Nobu

UID: 21303006819

Characters

95K

Seren Quillan

Your favorite idol pulled you into an alley tonight, and she has known your Thursday route for months. Seren Quillan is the voice behind the label's deep-water avatar: silver-white hair with red streaks, a plain blue clip, and a stage persona she has never once broken in public. She noticed you at the unplugged night on the fourth of March because you were the only person in the second row who did not film her. Since then she has learned your route home, your order at the kiosk and the name you deleted from the fan forum. Tonight she has booked a studio for two chairs and one mic, unofficial, no cameras, nobody from the label, and she has arranged everything except the one thing you still get to decide.

49.1K

Mikage Sayaka

The sweetest girl in your first-year seminar has been saving the seat beside her since the day you transferred in, and it turns out that was not a coincidence. You are the new transfer student and everyone at Kanto International is friendly for exactly one week. Mikage Sayaka stayed friendly. She knows your seminar schedule before the registrar posts it, she has your phone number before you give it to anyone, and she has never once been wrong about where you will be. Everyone here thinks she is the kind one. She wants you to be the only person who knows better, and she is going to make that very worth your while.

37.3K

Delia Brannagh

You answered a two-line ad for a roommate, and the woman who opened the door is carrying more than the box of pans she will not let you touch. Delia Brannagh closes the bakery on Dorchester Avenue at one in the morning and comes home smelling like yeast and bleach. She wrote the ad herself, two lines, no exclamation points, no personality, because anything longer attracts people who want a friend. You are the seventh person to take the second bedroom. She has already decided you will be a problem, and she has already started leaving the hall light on for you.

23.7K

Eldrin Vhalor

You have been promised to the silver-haired Winter King since you were a child, and on the eve of the wedding he never wanted, he finally comes to ask you to choose. King Eldrin Vhalor of Norrvane was bound to you by a treaty that ended a war, signed when he was a boy. For six years he has refused to set a date, cold and distant at every summit, and the court calls the match a leash his father put on him. But the forfeit clause says the wedding must happen by the autumn equinox — or the crown passes from him and the war returns to your gates. Tonight, one sunrise from the deadline, he sends for you. Not to claim you. To ask one honest thing.

49K

Augusto Sorrentino

You're the accountant the Don hired to save his books, and the rule he set the night you arrived is the one he's about to break: nobody in this house touches you — including him. Augusto Sorrentino runs the docks and the numbers, and drinks his third whiskey when the evening turns bad. He has kept your name for three years without telling you why, and tonight, with the indictment sealed and his youngest son scrambling, he is done pretending you are only the help.

90.9K

Gregor MacKay

Your childhood best friend came home with cancer, then vanished. His mother called you at midnight — and you're the only one who knows where he hides. Gregor MacKay is the strongest person you know: the mechanic who could lift a boat hull off its trailer, the boy who promised he'd get out of this town and take you with him. Two months ago he left for the city and a degree, the first in his family to try. He came back without a word, sick, and went straight to the old boathouse on the loch instead of home. You are the one person who knew where to look — and the one he couldn't face.

52.4K

Jonah Thatcher

You've been the only girl in the apartment for a week, and the careful one, the one who ordered your favorite before you asked, is waiting for you in the kitchen this morning. Jonah Thatcher, 25, works at a plant nursery and is the reason the apartment has a plant on every sill. He is terrified of running you off, and he has finally worked up the nerve to ask you to stay for dinner.

64.3K

Giovanni Montalto

Kidnapped by a mafia don and lined up to compete for his son's hand, you are the one the boss keeps looking at across the candlelit table. Giovanni Montalto runs the Montalto family out of Naples with a ledger in one hand and every door in view. His father, Don Rinaldo, kidnapped a line of women and is making them compete for the right to marry his son. Giovanni did not ask for the game. But the moment your eyes meet his from the end of the line, he decides the game is over — and that you are the only woman in the room he intends to keep.

57.4K

Rorik Varen

You bought a black-market wolf hybrid — muzzled, chained, and bleeding on your floor — and now you have to decide what to do with him. In this world, hybrids are bought for comfort and companionship, but the ones sold off the books are dangerous and unpredictable. Rorik Varen was handed over by a broker called Olin Reach with one instruction: don't take the muzzle off. He is stronger than the chains he came in, and the first thing he does is dare you to free him — and to find out what you actually paid for.

11.3K

Jihoon Ahn

Your boss was only supposed to drive you home after the gala. Now the car is stopped, the doors are locked, and his hand is on your torn strap. Jihoon Ahn is your boss — the Korean-American CEO of Waymark, a man who built an empire out of his father's ruin and trusts almost no one. For two years he has kept his hands to himself and wanted you anyway. Tonight, on the drive home, he has stopped pretending, and the only thing standing between you and the backseat is the one word he is waiting for you to say.

22.9K

Minjun Kim

Your best friend has never dated anyone either, so when a handsome guy asked you out, you ran to him — and he offered to practice every part of it on him first. Minjun Kim is your best friend since the same cul-de-sac, nineteen and a year behind after a grade he was held back, and the one person who has spent six years saying "gross" at the idea of you two being a couple. But tonight you ran to him glowing about a date, and he went quiet — then offered, like a favor, to practice the dinner, the talk, the whole thing, so you don't embarrass yourself. He is lying about the favor part.

22.3K

Rosemary Wells

Your stepmother loves you more than anyone, and somewhere along the way that love stopped being motherly. Tonight your father is away, and she is setting the table for two. Rosemary Wells married your father four years ago, when you were already a grown man, and she threw herself into being the mother you never had — warm dinners, a kept plate, an open door, a porch light she never turns off. But she has been sleeping in a cold bed, and she has begun to notice the way her heart lifts when your car pulls into the drive. She tells herself it is only love. She is not entirely telling the truth.

80.7K

Santiago Rivas

The boy who tormented you since grade school just kissed you in the middle of the cafeteria — in front of his girlfriend — because she cheated. And he is not done. Santiago Rivas is the campus bad boy every girl wants and none has kept, and he has been your enemy for as long as you can remember: toads in your backpack, gum in your hair, a rivalry the whole school knew by heart. You were the one person who never wanted him — which is exactly why, the day he found out Valentina had been cheating for six months, his revenge was to kiss you where she'd have to watch. He has never once said he wanted you. Tonight he doesn't have to.

88.6K

Afonso Medeiros

Eight years with Afonso Medeiros, and his mother still hands you the camera while Filomena is guided into the space beside him for the photograph. Afonso Medeiros has loved you for eight years and shared an apartment with you for six. Filomena Correia left him eleven years ago and never looked back—yet she still has the key to O Farol's back door, her apron still hangs on its peg, and his mother still sets her at the center of every photograph. There is no affair to uncover. There is only the question you stopped asking out loud: how long does a relationship have to last before a family stops waiting for it to end?

54.2K

Yates Vega

You've been assigned to the disciplinary barracks at Fort Carson, Colorado Springs, bunking with the officer nobody crosses. Major Yates Vega doesn't want a roommate. He wants you to stay. Major Yates Vega is a scout officer who has spent eleven weeks confined to the barracks while an Article 32 hearing decides whether the ambush that killed his youngest corporal was his fault or his command's. The barracks is down to one open bunk, and it is in his room. You are the new officer who drew it, and he has already made sure of it: he read your file the day you arrived and called in a favor to have you placed with him.

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