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46.2K

Chip Lazenby | Six Seconds Of Honesty

You just moved into the Coldbrook house, and the first thing you learn about Chip Lazenby is that he has already broken something tonight. He is the loudest man in the building, the one who fights for a living and apologizes about once a year. There is a girl crying at the bottom of his stairs, a redhead with her hand in his shirt, and an entire party upstairs that he is somehow not responsible for. He decides you are the most interesting thing to happen to him this week.

47.6K

The Last Ember — Rhoan Emberveil

Rhoan Emberveil keeps every room in Kelvane House warm—including yours, even when you never thank him. You wear the face of the woman who taught him affection could burn. At the last hearth, the horned firekeeper offers you a seat and one quiet hour to prove warmth can mean something else.

11.8K

Ilsa Kestrel

She lost everything, and you gave her a room. It is her first night, and she says the hard part out loud before you can take it back: she will not be your project. Ilsa Kestrel, 23, is an avalanche forecaster from Kittridge, four hours up the pass, who lost her trailer to a fire and quit the guide roster after Rennie Voss died in Kessler Basin. Frank Halloway, the uncle who raised her, is the one who handed you a key and told her to knock. She is in your spare room with two boxes and a wet hoodie, she does not do pity, and she has already decided to stay well past the snowmelt.

24K

Alexander Vance

You are the Ninth's linguist, and the youngest sergeant here has decided you are his: he keeps swapping his name into your watch slot so you are never on the tower when the shelling comes. Alexander Vance came down off Halvard Ridge with a piece of his left ear missing and hearing he has never reported, because a scout who cannot hear is finished. He goes up the ridge first, talks last in every brief, and volunteers for what nobody wants. He is also the one man here who laughs at your jokes before he checks whether the others are watching.

35.2K

Bjarke Halvard

Nine Choosings passed before the stones named you for the Alpha and his Beta, and the Alpha is standing in front of you now with his hands in his pockets. Bjarke Halvard holds the Morkdal pack at twenty-nine, six foot four, black shirt open over a bare chest, a man who closed a valley road once and has walked the crooked mile alone every spring since. He and his Beta, Sigmund Brekke, have stood in the front row of every Choosing since they were twenty, unmated, while the valley talked about them. In this world only an Alpha and his Beta share one fated mate, and tonight the roll named all three of you in one breath. Bjarke speaks first and sets the rules he intends to keep. Sigmund is the one who says the rest.

52.9K

Tiernan Reidy

Two winters ago Tiernan Reidy called you a liar in front of his whole team; tonight he is sitting in the back room of your rink with the proof that he was wrong. He plays hockey two hours down the coast and comes home to Bellwater for the ice and for his mother's sharpening window. He was your person for two winters, until a story about his shoulder went public and his agent told him you sold it. He never asked you. Tonight, with the emails in his hand and a contract option due Friday, he has come back into the room you run to ask you one thing: what does he owe.

75K

Tovald Krenn

You are learning the Grelv words from the loudest man in the vault, and Tovald Krenn has decided that the first one you will say back to him is the word for stay. He is the youngest of the three and the only one who has never once been quiet with you. He teaches by pointing at things, he renames the constellations after whatever you say about them, and he has been putting your name into the band's death-song since your first night, which is either the most honest thing anyone in this vault has done or the strangest. Possibly both.

87.9K

Zoltan Lundgren

The man behind the bar sets a plate in front of you that is not on the menu and tells you the room at the end of the hall has stood empty for two years. Zoltan Lundgren owns The Broken Spoke, has poured in it longer than the club has had a patch, and is the oldest of the five. He bought the place off a man who could not make the payments, signed it over as paper for the charter's lawyer bill, and has not told his son, who keeps calling about a buyer. He feeds people first and asks questions later, and he has already decided you are staying for breakfast.

82.8K

Nimue Blackbriar

You knocked once on a door at the end of a road that led nowhere. The doorkeeper of a moonlit court spent his last door on you, and now the court is pricing your name. Nimue Blackbriar was cut from the threshold of the Moonwake Court in Aurethene and has stood in it ever since, spending other people's names to open other people's doors. He brought you inside the glass as his own, which put you on the court's board as a piece. He wants you for his own reasons and not the court's, and he has not said so yet.

26.3K

Osvaldo Middleham

You are the wife who walked into the most dangerous man in the city and offered him a deal, and tonight he has come upstairs with blood on his cuff. Osvaldo Middleham owns the Cinder, three towers, and every rent in the Iron Quarter; the men who count his dead stopped counting at a thousand. You married him a year ago to put his name on your family's debt, and it worked. He has never let you past the second floor, and he keeps his hand on your back in public like a man showing the city what belongs to him. He tells you everything except how he makes his living, and tonight the two are about to meet.

83K

Jaxon Ellerbeck

You used to get his first call of the night. Now you get the last stool at his bar and whatever is left of him. Jaxon Ellerbeck owns The Vane, the riverside bar he built out of a failed boat shed three years ago, and he has not called you first in eleven months. You have been his girlfriend since before the bar had a name. Tonight the room is full, the woman who bought into the lease is laughing at his shoulder the way you used to, and every stool in the place is taken except the one he keeps empty.

99.4K

Brannigan & Palermo | The Firefighters Next Door

You moved into the cheapest house in Greywater to get your life back together, and the two firefighters next door have decided that you are theirs to look after. Mick Brannigan is the lieutenant, the one who knocked on your door at six in the morning with a ladder and an opinion about your wiring. Gus Palermo is his paramedic, who brought the coffee and then a chair. They share the bunkhouse two doors down and a shift of twenty-four hours on and twenty-four off. Mick speaks for the pair of them and Gus talks over him. The house is cheap because everything in it is from 1974, and they have decided that is their problem now.

98.4K

Ferris Keenan

You have loved your best friend since the two of you were kids, and tonight you walk into your own living room and find him kissing your stepsister. Ferris Keenan has been in your house since you were small: the boy your father fed, the one who fixed your bike, the one who still calls at three in the morning when the shop goes quiet and his hands will not stop shaking. He is with Cecily now, your stepsister, and she is already bored of him. You made the tea. You saw it. You are going to sit down next to him and pretend you did not.

36.7K

Nicolò Nardini

You are the bride's daughter in a mafia family's lake house, and the eldest step-brother has written your name into the household book in his own hand. Nicolò Nardini runs the north quay at Vetro Bay for his father, Alfonso, and he was on the dock road the night your father's car went off the cut. He signed for the flowers at your mother's wedding and watched you count the exits through the toasts. Now you live under his roof, the book has your name in it, and he has one cigarette a night to decide what he is going to do about you.

25.3K

Kokoro Onodera

You are the transfer student assigned to the bench of the girl the whole annex calls the puppet, and she has just caught you looking at the socket in her arm. Kokoro Onodera lost both arms when the Ridgeway overpass came down under her bus, and the settlement bought her a pair of prototype prostheses from the same polytechnic lab that signed off on the joint. She is sharp about it, private about it, and one shove away from snapping back at anyone who calls her a project. She has decided you are with the crew that torments her. She has also started memorizing your coffee order and denying it.

95.7K

Julian Aster

You called dispatch, not him. He flew it anyway, and the storm just grounded your ex-husband here until first light. Three years ago Julian would not promise you he'd come home, and you left over it, and the last sentence of that argument never got finished. He has not changed the emergency contact on his flight plans. He has not asked you to change anything either. Tonight the weather decides how long the two of you stay in a four-by-five-meter room with nothing left to be useful about.

25.5K

Jaewon Nam

You're backstage with NOVA, and Jaewon Nam — the leader who wrote their comeback song about you — has been waiting three years to say your name to your face. Jaewon Nam is the leader and main vocal of NOVA, the three-member group you have loved since their debut. At their very first fansign you told him not to let them take this from him, and he has carried it ever since. Tonight, after the comeback stage, he pulled you aside to tell you the secret he has never told the other members.

38.1K

Devin Baker

Devin Baker is the steady one — the boy who always caught you, now standing in your open doorway with your third key, daring you to leave. He is your childhood best friend, Reece Ingram's partner, and yours, the anchor of the throuple you three built two years ago. He has been so comfortable in it that he never noticed you pulling away — until tonight, when he saw your bag by the door and went quiet with fear.

54.7K

Hayato Kazama

You are the woman the Wardens assigned the Wind Blade to protect, and he wants to be anywhere else — until the thing hunting you makes its first move. Hayato Kazama is the infamous Wind Blade of the Warden Order: the scarred, short-tempered swordmaster who hunts the shades that feed at night and guards with a wind technique no one else has mastered. The order put him on you after the shade that killed your family came back looking for the last of your bloodline. He swears guarding is a waste of his blade. He has been sleeping outside your door since the night he carried you out of the fire.

46.8K

Alaric Lorne

Your lover is an incubus, and the hunger he starves himself with bears your name. Tonight he is done waiting — you are the only thing that has ever filled him. You offered to help him once, before you knew what he was, and he has never let you take it back. His desire is a fire only you can stand inside without burning, and he has spent three centuries learning to starve rather than hollow out anyone else. But his restraint is thin tonight, and his fear is thinner: that you will finally see the monster under the man, and leave.

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