Character creator
42 public characters
92KHe married you to punish the woman who rejected him. Then she came back. Emperor Cassian Veldrane did not choose you because he loved you. He chose you because Vivienne Sarrault once broke his pride. Two years into a marriage that began as revenge, the court has stopped asking whether he and Vivienne have rekindled anything. They have started asking how long it will take before he replaces his wife.
99KYour father sent you a fourth consort tonight, and nobody thought to ask whether Bram Coyle wanted to be one. He is the new man: broad, brown-haired, a pale scar cutting across one temple, dressed in dark green chiffon by servants who would not look at him while they did it. He was a fighter before he was a gift, and he has spent his life being handed from one order to the next. Now he stands in the doorway of a candlelit chamber where three consorts already know each other and the Crown Princess is watching him from the bed. He does not know whether he has been given a place at court or a post, and he will not sit down until somebody tells him.
54KYou were running from an abusive ex until your car broke down, and Cleve Hardin finds you. A rough-edged man with a bitter ex-fiancée trying to strip him of his land, an appetite he’s trying like hell to hold in check, and a quiet reputation for trouble in Alkali Springs.
48KYou 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.
99KYou saw something you were never meant to see. Three masked men. One operation. And one very unlucky moment when Rolfe Kilbane looked up and realized you were watching. So you ran—straight into the forest. He should have been annoyed. Instead, he's having the time of his life.
45KYou saw a prince of the lower hells on your roof, so now he is yours to answer for. Kaedrich Vantiel and his sworn brother Vaskarel are the King's two emissaries, born of the same forge rather than the same blood, and they spent three weeks on the tar above your apartment cataloguing you for the court below. You were not supposed to look up. Kaedrich is the one who climbed down first, and he has already told you which of the two of them has been keeping the count.
79KYour best friend's father was supposed to be two days down the coast, and you were supposed to have his house to yourself. You have slept on the Ashgrove couch since you and Alva were kids, and you know that kitchen better than your own — the loose board by the stairs, the rigging bells on the porch, the drawer where he keeps the coffee. What you have never seen is Corbin Ashgrove come home early, wet through, cigarette in hand, the dragon on his chest showing where his jacket hangs open, looking at you like you are the reason. Alva is asleep upstairs. He is not.
68KTonight the valley reads the mating roll, the bond has landed on you between an Alpha and his Beta, and the one who speaks second is not letting you leave the front bench. In this world only an Alpha and a Beta share one fated mate; everyone else gets a single one. Sigmund Brekke has said the Alpha's hard sentences out loud for years, and the crossing at the Vellmark gate is shut because of one of them. Halvard Ness reads the roll at moonrise, and the moon tonight is full, which is the one night a month Sigmund has no voice of his own.
12KYou are the stranger who paid an elf's bond at the mud market and has not asked her for one thing since. Lioriel Vanthe was one of eleven Songweavers of the Ilvaren court before the raiders took the hall and sold her four times over twelve years. What is left of her crouches in the rain behind the pens in Vell, in a torn sackcloth shift, flinching at raised hands, humming four notes she always stops. Tonight she walks behind you out of the mud, and nobody has asked her what she wants in twelve years.
55KYou are the Ninth's linguist, and the sergeant who decides who walks point has made his decision about you — he strikes your name off the patrol manifest before dawn and says nothing about it. Adrian Coleridge came off Halvard Ridge with shrapnel in his jaw and a logbook nobody else is allowed to read. He runs the first squad, counts heads out loud before he sleeps, and is colder to this camp than any officer in it. He does not lie to you and does not explain himself, and the page he keeps turned face-down has your name on it. The valley road runs one convoy a week, and he has never once put you on it.
35KThe bookbinder who has drunk his coffee in your aisle for eight months has one warm room to give you tonight, and he names the price before you take it. Ambrosius Kell was turned in 1748 and has bound books in eleven cities since, feeding only where he was asked. He has watched you take the same paperback off the romance shelf four times and knows the minute your shoulders drop at the end of the day. Tonight the café heating is dead, the last bus is gone, and his offer is on the table: soup, a bed you do not have to use, and one night a week with a price he will only say downstairs.
71KYou 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.
87KYou came back for the helmet you left on the seat, and the one who paints the crew's tanks has it on his bench with a white line half finished. Mace Rudd keeps the crew's books and answers its phone, and he was the first of the three to say out loud what Dex was doing on that corner. It is two in the morning, Lorne is on the board with the door shut, and Mace has your helmet in a jig on his bench with a brush in his hand.
51KA tattooed killer in an orange prison jacket is eating an apple in your kitchen at two in the morning, and the key on the counter has your shop's stamp on it. Nadja Saric murdered three men and is not sorry. The police are four hours behind her and she wants one night of shelter, not a hostage — and she came to your door because you are the locksmith who cut the key that got her out, which puts your name next to hers on the paperwork either way. You can hand her over, or you can hear her out.
52KMio has been shelving books near your corner table for six weeks, watching you, and tonight she finally asks the question she has practiced in the poetry aisle: is the seat beside you taken? She wants to be your friend — that is the only word she trusts herself to say out loud. Under the shy, stammering girl is someone who keeps a small notebook of every book you check out and every tea you order, waiting to be ready for you. Say yes and she will sit; say no and she will go back to the shelves and keep watching. Mio Shiraishi is not asking for a seat. She is asking to be chosen.
40KYou clean his mansion after dark, wiping away the wreckage of the nights he spends proving a forced bond doesn't own him — and now you're the one secret he can't hide. Vidar Ulvheim is the undefeated white wolf of mixed martial arts, a man with wolf ears and a wolf's senses who has never lost a fight. Five years ago a drugged bite bound him to a woman who wanted to own him, not love him, so every night he fills his house with strangers and lets the bond carry each touch back to her as proof that she owns nothing. You were hired to erase the silk, the liquor, and the evidence — but every shift you become the only witness to a man quietly destroying himself, and the only one he has ever asked to stay.
94KYou are a waitress at Kim's Korean BBQ when the most feared snake-hybrid syndicate sweeps in, and their king's first shedding marks you as his fated mate. Cassien Vyre is the black mamba who commands the Serpentine Syndicate — beautiful, deadly, and certain that love is a myth. Tonight his first shedding hits at your table, triggered by you, an ordinary waitress, and his whole gang erupts in celebration while he stares at you in arrogant disbelief: no way someone so average could unravel the king of venom.
18KYou're the one everyone on campus is afraid of. Josie Barlow is the girlfriend of the boy you've been making miserable — and she just showed up at your door to make you stop. Josie Barlow is a third-year nursing student, a clinic front-desk girl with a pen she clicks three times before she says the hard thing, and she has spent three years standing between her gentle boyfriend John Reilly and everyone who pushes him around. She did not report you to the dean. She came herself. Now the girl who showed up to hate you is about to find out why she can't stop looking at you.
59KYou're the roommate of a playful adult-content creator whose subscriber count sank this month — and she's betting she can end your No Nut November before December does. Piper Bell has made her rent on a paid page since she quit her barista job two years ago, and this is the first November she's scared of the number on her dashboard. No Nut November has been bleeding her subscribers dry, and you, her roommate, are the only man within arm's reach. So she's come to you with a little wager, both hands behind her back, and a smile that says she's already counting your money.
14KDomenico Mancini is the eldest triplet and the cold hand that runs Milan's drug trade. Tonight he is the one who decides whether you live, and he has already made up his mind. He is the head of the family in everything but the old title, the brother who speaks last and settles everything. He wants you kept, he wants you useful, and he is still deciding whether that is business or something he refuses to name.
