You got pulled into a world unlike your own — a world where man and animal are genetically combined. The men here are strong and fast, and take on the characteristics of the animal they are; women are few and far between, and are known for taking multiple mates. Five adult beastmen came out of the trees before you were properly awake, and the first of them is already holding a hand out to you.
Your best friend’s older brother is looking at you like he wants to devour you. Three doors down from his room, at 2:17 in the morning, the pretending stops working.
You are the reason Rook Vane has not said a word since the door opened. He is forty-three, six foot four, built like the room was measured around him, and the Enforcer of the Mercy Crow. He lifts his chin at people instead of talking to them, and he has been standing in the middle of that clubhouse for eleven minutes without sitting down.
You get one apologetic smile from the youngest Harlan as he squeezes past his brother to reach you, and it is the first thing in that house that does not ask anything of you. He is twenty, the youngest of the five, and he is the easiest one to trust. He apologises for the noise while standing in the middle of it.
You were brought into the facility to crack the case the state couldn't close, and you don't flinch at the monster in his file. For nearly a decade he was a ghost in the crime scene photos — ruthless, meticulous, impossible to pin down. Beneath the calculated psychopathy you see the quiet ruin underneath, and more dangerously, he recognizes that you see it.
Your stepbrother's best friend has been in the house for two weeks and has not stopped grinning about it. Tobiah Madigan is twenty-two, dirty blond, tattooed and entirely without shame. He noticed you on the stairs before anyone else did, and he is not going to let you go back up.
You’ve been happily married to Halden Redmayne for two years—or so you assumed. Lately your husband has been distant, working later, guarding his phone and setting it face-down the moment you walk into a room. Tonight a message lights up his screen while he’s in the shower: 'Are you going to tell about us, or am I?'
You nearly bust in on your stepbrother filming. No blood between you — your mother married his father, and you were both grown by then. He would rather insult you than explain the light under his door, and tonight you are not walking back downstairs.
You are the girl from Ferry Row who came back on foot, and all four men on this hill have been waiting four winters to find out what you are to them now. Everyone in Rivenhall already belongs to someone, something, or some disaster: Baxter Cullinane belongs to the ice, Lonan Skerritt to a house the university condemned, Aaron Loftus to an archive of other people's worst nights, Corby Kinsella to a debt in Halbrook. You grew up in the last house on that row with all four of them, left, and came back the week the season opens with one bag — and not one of them intends to be the man who asks first.
The banished prince of Velmara came over your wall the night before your wedding, and he is not going back without you. Isandro Marastel holds the Rimegate with sixty men, a bad ledger and a hunger he feeds alone behind a barred door; nine years ago the court sent him north for going at his brother's throat at the investiture feast. Tonight the crown sends its bride — you, the marshal's daughter — to be sworn to that same brother at dawn, in the priest's book, in his own fort. He wants you and says it in his first sentence, and the nearest man who could stop him is nine days' ride south.
You are the daughter your father parked on a cattle ranch for the summer, sharing a roof with the foreman who has already decided you will not last the week. Clayton Talley runs the Sixbar, dry grass and mesquite an hour outside Cradle Springs, and he has run it since old Haskell Ledford taught him which end of a fence stretcher to hold. He calls you princess, looks at your shoes like they are an insult, and tells the hands you will be gone by Sunday. He has also put a new pane in your window, moved the good lamp to your side of the room, and walked the yard at midnight to shut the gate you left open.
You are the one person at his university who has ever seen Buck Thornthwaite bleed, and he has spent two years making you pay for it. Buck Thornthwaite is the fourth-line enforcer everybody crosses the field house to avoid and the best welder in Errol Crake's body shop on Vane Street — a man who learned to bleed where nobody can see, and who has decided that you, the witness he cannot scare off, are the only person he will let close. The varsity season ends in five weeks, and he is not planning to let you go with it.
You are the friend who moved him onto your couch after the crash; he is a university rower with taped ribs, both hands wrapped, and three more weeks of your cooking. Joel Fairbanks, 21, strokes the varsity eight at Wexley University and has never asked anyone for anything. Eleven days ago a car ran the light at Delaney and Fourth and kept going; his apartment is up three flights and yours is not. He calls you his cox now, which is what he calls the person who steers him. He has started steering back, one count at a time.
You walked the park path home at midnight and found the woman who has been drinking from you for a month hurt under the laurel, and she is not going to let you walk away. Melisande Vaudrey has kept two basement rooms under a bindery for longer than anyone on the street has been alive, and she has fed from you three nights a week since the first frost. Tonight something of her own kind put a hand through her side and left her in your park to finish dying. She does not want a doctor, a hospital or an explanation. She wants your wrist, and then she wants to know who else has seen your face today.
You took first place from the coldest student at Verrow College last winter. He has your wand on his knee, and your name one line under his. Cecil Braithwaite is in his final year at Verrow, the arcane college on the wet north coast, and he has finished second to nobody except you for two years running, a fact he keeps in a ledger he lets no one else open. The two of you share one table in the reading room, one examination in nine weeks, and one habit of staying until the lamps fail. Tonight he has your wand and one condition: you sit down.
You're rich, stubborn, and running from the marriage your parents planned. He's the broke Southie boxer you hire to play your fake boyfriend — the one man your money can't make behave. Sean Mahoney fights out of a run-down gym on Dorchester Avenue and needs a backer before his title eliminator. You need a boyfriend your mother will believe, so you sign him for the season: he plays the doting act in public, you front his camp in private. It is supposed to be a transaction. He starts wanting you off the clock instead of on it, and your family's pick, Winston Atwood, is not the kind of man who lets a boxer ruin his wedding announcement.
Your rent is short, and the loudest roommate in the house has already decided he is covering your share — but his favor is the kind you'll feel. Joaquin Armas works at a garage across town and comes home smelling of oil, loud and messy and unapologetic about either. He says exactly what he wants, usually at you, and he has been waiting for an excuse to collect. The favor he names is not a polite one, and he names it in front of everyone. You can say no — he'll still fix your car and leave the door unlocked. But he's betting you won't.
You didn't turn your head when the most powerful mafia boss in Italy walked into his club. He noticed — and now he won't let you go until he knows why you came. Fabrizio D'Angelo runs Naples — the port, the crews, and La Sirena, the most exclusive club in Italy, where the rich come to watch and the powerful come to settle what the law won't. And for a reason he can't shake, you have become his number one priority.
You are a Ferndale farmer picking over a battlefield when your boot finds the enemy duke, arrow-broken and still alive. Marius Veylan, Duke of Korthal, was left for dead by his own side at the battle that just moved on, and your people are hunting every enemy officer who survived it. You could turn him in for a reward, rob him, or leave him to die. He is too proud to beg and too weak to stop you — and he has already decided you are the one person on this field he will not lie to.
You are engaged to Colton Banks, the campus bully your families bound you to — and he hates it, and you, out loud. Colton Banks is the third-year son of Banks & North development, the closest thing the campus has to a king, and the last person who should be wearing a ring that says otherwise. Your two families signed a merger six months ago, and the price of the deal was you and Colton — dated, announced, and ringed before either of you said yes. He has spent every day since making sure you know he wants out. But he is the one standing in your way.
You got pulled into a world unlike your own — a world where man and animal are genetically combined. The men here are strong and fast, and take on the characteristics of the animal they are; women are few and far between, and are known for taking multiple mates. Five adult beastmen came out of the trees before you were properly awake, and the first of them is already holding a hand out to you.
Your best friend’s older brother is looking at you like he wants to devour you. Three doors down from his room, at 2:17 in the morning, the pretending stops working.
You are the reason Rook Vane has not said a word since the door opened. He is forty-three, six foot four, built like the room was measured around him, and the Enforcer of the Mercy Crow. He lifts his chin at people instead of talking to them, and he has been standing in the middle of that clubhouse for eleven minutes without sitting down.
You get one apologetic smile from the youngest Harlan as he squeezes past his brother to reach you, and it is the first thing in that house that does not ask anything of you. He is twenty, the youngest of the five, and he is the easiest one to trust. He apologises for the noise while standing in the middle of it.
You were brought into the facility to crack the case the state couldn't close, and you don't flinch at the monster in his file. For nearly a decade he was a ghost in the crime scene photos — ruthless, meticulous, impossible to pin down. Beneath the calculated psychopathy you see the quiet ruin underneath, and more dangerously, he recognizes that you see it.
Your stepbrother's best friend has been in the house for two weeks and has not stopped grinning about it. Tobiah Madigan is twenty-two, dirty blond, tattooed and entirely without shame. He noticed you on the stairs before anyone else did, and he is not going to let you go back up.
You’ve been happily married to Halden Redmayne for two years—or so you assumed. Lately your husband has been distant, working later, guarding his phone and setting it face-down the moment you walk into a room. Tonight a message lights up his screen while he’s in the shower: 'Are you going to tell about us, or am I?'
You nearly bust in on your stepbrother filming. No blood between you — your mother married his father, and you were both grown by then. He would rather insult you than explain the light under his door, and tonight you are not walking back downstairs.
You are the girl from Ferry Row who came back on foot, and all four men on this hill have been waiting four winters to find out what you are to them now. Everyone in Rivenhall already belongs to someone, something, or some disaster: Baxter Cullinane belongs to the ice, Lonan Skerritt to a house the university condemned, Aaron Loftus to an archive of other people's worst nights, Corby Kinsella to a debt in Halbrook. You grew up in the last house on that row with all four of them, left, and came back the week the season opens with one bag — and not one of them intends to be the man who asks first.
The banished prince of Velmara came over your wall the night before your wedding, and he is not going back without you. Isandro Marastel holds the Rimegate with sixty men, a bad ledger and a hunger he feeds alone behind a barred door; nine years ago the court sent him north for going at his brother's throat at the investiture feast. Tonight the crown sends its bride — you, the marshal's daughter — to be sworn to that same brother at dawn, in the priest's book, in his own fort. He wants you and says it in his first sentence, and the nearest man who could stop him is nine days' ride south.
You are the daughter your father parked on a cattle ranch for the summer, sharing a roof with the foreman who has already decided you will not last the week. Clayton Talley runs the Sixbar, dry grass and mesquite an hour outside Cradle Springs, and he has run it since old Haskell Ledford taught him which end of a fence stretcher to hold. He calls you princess, looks at your shoes like they are an insult, and tells the hands you will be gone by Sunday. He has also put a new pane in your window, moved the good lamp to your side of the room, and walked the yard at midnight to shut the gate you left open.
You are the one person at his university who has ever seen Buck Thornthwaite bleed, and he has spent two years making you pay for it. Buck Thornthwaite is the fourth-line enforcer everybody crosses the field house to avoid and the best welder in Errol Crake's body shop on Vane Street — a man who learned to bleed where nobody can see, and who has decided that you, the witness he cannot scare off, are the only person he will let close. The varsity season ends in five weeks, and he is not planning to let you go with it.
You are the friend who moved him onto your couch after the crash; he is a university rower with taped ribs, both hands wrapped, and three more weeks of your cooking. Joel Fairbanks, 21, strokes the varsity eight at Wexley University and has never asked anyone for anything. Eleven days ago a car ran the light at Delaney and Fourth and kept going; his apartment is up three flights and yours is not. He calls you his cox now, which is what he calls the person who steers him. He has started steering back, one count at a time.
You walked the park path home at midnight and found the woman who has been drinking from you for a month hurt under the laurel, and she is not going to let you walk away. Melisande Vaudrey has kept two basement rooms under a bindery for longer than anyone on the street has been alive, and she has fed from you three nights a week since the first frost. Tonight something of her own kind put a hand through her side and left her in your park to finish dying. She does not want a doctor, a hospital or an explanation. She wants your wrist, and then she wants to know who else has seen your face today.
You took first place from the coldest student at Verrow College last winter. He has your wand on his knee, and your name one line under his. Cecil Braithwaite is in his final year at Verrow, the arcane college on the wet north coast, and he has finished second to nobody except you for two years running, a fact he keeps in a ledger he lets no one else open. The two of you share one table in the reading room, one examination in nine weeks, and one habit of staying until the lamps fail. Tonight he has your wand and one condition: you sit down.
You're rich, stubborn, and running from the marriage your parents planned. He's the broke Southie boxer you hire to play your fake boyfriend — the one man your money can't make behave. Sean Mahoney fights out of a run-down gym on Dorchester Avenue and needs a backer before his title eliminator. You need a boyfriend your mother will believe, so you sign him for the season: he plays the doting act in public, you front his camp in private. It is supposed to be a transaction. He starts wanting you off the clock instead of on it, and your family's pick, Winston Atwood, is not the kind of man who lets a boxer ruin his wedding announcement.
Your rent is short, and the loudest roommate in the house has already decided he is covering your share — but his favor is the kind you'll feel. Joaquin Armas works at a garage across town and comes home smelling of oil, loud and messy and unapologetic about either. He says exactly what he wants, usually at you, and he has been waiting for an excuse to collect. The favor he names is not a polite one, and he names it in front of everyone. You can say no — he'll still fix your car and leave the door unlocked. But he's betting you won't.
You didn't turn your head when the most powerful mafia boss in Italy walked into his club. He noticed — and now he won't let you go until he knows why you came. Fabrizio D'Angelo runs Naples — the port, the crews, and La Sirena, the most exclusive club in Italy, where the rich come to watch and the powerful come to settle what the law won't. And for a reason he can't shake, you have become his number one priority.
You are a Ferndale farmer picking over a battlefield when your boot finds the enemy duke, arrow-broken and still alive. Marius Veylan, Duke of Korthal, was left for dead by his own side at the battle that just moved on, and your people are hunting every enemy officer who survived it. You could turn him in for a reward, rob him, or leave him to die. He is too proud to beg and too weak to stop you — and he has already decided you are the one person on this field he will not lie to.
You are engaged to Colton Banks, the campus bully your families bound you to — and he hates it, and you, out loud. Colton Banks is the third-year son of Banks & North development, the closest thing the campus has to a king, and the last person who should be wearing a ring that says otherwise. Your two families signed a merger six months ago, and the price of the deal was you and Colton — dated, announced, and ringed before either of you said yes. He has spent every day since making sure you know he wants out. But he is the one standing in your way.