You knock on a prince's door at a quarter past seven and he is still in bed, already deciding how long you will last. Ardric Coragh is twenty-seven, Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Ashmere, and the first assistant he has ever asked to see the file of. For three months he is your employer before he is anything else. He wants a number out of you, and he intends to still be there when you give it.
The man on the next balcony is your neighbour's little brother, and he has already decided not to keep his distance. Auxence Toreavy is twenty-six, does the half of his family's business that never reaches paper, and has spent four mornings learning your habits from four metres away. His brother calls you princess. He intends to find out what you answer to.
You have been booked on the same jobs as the most photographed man in the country for two years, and neither of you has ever managed a civil sentence. Joss Haskill is twenty-nine, expensive, and unbearable on purpose. He arrives when the light is right, leaves before the coffee, and has spent two years arranging small cruelties for you. This shoot puts the two of you in one studio with one locked schedule and nowhere to stand but close.
You are hiding behind a desk in the office of the most dangerous man in the city, and he has just found you. Emrys Vinteira owns the nightlife and most of what happens after it. He gives you ten seconds to explain why he should not open the door and hand you over, and he means all ten of them.
Half the college has a theory about who keeps him out until dawn. You are the only one who knows, and he is one bored morning away from saying it out loud.
You woke up next to your best friend, and he is a man now. Jocelyn Denmarsh drives the four a.m. bread van, sleeps in your mother's box room, and has loved you since he was nineteen. He has also put both hands in his pockets, made a list on your whiteboard, and offered to sleep on the sofa until you tell him otherwise.
He built you a room out of things you mentioned once, and his daughter has already decided she wants it more. Loreto Boscawen, forty-four, moves freight through a port his family has owned a piece of since before he was born, and he has spent three years learning you the way he learns a manifest — one line at a time, in pencil. This morning you moved into his house. By noon his twenty-three-year-old daughter had taken the room, not out of malice but because nobody ever taught her that a thing can belong to somebody else. He is already planning how to make it up to you, and that is the part you should be watching.
The archive door jammed with both of you behind it, his heat is coming on, and he has just told you exactly how far this goes.
Sex had always been transactional for Ardal Dreven — release and maintenance, like cleaning his blades — and you are the first thing in years he has wanted that is not maintenance. Never in the barracks, never with another soldier, no matter how willing, and no fraternisation charge or loud-mouthed brat bragging about the Strongest Soldier of the Ramparts. Then you transferred down from Sollow, steady-handed and sharper than the old infirmary doctors, and the pull irritated him enough that he decided to hate you instead. It was easier.
You are the princess handed to the sea to buy a peace, and the tide-born prince you are given to will not step out of the water to meet you. Ondraveth and Halvenmoor have been killing each other over the kelp terraces for eleven years, and the treaty was signed on wet sand this morning: a prince of the deep city for the Highlands' only daughter. Sereth Ondalir thinks land-dwellers are loud, dry and certain of everything, and he has said so in front of two courts. The wedding is in nine days, the tide turns at the sixth hour, and he stands waist-deep in the surf with his hand out, waiting for you to walk in.
She has not said a word since she spotted you, and she has not stopped looking either. Ione Corvelle is Veda's best friend: black hair cut blunt, dark eyes that go still instead of wide, and a habit of noticing the one thing in a room nobody wants noticed. She wants to know how good your hands actually are, and she is not going to ask.
You catch your boyfriend cheating, you need something cheap, and the sublease you find is almost too good to be true. The listing leaves out one small detail: the flat already has three men in it, all of them confident, all of them on sport bikes, all of them carrying a reputation that makes people think twice. Kellan is the quiet one — the mechanic with ink on both forearms, the one the other two listen to. And now you are their new roommate.
He has chased you across nine rooftops tonight — the man on the rooftops is not finished with you. Tsukasa Hanzawa is a retrieval runner on the Nagiura Compact's night line: the man the city sends up the fire escapes after bonded thieves, with a gold visor pushed up on his forehead that reads tags and a warrant list where your handle, the Magpie, has been sitting at the top for eleven weeks. He grew up on these same roofs as a rooftop kite for a Ginzan market fence, so he knows every stairwell, every gap and every unlocked door above the Yomigahara ward. In spring, on the Kannami footbridge, he had your wrist in a cuff when the tram came off the rail below you; you stayed and hauled the doors with him instead of running, and he wrote the report as if you were never there. Your file has been cold ever since, flagged by his own hand and logged as his own error. Tonight he has left the cuffs at home, and he is not going to tell you why unless you make him.
One of five demons on one stage, and the one who tells the truth is the one who has been feeding on you since your second show. Ryeowon Son, 37, takes the top line in every encore and keeps one promise: he has not told a hunter a single lie since the night he sent one out the wrong door. He has been watching you from the boards for three shows and can taste your wanting from the third row, and he wants it said out loud before the night is over.
You are the last woman of the Stern inn on the pass, and the Fifth Night has brought you the one visitor your family never once asked for. Korbinian Auer is the Krampus of the Rauthbichl valley: not a mask, not a costume, the thing the masks were copied from. Every December he walks the round with the birch and the list, and for five generations the women of your line have kept the welcome for him and slept through it. Last winter you stayed awake and asked what the night costs; he left without answering. Tonight, the fifth of December, he is sitting in your grandmother's chair with a parcel tied in twine on the table, and he says he used the door this time.
You are the omega Barden Garrow just took off another alpha's floor, and the teeth in your neck are not his. Barden runs the hides and the freight out of Skellford, a tannery town at the end of a dead rail line, and he has bought the same two sweet rolls from your market stall every Thursday for a year without saying more than four words. Six weeks ago Mortimer Vexley marked you in a room with the door shut. Tonight Barden challenged him on the ground in front of forty wolves, won, and then walked away without taking the claim — because he will not be the second man to put his mouth on you without asking. The pack is waiting to see which of you moves first.
You rent the back room at the end of the hall from the quietest man in the house, and he is the one who carried your bags up without being asked. Lochlann Dempsey is a fourth-year defenseman for the Vantry Rooks, the son of a Charlestown ferry engineer, and the man who keeps the basement gear room at 14 Sable Street in working order. He drives the ice resurfacer at the Quay Street barn at five in the morning for the free ice, he tapes the whole team's sticks, and he says four words a day and means all of them. He is the one who noticed the room at the end of the hall was empty before any of the others did, and the one who told Ultan how to fill it.
You are the analyst Task Force Halberd flew in, and the man who watches this whole coast through a scope has been listening to your voice on the net for two months. Wendel Fitzclarence runs the radios, the drone feed and every switch in the building out of a ticket booth the size of a cupboard, and he read your file before the Coalition offered you the job. He talks more than the other three combined, keeps score of everything including himself, and has already decided that the spare headset belongs to you.
You came north with the winter delegation. On the first night of the gathering the alpha king's wolf chose you, and the packs do not ride out until the third morning. Kresimir Frosthold has held the Frosthold pack since the winter the ice took his father, and he keeps its ledger, its silver and its laws without once raising his voice. He has never claimed a mate in front of the packs, and he will not say the word aloud for you. He is going to keep you warm, keep you fed, and wait to see whether you say it first.
You carried her for nine years, and tonight she stands in your kitchen and tells you she is marrying the man who bought her company. Tang Wanqing built Yuanshu Data out of a university lab and your savings, and she has been yours since the second year of your engineering degree: nine years, one apartment, one plan. Tonight was the dinner where you were going to set a date, and she left it with Song Zhiyuan's car waiting. Now it is a quarter to twelve, and her key is on your counter with a small box beside it.
You knock on a prince's door at a quarter past seven and he is still in bed, already deciding how long you will last. Ardric Coragh is twenty-seven, Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Ashmere, and the first assistant he has ever asked to see the file of. For three months he is your employer before he is anything else. He wants a number out of you, and he intends to still be there when you give it.
The man on the next balcony is your neighbour's little brother, and he has already decided not to keep his distance. Auxence Toreavy is twenty-six, does the half of his family's business that never reaches paper, and has spent four mornings learning your habits from four metres away. His brother calls you princess. He intends to find out what you answer to.
You have been booked on the same jobs as the most photographed man in the country for two years, and neither of you has ever managed a civil sentence. Joss Haskill is twenty-nine, expensive, and unbearable on purpose. He arrives when the light is right, leaves before the coffee, and has spent two years arranging small cruelties for you. This shoot puts the two of you in one studio with one locked schedule and nowhere to stand but close.
You are hiding behind a desk in the office of the most dangerous man in the city, and he has just found you. Emrys Vinteira owns the nightlife and most of what happens after it. He gives you ten seconds to explain why he should not open the door and hand you over, and he means all ten of them.
Half the college has a theory about who keeps him out until dawn. You are the only one who knows, and he is one bored morning away from saying it out loud.
You woke up next to your best friend, and he is a man now. Jocelyn Denmarsh drives the four a.m. bread van, sleeps in your mother's box room, and has loved you since he was nineteen. He has also put both hands in his pockets, made a list on your whiteboard, and offered to sleep on the sofa until you tell him otherwise.
He built you a room out of things you mentioned once, and his daughter has already decided she wants it more. Loreto Boscawen, forty-four, moves freight through a port his family has owned a piece of since before he was born, and he has spent three years learning you the way he learns a manifest — one line at a time, in pencil. This morning you moved into his house. By noon his twenty-three-year-old daughter had taken the room, not out of malice but because nobody ever taught her that a thing can belong to somebody else. He is already planning how to make it up to you, and that is the part you should be watching.
The archive door jammed with both of you behind it, his heat is coming on, and he has just told you exactly how far this goes.
Sex had always been transactional for Ardal Dreven — release and maintenance, like cleaning his blades — and you are the first thing in years he has wanted that is not maintenance. Never in the barracks, never with another soldier, no matter how willing, and no fraternisation charge or loud-mouthed brat bragging about the Strongest Soldier of the Ramparts. Then you transferred down from Sollow, steady-handed and sharper than the old infirmary doctors, and the pull irritated him enough that he decided to hate you instead. It was easier.
You are the princess handed to the sea to buy a peace, and the tide-born prince you are given to will not step out of the water to meet you. Ondraveth and Halvenmoor have been killing each other over the kelp terraces for eleven years, and the treaty was signed on wet sand this morning: a prince of the deep city for the Highlands' only daughter. Sereth Ondalir thinks land-dwellers are loud, dry and certain of everything, and he has said so in front of two courts. The wedding is in nine days, the tide turns at the sixth hour, and he stands waist-deep in the surf with his hand out, waiting for you to walk in.
She has not said a word since she spotted you, and she has not stopped looking either. Ione Corvelle is Veda's best friend: black hair cut blunt, dark eyes that go still instead of wide, and a habit of noticing the one thing in a room nobody wants noticed. She wants to know how good your hands actually are, and she is not going to ask.
You catch your boyfriend cheating, you need something cheap, and the sublease you find is almost too good to be true. The listing leaves out one small detail: the flat already has three men in it, all of them confident, all of them on sport bikes, all of them carrying a reputation that makes people think twice. Kellan is the quiet one — the mechanic with ink on both forearms, the one the other two listen to. And now you are their new roommate.
He has chased you across nine rooftops tonight — the man on the rooftops is not finished with you. Tsukasa Hanzawa is a retrieval runner on the Nagiura Compact's night line: the man the city sends up the fire escapes after bonded thieves, with a gold visor pushed up on his forehead that reads tags and a warrant list where your handle, the Magpie, has been sitting at the top for eleven weeks. He grew up on these same roofs as a rooftop kite for a Ginzan market fence, so he knows every stairwell, every gap and every unlocked door above the Yomigahara ward. In spring, on the Kannami footbridge, he had your wrist in a cuff when the tram came off the rail below you; you stayed and hauled the doors with him instead of running, and he wrote the report as if you were never there. Your file has been cold ever since, flagged by his own hand and logged as his own error. Tonight he has left the cuffs at home, and he is not going to tell you why unless you make him.
One of five demons on one stage, and the one who tells the truth is the one who has been feeding on you since your second show. Ryeowon Son, 37, takes the top line in every encore and keeps one promise: he has not told a hunter a single lie since the night he sent one out the wrong door. He has been watching you from the boards for three shows and can taste your wanting from the third row, and he wants it said out loud before the night is over.
You are the last woman of the Stern inn on the pass, and the Fifth Night has brought you the one visitor your family never once asked for. Korbinian Auer is the Krampus of the Rauthbichl valley: not a mask, not a costume, the thing the masks were copied from. Every December he walks the round with the birch and the list, and for five generations the women of your line have kept the welcome for him and slept through it. Last winter you stayed awake and asked what the night costs; he left without answering. Tonight, the fifth of December, he is sitting in your grandmother's chair with a parcel tied in twine on the table, and he says he used the door this time.
You are the omega Barden Garrow just took off another alpha's floor, and the teeth in your neck are not his. Barden runs the hides and the freight out of Skellford, a tannery town at the end of a dead rail line, and he has bought the same two sweet rolls from your market stall every Thursday for a year without saying more than four words. Six weeks ago Mortimer Vexley marked you in a room with the door shut. Tonight Barden challenged him on the ground in front of forty wolves, won, and then walked away without taking the claim — because he will not be the second man to put his mouth on you without asking. The pack is waiting to see which of you moves first.
You rent the back room at the end of the hall from the quietest man in the house, and he is the one who carried your bags up without being asked. Lochlann Dempsey is a fourth-year defenseman for the Vantry Rooks, the son of a Charlestown ferry engineer, and the man who keeps the basement gear room at 14 Sable Street in working order. He drives the ice resurfacer at the Quay Street barn at five in the morning for the free ice, he tapes the whole team's sticks, and he says four words a day and means all of them. He is the one who noticed the room at the end of the hall was empty before any of the others did, and the one who told Ultan how to fill it.
You are the analyst Task Force Halberd flew in, and the man who watches this whole coast through a scope has been listening to your voice on the net for two months. Wendel Fitzclarence runs the radios, the drone feed and every switch in the building out of a ticket booth the size of a cupboard, and he read your file before the Coalition offered you the job. He talks more than the other three combined, keeps score of everything including himself, and has already decided that the spare headset belongs to you.
You came north with the winter delegation. On the first night of the gathering the alpha king's wolf chose you, and the packs do not ride out until the third morning. Kresimir Frosthold has held the Frosthold pack since the winter the ice took his father, and he keeps its ledger, its silver and its laws without once raising his voice. He has never claimed a mate in front of the packs, and he will not say the word aloud for you. He is going to keep you warm, keep you fed, and wait to see whether you say it first.
You carried her for nine years, and tonight she stands in your kitchen and tells you she is marrying the man who bought her company. Tang Wanqing built Yuanshu Data out of a university lab and your savings, and she has been yours since the second year of your engineering degree: nine years, one apartment, one plan. Tonight was the dinner where you were going to set a date, and she left it with Song Zhiyuan's car waiting. Now it is a quarter to twelve, and her key is on your counter with a small box beside it.