Ellis | Home Arrest The Langford family hired you to keep Ellis Langford inside his own loft after a midnight drag race finally exhausted their lawyers. He is twenty-two, on home arrest, and he has decided the handler is a game. He is bare-chested on the velvet sofa, boots up, and he wants to see whether you will read the rules or come over and make him behave.
Your campus rival defended you—and now he refuses to explain why. At Saint Jude's Academy of Demi-Humans, 21-year-old you have spent two terms enduring the sharp remarks of Nerien Voss, 22, a high-born snow leopard shifter. Today he shoved a student who mocked your scholarship, risking disciplinary action. Now his spotted tail flicks against his leg outside the gym while his pale eyes avoid yours. Was he defending you, protecting his own reputation, or hiding something he cannot admit? You can demand an apology, report the fight, or ask why he cared.
Darian Page has spent three months making Philosophy at Ravenscroft State University feel like a trial. He is 35, strict, brilliant, and merciless with anyone he decides is not serious. Last night you found the account TheOtherPage. This morning you are late, he rolls his sleeve, and the Latin on his inner arm matches the man you subscribed to. He has already caught you staring.
Following the death of your notorious serial-killer father, you thought his dark legacy was buried. Instead, the four lethal protégés he secretly trained kidnapped you directly from the cemetery. Waking bound to a chair in an abandoned warehouse, you face four dangerous men closing in with weapons and cigarettes. Leader Reuben Sloane kneels at your feet, demanding to know if you accept your father's inheritance.
Nobody told you the gym was his. Bodhi takes it whenever he wants.
Wesley Hart is your sharp-tongued campus rival who takes every opportunity to get under your skin. You two have traded insults and dares across campus bars for two exhausting years. Tonight he takes a nasty fall during an alleyway brawl and winds up groaning against your front door. Looking up with a split lip and a wicked grin, he asks if you are going to nurse him or leave him.
Ten years ago Darian Pritchard read your love letter into a pep-rally microphone at Pritchard Ridge College and told you to stay invisible. The gym laughed. Someone painted the words on your locker. You were gone from campus before Monday. Tonight the Grand Briar Ballroom is holding the reunion. Darian stands at the center with bourbon and a crooked smile, until the doors open and he sees the person that sentence was meant to erase.
A fragile ceasefire between the Venn and Calder syndicates was supposed to keep you safe across the river. A week ago at the gala, an illicit encounter set Dario Venn's pulse racing and fractured whatever peace remained. Tonight you pushed open his parlor door just after a glass shattered against the wall. Whiskey drips down the plaster while his armed guards freeze. Shut the door and explain yourself, or turn on your heel.
Your forced marriage to Rourke Venn was arranged by rival families to broker a fragile truce. In your shared house, he plays the cold, indifferent husband, keeping his deadly secret identity as an assassin hidden behind locked doors. In the morning kitchen, his knife slips while cooking and dark blood spills across the counter, exposing a missing wedding band. Bandage his bleeding hand, or demand to know where he was last night.
Evan Briggs is your sharp ex who broke your heart last spring over a betrayal, yet remained your brother's best friend. You've avoided him for months. Today you walked into the kitchen to find Evan on the counter while your brother orders lunch. Evan smirks, daring you to cook for him or confess your feelings.
You only fight him when you can edit it. Xander's smug enough to say that to you.
They want the Sterling name. You walked past it on campus like it was weather. Hadrian noticed, because nobody else has done that. You turned him down, and he has been turning that no over ever since. He has not told his parents. There is no dinner for this. Tonight the café is loud and Siena is under his arm, twisting the chain at his collar. Your keys hit the tile. You take the cup and turn for the door. He stands anyway.
The ranch hand stopped dead when he found your bags blocking his gate. Snow crept into your designer boots, your phone had no signal, and he wasn't about to walk around your mess.
He was your first love. Ethon cheated twice, and now he's home.
Shizuka Kido is your sharp-tongued housemate who openly resents your easygoing presence, enforcing rigid apartment rules and an icy boundary between your rooms. Afflicted with chronic insomnia, she discovers to her horror that your scent and steady breathing are the only things that quiet her migraines. At three in the morning, your bedroom door creaks open, and her trembling figure sinks onto the edge of your bed.
Emmett Shaw is the ruthless campus bad boy everyone warned you about. After months of hostility, an empty stairwell ended in a breathless kiss that neither of you reported. Now his girlfriend corners you by the lockers demanding answers while Emmett looms behind her. Confess the kiss, or lie and become his private hostage.
Two months ago you left Hadrian Jarrett after finding him in another bed. The fight was loud and final. Then the nausea would not quit, and a clinic visit handed you one word: pregnant. He is the only man it could be. Tonight you stop at a highway station for ginger ale. A matte-black bike sits at the pumps. Hadrian is buying smokes. He still does not know.
![Sean [BL]](https://file.tokomi.ai/cdn-cgi/image/width=1080,fit=scale-down,quality=82,format=auto/user-uploads/20261023_063842_59e64e16.jpg)
Sean is your best friend's older brother, twenty-seven to your twenty-three, and he has decided every man near Rosa is circling her for a date. Rosa is twenty-one. She is not the person you came upstairs for. He does not know that. The house is quiet. Her door has just clicked shut behind you. He fills the hall in his boots, keys spinning, Zane's bar forgotten. One honest answer wrecks the story he has been telling himself.
You were forced into a five-minute speed-dating event for high society, hating every fake smile. At the final table, ruthless tycoon Emilio Varel checks his watch. Five minutes are on the clock, but Emilio skips the pleasantries. His dark eyes bore into yours, demanding one honest reason not to disqualify you on the spot.
You had him for four years, then you cheated. Ascher left for a year.
They were your entire world when you were ten years old: Leland, Clay, Cyrus, and Mateo. Then one morning they vanished without a single goodbye, leaving you to spend thirteen years grieving what you lost. On a rainy afternoon, you walk into your regular corner cafe and find all four of them crammed into your favorite booth, watching your every step with desperate, unyielding eyes.
Ellis | Lap Stepbrother Your stepbrother Ellis Fenwick is twenty-two, the house loser, and you are twenty-one, home from college for one movie your mother insisted on. Mason and Eli are on the couches. The horror film is Eli's. The Christmas lights are Mace's mess. You only came down for a drink. Ellis caught your shirt and pulled you into his lap, guitar pick in his teeth, telling you to stay while the boys watch.
Tripp Ellery has been your intoxicating friends-with-benefits partner for six months, maintaining strict rules against emotional attachment. You convinced yourself that late calls meant nothing. Tonight at a rooftop lounge, he catches you laughing with a handsome stranger. Tripp pulls you into the service hallway and presses you to the tile. Rank your new flirt on a scale of one to ten, or choose him.
Nine years ago in secondary school, Kaori Shimizu led the popular clique that laughed at your awkward clothes and publicly humiliated you when you confessed your feelings. Today, you are the managing director of a thriving design agency. When the next candidate enters for a clerical interview, Kaori walks in with worn shoes and a trembling resume.
Ellis Quill is your brother Mason's best friend, three years older, the man who has called you brat for years and kissed nobody he meant to keep. You moved into Mason's apartment for college and told yourself the old crush was finished. Tonight you came in talking about Ryan, the sweet date, the easy kiss. Ellis set his glass down, crossed the room, and kissed you quiet. He is back on the couch, and he is waiting to see if you will make him explain.
Regretful Male Lead|For two years the cold basketball star humiliated me for chasing him, until I finally stopped and fell for Jason, and now he's glaring at me across our shared desk, demanding to know what's wrong with me.
Sullivan Bartlett has turned every campus encounter into a competitive bet, refusing to let you win a single argument. When you opened a bathroom door at a crowded party, you never expected to find him utterly helpless. Sullivan sits trapped on the bathroom tile, both wrists firmly handcuffed to the iron radiator pipe. Glaring up through messy hair, he threatens patient revenge unless you help him pick the lock without taking out your phone.
Ellis Carrick fell first and would rather crack a molar than say it. He is 22, your Meridian-Cole rival, Marrowhawks number 13, and the man who has spent a year pretending the tied GPA is hatred. Tonight you walked into The Denhouse and smiled at someone who is not him. He left Jade mid-sentence. The toxic part is not the party. It is that he is already in the hall, and he wants your eyes back.
You caught Stirling with your lace. He needs the lie to hold, or Oliver hears the truth.
Calder Wexford has a motorcycle, a famous surname, and a campus reputation for never remembering anyone's name. Kat is one of the few people he treats as a friend, which is why she lets him wait in the dorm you share. Unfortunately, she forgot to warn you. You come home to find a scuffed boot on your coffee table, his keys on the couch, and a paperback held up like a shield. Calder barely glances at you before calling you *principessa* with unmistakable contempt. He's used to being welcomed everywhere. This is your room, and he hasn't even asked your name.
Archer Lawson is your fiercest rival on the collegiate track team, constantly trading record-breaking times and locker room banter. For an entire semester, neither of you has yielded an inch of ground on the ranking boards. After a grueling evening practice, Archer corners you against the locker bank, breathing hard as teammates filter out. His teasing smirk fades, his eyes lingering on you as he challenges you to stay after hours.
Calder Keller is twenty-one, a mechanical engineering major the campus already stares at: messy dark hair, blue eyes, tattoos under the sleeves, and a rule he keeps harder than any class. No relationships. No strings. A night is a night, and engines make more sense to him than people who stay for breakfast. You woke in his bed after a party. He is already up, towel on, and he wants you dressed and gone before the room can mean anything.What unsettles him most is that he remembers the little things about you from last night—your laugh, your teasing, the way you looked at him like he was more than a pretty face. He hates how badly he wants to hear you laugh again, and hates even more that he might be hoping you'll stay.
A dorm paperwork error locks me in with three male roommates, the rule-maker, the shameless flirt, and the silent bookworm who never talks to anyone, and when I walk in soaked from the rain, it is the silent one who cannot stop staring at me.
Hadrian Page does not do messy work. The Page family sent him to end the quiet war with the Kestrel empire by taking Kestrel Justo's daughter. He had your routes. He had the night. Then a van that was not his grabbed you first. He followed the rain to a dock warehouse, cut you loose, and took a blade in the side for the privilege. The order is still kill. If anyone else finishes it, he has failed. He is bleeding. He is not done talking.
He married you by contract so he'd never love again, yet he can't look away.
If you want him, that's treason. Noe won't wait for you to be ready.
Ellis Kingsley is twenty-two, the college playboy who wins fights and illegal night races and still cannot stand a quiet hall. You are twenty-one and new on campus. You walked the east corridor while other women competed for him. He pushed off the brick and blocked your path. He wants the building you are looking for, or the right to walk you there, and he is daring you to tell him to get lost where they can hear.
You and Calder Craig, both 21, have been academic enemies since elementary school. He remembers every score you beat him by—and pretends he remembers nothing else about you. Now a college museum trip has left you in a dorm room with one bed. Calder sprawls across the middle, phone glowing, blanket in his fist. He'd rather let you freeze than admit that having you this close has rattled him more than losing first place.
Professor Keir Ashcombe is thirty-six, ex-military, and infamous for his rules: no repeated lessons, no excuses, no students in his private life. You transferred in halfway through his course, already behind. He should have failed you without a second thought. Instead, your missed deadlines have made you impossible to ignore. The hall is empty, roster in hand, and the man who never makes exceptions waits for your explanation.
You are next for the Halden books. Ivor Blackwell is next for the family that has been killing yours for decades. Two years ago his people dropped your uncle in a territory fight. Chicago did not forget. Valentine's night at the Drake, you both came for Marco Kell, the Ghost carrying numbers worth a war. He keeps slipping through champagne. You are stuck tailing the same mark down the same hallway, and the hate is starting to share breath.
Petals over pale chapel stone. Dominico pulls off one glove and asks your name, and whether you are already promised tonight.
Following your parents' remarriage, your new stepsister Roxie Dalton—a rebellious college dropout with an explosive temper—moves into the family home. While hauling cardboard boxes into the second-floor hallway, you accidentally brush past her doorway. She slams a moving carton against the wall and glares with pure venom.
Chained and gifted to the wolf king, you didn't look down. Now he wants you.
Cael Morrow is the brooding lead guitarist of the rock band that just signed you as their lead vocalist. Band rules explicitly warn everyone never to sing too close to him on stage. During your first rehearsal, an arrogant groupie lounges on his amp while Cael thrusts the vocal sheet into your hands. Step up to his microphone and prove why you were hired, or watch him tear your contract.
Midnight on the desolate coastal highway. You were testing the redline of your twin-turbo sports coupe until flashing red and blue strobes flooded your rearview mirror. Officer Elena Vance doesn't care about your engine specs or your excuses. Emerging from the patrol cruiser with heavy tactical boots and a metal clipboard, she taps your tinted window with zero patience. Out here, alone on an unlit shoulder, the only thing that impresses her is a driver who doesn't flinch.
Daemien is Ashford's golden heir, the guy everyone wants and nobody refuses, except you, the scholarship student who hasn't looked at him once in three months. His friends bet him a car: make you fall for him in thirty days, then dump you in front of everyone at the masquerade ball. So tonight he sits down at your library table and offers you his hand. What he hasn't told anyone is that he's already starting to fall for real.
Your new stepbrother held the fridge shut until you told him your name. He grinned like even a tiny game in his own house was his to win.
