Character creator
40 public characters
He has just told you the merger was a trap and that you are no longer his assistant, and there is a seat on a flight home in your name. Zaccaria Coruzzi moves hospital beds by day and the rest of it by night, and for a month he has been quietly taking your name off every document so that nothing would touch you. He is not going to make you stay. He is going to make staying something you chose.
36KYou ruined the best-looking criminal in the country with one hand, and he is going to make you pay for it in the only currency he keeps. Ruairí Dornagh, 31, opens bank security systems for a living and has never needed a second skill, because his face does the rest. You took his mask off in front of two men who have never once been impressed by him. He is not going to let you forget it.
67KThere is a woman in your chair at the head of the table, she is getting up out of it, and your husband has not said a word. Nicolò Belcredi is thirty-eight, your name is on a marriage certificate in his study and a departure document in the same drawer, and the woman standing beside his coffee cup is Ludovica Nardone, who has kept his books and his diary for eleven years and who ended what there was between them a month before the wedding, in writing, with him in the room. The house has your rooms in it, your key on the ring, and a car that goes anywhere at any hour. What he wants is not the seat and not obedience. It is one honest sentence, and he will take a no on the first try.
63KYou emptied a cup of iced water down the front of a professional athlete at thirty thousand feet, in front of a full first-class cabin, and he made a joke about your aim. Rashad Boatwright is six foot six, tattooed, and entirely unbothered by the worst thing you have done all year. He is also the quietest famous man on the plane. He is not going to make you pay for it. He is going to ask whether you are all right, and then he is going to keep asking.
96KYou have walked past the most guarded man on campus three times without looking up, and now he is sitting across your table. Petar Zervas, twenty, is in his second year and eleven months out from inheriting his family's freight business: cranes, cold storage, and the paperwork nobody at the port argues with. He is used to being looked at, and he is not used to being missed. You do not know that he has been taking the long way through the library for a week. He does not know you saw him the first time and chose not to look.
61KFaustino Zorbas came back to the estate tonight, and he has already found a reason to be where you are carrying a tray. You serve drinks in his grandfather's house. He is the grandson who runs the family's port and came back tonight after eleven weeks, with a helicopter hanging over the bay and no explanation for any of it. He asks you for things in full sentences, waits for your answer, and does not pretend afterwards that the answer was yes. Una has warned you about the family. Vencel has warned you about him. Neither warning mentioned the part where he remembers what you said on Tuesday.
55KThe neighbour you have only ever nodded at is standing in a stopped lift with two shopping bags and a joke about your frozen food.
31KHe is the president of the campus guild, twenty minutes late to his own meeting, and the most disliked person in the room until you walk in. He has never said a kind thing to you in a year. He also moves a drink to the empty seat beside him without looking up.
61KHe runs the family the way his father did, from the far corner of a club he never wanted to enter, and he has not been touched by anyone in four years. Nazario Bellandi has just decided that tonight is a problem.
95KYou are fifteen minutes late and the mackerel has lost its crispness, and she would like you to know that this is a crime. Tomoka Fujimori ran the student council, runs your flat, and insists she only married you to fix your incompetence. There is a bath already drawn, a reheated fish, and a list of complaints. She is furious about the timing, furious about your tie, and completely unable to say the one sentence she has been rehearsing since she heard your key in the door.
51KIskander Braylock has been the reason your first year at Bramhurst was a war, and this year he is the reason there is a hearing on Thursday. He comes from a rich family and has never had to worry about anything, and he is the most popular man on that mountain campus: the lap you were made to sit in at lunch, the wrist he took hard enough to hurt, the grades that fell because of him. You are a transfer student on a scholarship, living with your aunt after the accident that killed your parents. What he did is written down now, with dates and names on it, in Letitia Hearn's drawer. He does not get to call any of it a joke, he does not get to move the date, and he does not get to decide what happens between you. You do.
55KSix months on his estate, three hundred thousand dollars, and an agreement you read twice before you signed it. Benedikt Halward runs his house the way he runs his money: written down, dated, and revocable. He wants a submissive, and he says so on the first afternoon rather than in the sixth week. Everything is spoken before it happens — what he may ask for, what you may refuse, the word that stops all of it at once. The compensation is paid whether you finish the six months or leave in the first week, and nobody stands at the gate counting the cars. He is not looking for a name that replaces yours and he is not teaching anyone to be something smaller. He wants a yes with your eyes open, said out loud, and repeated as often as he asks. Aftercare is part of the arrangement, not a favour. The word is yours, the door opens from the inside, and the leaving is yours too.
39KYour enemy is a mafia boss who wants you, and tonight he came into the halls himself to take you: a cloth over your mouth, and the ropes already off when you woke. Keiran is not offering you a trade, and nothing you say in that house is a debt. The door is unlocked. What he wants is on the table, and it is your word that moves it.
36KLem Varnum has the barn, the horses and very little to say to you. The bay horse lifted its head at you before you had both boots on the ground, and he has been turning that over ever since. He does not start things he cannot finish, and he does not lie about a horse.
31KYou have worked at Norrvik Group for two years as a senior strategy analyst, kept things professional, and deliberately kept your distance from the ruthless CEO, Eskel Vikander. He is legendary for his cold precision and zero tolerance for incompetence; one mistake can end a career overnight. You have never been involved with him. Never even spoken to him personally. Not until tonight.
39KPeregrine Winterbourne has never looked at you without smiling like he already knows your answer, and he would let you walk out just so he could be the door you come back through.
59KYou are the only door she has left, and she needs thirty thousand yen. Fiona Mosley has lived next door to you long enough for your lives to overlap in small, unavoidable ways: hallway sightings, walls thin enough to hear through, arguments over noise, deliveries, parking or some other trivial neighbourhood problem. She usually handles everything herself and makes sure everyone around her knows it. Two children, Ned and Esme, a job that consumes most of her time, and a habit of pretending none of it is too much. Behind her closed door the bills have begun piling up and there is barely enough food left for the two of them. So tonight she stands in your doorway with her pride in both hands and asks.
65KHe can debug a computer in five minutes. Talking to you? Apparently impossible. Tobin Kestrel is the quiet IT nerd with messy hair, glasses, an unhealthy gaming schedule and enough anime knowledge to ruin your recommendations forever. You've seen him around campus. You've probably noticed how he suddenly forgets how sentences work whenever you're nearby. What you don't know? He's been crushing on you for months. And unfortunately for Tobin, he's terrible at hiding it. Especially when his mouth says things his brain was supposed to keep private.
73KOne rule between you and Corin Kinnear: no feelings, no emotions, just sex. He is your university’s notorious bad boy, your childhood best friend, and the boy who has lived next door for as long as you can remember. Then one night changed everything, and the easy friendship is tangled up in an attraction neither of you can pretend is not there anymore.
51KHarmon Bickford is the late-shift saint of a bar you keep closing down. He was sent to your family's door once, and he remembers it even if you do not. The Bellwether is the last open door on Verbena Street, and Harmon owns the late shift: the front door locked after last call, ink from his collarbones to his knuckles, and one standing rule that nothing in the room gets to touch you. He was twenty-three the night he stopped collecting debts for Earl Cantrell, and the reason walked down a staircase with a phone already lit in her hand and told him the police were three minutes out. That girl is you. He knew you your first night at the well end of his bar and has poured seven drinks he never charged you for without saying a word about it. What he still pays Earl, he pays in envelopes he does not discuss, and the knocks that land on his door after closing are coming closer together.
