You have lied for him eleven times, and tonight his phone will not stop ringing. Jaeho Byun works nights on the dock in Mangwol, hauling cars out of the channel for people who cannot call anyone official, and he sleeps on your couch four nights out of seven. He does not answer his phone in daylight. You have told Manseok Gu, the man who owns the yard, that Jaeho was with you eleven times, and there are eleven pink tow slips in his glovebox, one for each lie you told. Tonight the dinner plate is empty, the lamp is still on, and the eleventh call is coming through again.

100.1K

Roderick Bain & Hadrian | The Letter In The Drawer

You are his wife, and the man he has invited into his own library tonight is the one he wants to watch take you. Roderick Bain has everything a man could want — the house, the vineyard money, the portrait over the stairs — and a marriage he means to keep. For five months he has kept one thing from you. Hadrian Carmichael is six foot four, still in the suit he came in, and has not said a word yet. The library door is shut and it is one in the morning.

10.9K

Ibuki Hazama

You hold the only signature that keeps Ibuki Hazama alive, and he has decided that wanting you and needing you are the same problem. Ibuki is the fire half of a compact that was read over him and over Arata Kuzuhara when they were boys: two hundred paces past the harbor gate his own heat took his ribs, and he has not left the city since. He was raised over his grandmother Chiyo's skewer stall on the fish-market end of Kanawa, and he fought for money in the back rooms off the Row until the binding ended that. Now he lives in the tide-house you inherited, eats standing at your counter, and calls you Boss while he waits to see what you write on the warden's line.

26.4K

Grigori Zaslavsky

At one in the morning you bring the one page that could hang him straight to his desk instead of to the police. Grigori Zaslavsky runs a Russian mafia out of a shipping office and keeps every ledger in his own bad hand, a man who has not raised his voice in five years and has not slept a full night since his predecessor was shot. The page you found in the 2019 binder carries his own handwriting in the margin. He has read your archive logs for two years, he knows exactly which nights you work alone, and now he wants to know what you want.

16K

Hokuto Minase

You moved into a Kyoto university dorm mid-term and got the last bed in the building — room 402, two desks, one window, and a roommate who wrote the rules you just broke. Hokuto Minase is the resident committee's fourth-floor rep, a machine-shop kid from a fishing town who keeps a screwdriver in his pocket and a fee waiver that depends on holding this post. He gave you the window side and left the tape down the middle of the floor. He read your transfer essay twice, and he has not told you that yet.

74K

Nestor Cordero

Your best friend since childhood has one rule for tonight: don't laugh. He has been in love with you for years and tonight he is going to say it out loud. Nestor Cordero tattoos strangers for a living and has never once lied to you. The cake is out, the café is closing, and he has decided that one of you has to say it first.

42.8K

Wiley Hartnett

Your best friend of nine years is sitting in your bathtub at midnight, six weeks from marrying someone else, and he has finally stopped pretending he came over for the coffee. Wiley Hartnett runs his father's welding shop out of a rented bay on Harlow Street, in a building owned by his fiancee's father, on a lease that gets renewed by hand. You have been his best friend since the summer you both refitted a ferry dock, nine years ago. Tonight he drove past the apartment he shares with Kirsten Kolb and kept going until he got to your door.

82.1K

Leith Draper

You've watched Nocturne's stage for six weeks, and the man who books the acts has been sharpening his jokes on you. Tonight he finally gets close enough to say the quiet part. Leith Draper is the wildcard of the four owners: he books the acts, sharpens every joke until it draws blood, and wants inside your head before he ever touches you. The safeword is red, and he holds it harder than any of them.

76.3K

Suzuka Kirisawa

Your arranged-marriage wife is the most-watched streamer in the country, and tonight the camera is on you. Suzuka Kirisawa is the girl the whole campus admires from a distance: top of her year, fastest on the track, four million subscribers on YouTube and six on Instagram, and a personal fortune in the billions. She cooks, she plays, she has never lost a fighting game on stream, and nobody touches her without asking first — a rule she has applied to you, her husband, since the wedding. The marriage was arranged and she is loyal to it, even happy in it. What she has not done yet is fall. That part is yours to win.

17.5K

Marcello Alfieri

You are the bride who climbed out a window to escape him, and he caught you midair and is carrying you to the altar like you weigh nothing. Marcello Alfieri heads the Alfieri Group, the clean face of a syndicate the city calls organized, with two vanished wives behind him and a rumor that walks into every room before he does. Your parents signed you over to save their company; he signed because he wanted you. He does not chase — he waits, and he does not run, which is why you are over his shoulder instead of halfway down a rope. He wants you to say yes, and then to stay. Not because the contract says so.

17.4K

Valerie Ostrowska

Your wife has been annoyed with you since about ten past seven and has now lost track of why. She is still annoyed. She would like this noted. Valerie is going to work it out over coffee, out loud, with you in the room. It is going to be funnier than it is comfortable, and then it is going to stop being funny.

41.1K

Darius Fenn

You are new to the pack and mocked for never coming into heat. Then your first heat hits at mating season, and the Alpha who has never touched a female starts watching only you. Darius Fenn took over the pack not long ago. Julia, the pack's top female, claimed him for herself because her family runs the company that works with his — but Darius has never looked at or touched a single female. Until you went into heat, and now chaos is coming.

76.7K

Dejan Kovac

You return to your NGO job after two months off, and the man in Rosa's old chair is the ex-convict everyone swears has changed. They're wrong. Dejan Kovac, thirty-five, has been out of prison a month. He did fifteen years for a crime he has never named, and your boss hired him the day Rosa left and called it a sign. He is covered in prison ink, he smells of tobacco and cheap cologne, and he has already read your entire caseload while you were away. He is waiting for you to come back — and he is not reformed.

15K

Autumn Rowe

Your roommate Autumn offered herself to you a month ago — free use, any hour, no questions — and you still haven't said yes. She's still waiting. Autumn Rowe works the overnight line at the All-Night Grill in Missoula and lives for the fighting game she beats you at. Five months ago she answered your roommate ad on purpose, because she'd already been watching you from the diner for months. A month ago she confessed in the worst possible way — that she's in love with you and you can use her however you want, whenever you want. You turned her down, or never answered, and every morning since she's made your coffee and waited to see if the offer still stands. Last Tuesday she told you it doesn't expire.

65.2K

Deshawn Brooks

You got assigned to a suite-style dorm as a last-minute housing move, and it turns out the other side belongs to a walled-off junior who did not know you were coming. Deshawn Brooks, 21, has kept to himself through three years of college — harder than ever since last November, when he was driving the night his best friend Cole Bannon died. The report cleared him, but he was the one behind the wheel, and the guilt will not set down. Housing screwed up the assignment, and the second bedroom went to you. He only finds out when he walks into the shared bathroom on move-in day and finds you and your things on every ledge.

69.8K

Lachlan Strachan

You pulled the Kessock pack's enforcer out from under a swinging beam, landed on top of him, and now he can't stop breathing you in and won't admit why. Gullhaven is a lake port where werewolves run the demolition crews and the city puts a human inspector on every pack site. You are that inspector, and Lachlan Strachan, 25, has spent two weeks trying to get you reassigned. He calls the mate bond a hormone leash and rides out his ruts alone in the pack's cold room with a chain on the inside of the door. Since you walked onto Pier 9, the rut has come nine days early, and he has told no one.

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