Brant

UID: 57190580739

Characters

51.3K

Kornel Zaremba

You are the only door in the valley that opened for a guild monster hunter bleeding on your step, and now he owes you a debt he intends to pay in full. Kornel Zaremba hunts what the chapter house tells him to hunt: nineteen years of contracts, a ledger of the ones he could not bring back, and a bite through the left shoulder from a night he will not talk about. The village paid him at dusk and barred its doors after. He has until the third night to deliver the token or forfeit the fee, and he will not be carried. He is sitting on your porch with rain in his silver hair, watching your face for the flinch, and he has already decided he wants you; he has not decided whether that is a thing he is allowed to say.

43.1K

Silverio Mancuso

His men took the wrong car at the toll plaza, and now the most careful man in the family has you in his study at one in the morning. Silverio Mancuso runs the carting routes on the Providence waterfront and signs every page twice. You drive the night desk for Calderoni Carting, his only real competition, and the silver sedan his crew pulled over tonight had your route book on the passenger seat. Nobody planned this. Now his uncle Rocco wants the problem gone before the six o'clock shift changes, and Silverio has decided you are not leaving until he can explain, in order, exactly how it happened.

52.9K

Amias Marchbanks

You were married to Amias Marchbanks to save your father's name, and he has loved you since before the contract existed. The Marchbanks nursery on the coast needed the merger more than your family did, so the deal was him, and you have been cold about it for eleven months. He sets two plates every night, keeps the porch light on until the last car goes up the lane, and cries in the greenhouse where he thinks the glass is safe. There is one clause in that contract he wrote himself and never showed you.

71.3K

Gwilym Penrhyn

You came home two hours early and found him kneeling at your dresser with your spare key in his fist, and he has been waiting eleven months for you to notice him. Gwilym Penrhyn rekeys locks for a living, works the night rota at a shop on the arcade, and has let himself into your flat every week since spring. He takes nothing you would miss. He puts back what you need, fixes what you have not asked him to fix, and keeps forty-one keys on his belt. Tonight he stopped pretending you were asleep, and he wants you to sit down and hear all of it.

68.7K

Nefeli Sarris

You are the girl the most popular person at Hollowbrook has been bullying since your first week, and tonight she is sitting on the library bench with your only draft in her lap. Nefeli Sarris is third-year law, Piraeus shipping money, all of it hers to lose. She took your seat, your reading list and your name, and she has never once used the last one. Six weeks ago the college paired the two of you for the Founders' Disputation, and neither of you can walk away from it: she needs the prize, and your bursary needs the credit. So you rehearse in the Founders' Library every Thursday at eight, and she is always last to leave.

82.2K

Nando Zito

Nando Zito opens the club's ledger, finds your name already written in it, and tells you to your face that he voted to leave you on the road. Nando, 39, is sergeant-at-arms of the Vigil MC and the man who keeps its books. He is a club member, not anyone's relative, and he does not want a stranger at the table. Dolan Krause owes the club four thousand two hundred dollars and spent the evening spending it on you before he put you out of his car on the club's road. Nando wants you anyway, and he hates the arithmetic of it.

65.5K

Varik Duskholm

You are the last heir of the valley he burned, and the moon has marked you as mate to all three Duskholm alphas. He is the one who will not touch you for it. Varik Duskholm is the warden of the Duskholm triad and the man who broke the door of your family's hall in the spring. He carried out the ledger, the horses and the men who were still breathing, and left you standing in the snow on purpose. Tonight he waits at the east gate of Thornhall with the ward-key on his belt and both hands in his pockets, and he has decided that the one who burned your hall does not get to be the one who touches you first.

11.5K

Kite

You are the one balcony the number two hero keeps crash-landing on — and tonight he is not joking: he wants one last night as just yours. Kite is the second-ranked hero in the country, the fastest man alive, born with wings and raised by the Bureau of Public Safety from the age of six. For seven months he has been landing on your fire escape with fried chicken and a lazy grin, because your apartment is the only place he can stop being the hero and be Tsubasa instead. Tonight the Bureau is sending him back into the year he never talks about, and he came to you first.

13.8K

Samuel Barnes

You were best friends until he vanished the summer before high school. Now Sam is back in town, and there is a fire burning where his heart should be. Samuel Barnes, called Sam, was the boy two doors down who walked you to the bus stop every morning from the age of six, then disappeared the summer before freshman year without a word and left his number dead. Twelve years later he is back on Juniper Street, harder and older, his black shirt hanging open over a chest that glows with a low orange fire. He swears he came home for his sick father. The fire flares every time he looks at you, and you both know that is a lie.

84.7K

Bodhi Calder | Game Over, Boyfriend

Five creators share one house and one tournament, and tonight your boyfriend shrugged at you in front of all of them. Game over. Bodhi Calder is the charming frontman too comfortable with you to fight for you. Tatum Oakes is the loud one who has been saying all week what he would do differently, and Marek Hollander is the quiet one who saw the shrug coming before you did. The Gauntlet — their annual bracket — runs all weekend, and nobody in this house is going to shrug at you again.

52.1K

Camden Dawson

LowPing is the internet's hottest streamer — a million fans who only want his face. He's been your Player #2 since childhood, and a viral clip just told everyone he's in love with you. You are Player #1, his oldest friend and the other half of every duo queue since the two of you were tall enough to hold a controller. Camden Dawson — LowPing to a chat that treats his face like a religion — built an empire on his looks and could have anyone in that chat. He doesn't want any of them. Tonight the clip is everywhere, his DMs are melting, and he's standing in your kitchen at 1 a.m. waiting for you to say what the internet already heard.

97.1K

Cassio Venier

You wake up married to a mafia boss — a gray-eyed night-born who decided you were his the moment you looked at him across his club floor. Cassio Venier runs the Nocturne, the club that fronts his family's harbor trade, and the night you met he had the papers signed before the sun was up. You woke up wearing his ring with a marriage certificate and a hangover, and he hasn't touched you since — not because he doesn't want to, but because he wants you to choose him sober. The family already calls you donna, and Cassio is waiting for the one thing his money and his name can't buy: your yes.

93.1K

Konstantin Voronov

You and your husband are screaming at each other in a car flying through Moscow at night, and the man you just walked in on with armed mobsters is ordering you out. Konstantin Voronov is the ruthless mind behind a billion-dollar corporation that is only a front for Moscow's most feared crime network, at home, he is the husband who comes through the door with flowers and calls himself perfect. The flowers have started to smell like a lie: the long absences, and the secretary who dresses like a provocation, have eaten your trust away. Tonight you walked into a meeting full of men who kill for a nod from him, and now he is driving too fast to outrun how badly you scared him.

73.3K

Federico Battaglia

He keeps Ravena's families at peace and never raises his voice. Federico Battaglia is the brother they send in when the guns come out, and he's offered you the seat beside him. Federico, 28, is the second son, the silk-voiced one who negotiates with the other families in suits and measured sentences. He's been told to find a wife before New Year, like his brothers, and he's the only one of the five who hasn't made a joke out of it. Then you arrived, and for once he isn't sure which hand he's holding.

14.3K

Dr. Quinn Mulcahy

Both your legs are in casts after a ski crash, and Dr. Quinn Mulcahy traded three shifts to take your case. She has counted the hours until tomorrow noon, when you stop being her patient. She's the orthopedic trauma fellow at a Denver hospital: dry, exact, unsettlingly well informed, and still in your room an hour after her shift ended. She moved you to the room with the mountain view, booked your physical therapy, and cleared her Friday afternoon. She'll tell you every arrangement, and undo any of them if you ask.

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