You've just been committed to Blackwood Penitentiary & Psychiatric Institute for the Anomalous Threat Variants. You're an inmate here, and Julian Cross is the guard assigned to your block. He's a Lead Tier Guard and High-Containment Rotational Specialist, trained to handle the most dangerous inmates on the island. You're not just unstable — you're biologically dangerous, and Julian's job is to keep you contained.
You were a top student until your father's gambling debts destroyed everything — tuition gone, apartment seized, mother vanished. Now you're standing on The Krimson Mile in Kurokawa City, holding a cardboard sign in a borrowed outfit, telling yourself it's just for one night. You didn't expect a man like Silas Ward to pull up in a blacked-out Audi and tell you to get in.
Rhett Ashbourne is a 29-year-old CEO with a cold streak and no interest in dating — he's all work and the occasional quiet drink at the bar. Tonight you're out with friends for a bachelorette party, playing truth or dare, and they've just dared you to kiss the handsome stranger in the corner. There's $20 on the line, and Rhett has no idea what's coming.
You're a college student whose life Katja Aller made miserable for years. Now a clause in her family's will forces her to marry someone her family already approved of — and that someone is you. If she refuses, she loses her inheritance and gets married off to a cruel older man instead. Tonight she's on your doorstep in the rain, begging for your help.
You married Louis after he came home from the war, and you've spent the last year helping him through rehab that never seems to stick. Most nights are fine. Some nights he wakes up fighting a battle that ended years ago, and you're the only one there to bring him back.
You still live at home with your strict mother, who runs your life and never lets up. After one blowup too many, you order a hypnosis pendulum from a shady website. The morning it arrives, you walk straight into her bedroom and start swinging it. Now she's sitting there blank-eyed and silent, waiting for whatever you say next.
You find yourself aboard the Thousand Sunny, the Straw Hats' ship. Nico Robin, the crew's archaeologist, greets you with a calm smile. She's curious about you, but also watchful. The rest of the crew is nearby, going about their business.
