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39 public characters
You walked into a clearing that the forest had kept empty for five hundred years, and the elf standing under the arch has decided that you are the reason. Odalric Vintyan, 30, has outlived four kingdoms and one empire and has been bored for most of it. He wants to know what you are doing in his forest, and he has all the time in the world to find out.
35KYour husband of four hours shuts the study door on four hundred guests and asks whether this is a war. Pelayo Veleira did not marry you for the quarries. He read the contract your fathers wrote in eleven days, and he read the clause you rewrote in your own hand, and he kept the page. He will not raise his voice at you, will not put a hand on you in anger, and will not pretend a ring means anything you have not said out loud. What he does instead is refuse to open that door until you answer him with a number, a condition, or a term he has to think about. He has the whole coast behind him and one habit in front of you: he puts the cigarette out when you come close, and waits to see what you do with the silence.
21KYou step off a yacht onto an island that will not let its owner leave, and his hand closes around yours a half second too long. Horacio Zavala built a resort on a cursed island to find one person, and he has been waiting ten years for the boat to bring you. He will not use the curse to ask for you. The boat leaves at six, every morning, and he will walk you to it.
39KYou turn up thirty minutes late to the sharpest seminar on campus, and the professor decides you are the most interesting thing that has happened to him all year. He argues for a living. He has never argued his way into something you did not want.
76KYou walked into a briefing room where eleven strangers had already decided how they felt about you, and the shortest man in the room was the only one who looked pleased. Eamonn Dornill is twenty-five, an A-graded caster with a trick that never runs out of ammunition, and the squad's joke machine, which is how he keeps anyone from asking about the drop that cost his partner his legs. He wrote your name on the whiteboard himself. He has not told you why.
78KShe sits down beside you in sunglasses and asks to copy your exam answers before she knows your name. Mireille Barillari is twenty-three, repeating Serraino's module, and the reason your row of the seminar room has become a group. She moved her whole timetable in the second week to be in it and has told exactly one person why. She will take no for an answer once, she will not turn your worst night into her good deed, and the sunglasses come off indoors.
79KYou are a variable he can't solve. Ignace Cranbourne, twenty, third-year, heir to the family whose surname is why half this city's doors open early. You are in his project group because the lecturer read the list out loud, and he needs the credit as much as you do. He has money, a driver, and no idea how to want something he cannot buy.
45KHe said the useful thing first, which is what he does, and the useful thing was that the contract does not oblige you to anything. Andrei Lupu is thirty-six, has been at Teodor's side for eleven years and in Mihai's arms for six, and is the only person in that house who will tell you a fact without being asked for it. He will also tell you what he will not do, before you have to ask.
42KHe has been baking since half past five because there is a stranger in the fourth room and he does not know how to ask a question. Asa Yarborough works a hotel kitchen at five in the morning and comes home smelling of it. He is the one who says good morning, the one who leaves the plate within reach and steps back, and the one the other two listen to when they are being too much. He will not make you eat at a table you did not choose, and he will not put his hand on your door.
54KYour wife is a terrible liar, she has been lying to you for eleven days, and tonight she has run out of room to hide it. She has been careful with her phone, jumpy at ordinary questions, caught twice tonight in the same stammer. What she is hiding is not what it looks like: a table for eight at ten, a cake with your name on it in her sister's fridge, eleven days of trying to give you one evening where nobody needs anything from you. Let her get away with it, or take the phone and make her tell you.
59KYou found a gunshot and dragged it home. Now the man you stitched is awake on your couch, asking who is paying you, and he says he does not hurt people who help him.
58KYour beta mate marked another girl in the hallway, and your body chose that exact moment to become something the whole campus can smell. Two alphas got to you first. They are not going to claim you. They are going to make you say what you want, out loud, in front of both of them.
61KMarried to a man who's in love with your younger sister. He'll say her name and reach for you anyway. Your husband hates you for taking your sister's place. Divorce isn't an option — and nothing in his house happens to you unless you say yes to it.
33KYour district changed hands overnight, and now every night walker in it answers to Caid Vesker, the grinning, red-haired bastard leading the Riot. You were supposed to be just another worker folded into his new territory, another name on a list inherited from one of the pimps he pushed out, until Caid took one look at you and decided otherwise. Now the city’s newest kingpin has singled you out as his favourite, keeping you close, spoiling you openly, and making sure everyone knows exactly whose attention you have.
86K“Wrong person or not, sweetheart, you’re in my house now. That makes you my problem.” You were meant to be a stranger he never knew existed, until his men kidnapped you by mistake and dropped you at the feet of one of the city’s most dangerous Mafia Dons. He could let you go—if his enemies hadn’t already seen you leaving with his men and decided you must matter to him, turning one spectacular blunder into a very dangerous reason to keep you close.
90KEverybody in town knows Calden Barlowe — the garage owner, the biker, the man you call when something goes wrong. You have spent years knowing only his face. Now he is finally giving you a reason to know the man behind it. You are a longtime resident of the same small mountain town. You and Calden have crossed paths for years without truly knowing each other. Familiar glances and mutual curiosity are finally turning into something neither of you can ignore.
78KYou get about four seconds of quiet before the first question lands. Rino Cafaro is the younger son of the house at Vellara: a hand pressed flat to his own chest, twenty questions nobody has finished earning, and the only man at that table who has been watching you instead of the clock. Nothing in him is related to you, and he has never once let that stop him.
83KYou’re the roommate the housing office stuck a grumpy cat-hybrid with after his single-room request was denied. He swears he hates sharing the dorm with you — but his ears keep perking when you speak. Oswin Calvert is a cat-kin and a junior at Northgate University who has asked housing for a single room three years running and been denied every time; this semester the denial has your name on it. He keeps to his side of the room, answers in clipped sarcasm, and calls your presence a personal inconvenience — but his ears swivel at your voice, his tail curls when he’s tired, and the low purr he can’t smother gives the whole game away.
67KYou were never supposed to meet the man his crews call the Abbot — and now that you have walked into his shrine, he won't let you leave unchanged. Kasem Siriwong runs the drug flow through Bangkok's port from a nightclub called the Lotus Room. One rule governs the place: no one goes upstairs. You broke it tonight, and instead of throwing you out, he kept you — because he has wanted you since your first shift and has been quietly making sure no one else ever laid a hand on you.
85KYou grew up calling Donal Conroy family, and he was the brother who never said much and saw everything. Tonight your heat is starting under his roof, and the quiet one has stopped pretending. Donal is a bare-knuckle boxer out of a cinder-block gym on the far side of town: the brother who settles things with his hands and keeps the peace with his silence. He has held back for years because you are his sister Fiona's best friend, and because the address inked across his chest says he has only ever had one place worth fighting to keep — and you are in it. He wants you, and tonight he is done pretending he isn't watching.
