summoning…
lore✦squadsummoning…
Stories where the tension builds scene by scene - and every almost-moment counts.
You wanted out. A clean transfer, a different floor, anyone else's name on your paychecks. Instead your boss bought the entire company you were trying to escape to, and now Adrian Vale owns every door you tried to walk through. He says it was a smart acquisition. The contract on his desk says otherwise. So does the way he keeps finding reasons to need you in the room.
You rented his lake cabin for a month to vanish from your life. Instead the composed older landlord keeps showing up to fix things that work perfectly fine, and the quiet between you is getting louder by the day.
You panic-lied to your entire family about having a boyfriend, and now your cousin's wedding is in five days. The only person who can save you is Mason, the grumpy guy next door who owes you a favor he can't get out of. One fake relationship, one weekend of nosy aunts and open bars, and a whole lot of pretending that starts feeling less and less fake.
You sell tour merch from the last table in the arena, the one nobody important ever sees. Except him. Night after night a backstage pass shows up at your booth with your name written on it, and the frontman keeps finding his way over. He's the headliner. You count tees and make change. The gap is huge and the tour buses leave in the morning, but he keeps coming back to the last row, every night.
He needs a wife on paper before the shareholder vote or he loses the company to his uncle. You need money fast and you do not scare easily, which is exactly why he chose you. Sign the contract, play the part for one year, walk away rich. Simple. Until the part stops feeling like a part.
You and Theo grew up sharing juice boxes because your moms were inseparable. Two decades later, rent forces you into the same apartment. One bathroom, thin walls, and a lifetime of history that suddenly feels different now that he sleeps eight feet away.
You spent two summers turning your food truck into the thing people line up for. Then Mateo Reyes parks six feet away and your whole lunch crowd drifts to his window. Now the festival just put you both in the same finale tent, same judges, same weekend, one winner. You're stuck sharing a wall with the man trying to take everything you built. The problem is he keeps handing you tacos at 2am and looking at you like he means it.
Your brother offered up the couch without asking you, and now his best friend Theo lives here. One bathroom. Thin walls. A man who keeps showing up in a towel at 7am like it is normal. You told yourself you do not care. Then he started smiling at you over the coffee maker, and the apartment got very, very small.
You just wanted a quiet new apartment. Instead you got a tiny human in pigtails knocking at all hours for snacks, and her impossibly handsome, perpetually frazzled single dad who keeps showing up to apologize. The more he knocks, the harder it gets to remember why you wanted quiet in the first place.
You came to Vegas for your best friend's bachelorette party. You wake up married to a stranger who already knows how you take your coffee, remembers a wedding you don't, and isn't in any hurry to undo it. Now you have one weekend in a shared suite to figure out if the receipt in your purse is a disaster or the best decision you ever drunkenly made.
You and Theo flew to a friend's bachelor weekend as the platonic best friends everyone keeps insisting you are. You came home with matching rings and a signed certificate. Now there is a stack of annulment paperwork on the kitchen table, a pen between you, and a very loud silence about why neither of you has picked it up.
You're a mid-level nobody at Sterling Holdings until the CEO pulls your file and rewrites the org chart so you report to her and only her. Now every day runs through her office, her rules, her undivided attention. She says it's about your potential. The way she watches you says otherwise. Slow burn, all tension, one locked door at a time.
A new transfer student picks the desk right behind yours and decides, quietly, that you belong to him. He is gentle. He is patient. And every single person who tries to get close to you disappears from the school by the end of the week. You are the only one who notices the pattern. He is the only one who knows you noticed.
You came up to the rooftop bar for one drink and the wrong kind of attention from the woman who owns it. Vera doesn't waste smiles. Tonight she's spending one on you, which means she needs something only you can give.
Your bike chain snaps a mile from home, way past curfew, and the only person who pulls over is the one boy your parents named out loud as off-limits. He could fix it in five minutes. He could also be exactly the kind of trouble they warned you about. You have a whole mile to figure out which.
You live next to the guy everyone whispers about. Caleb in 4B. He's gorgeous and impossible and he flinches every single full moon. The closer you get, the more the weird stuff stops adding up to coincidence. He growls when guys text you. He shows up before you even call. And tonight the moon is full, and he's banging on your door looking like he's about to fall apart.
You signed a one-year marriage contract with a CEO who pays your tuition in exchange for one thing. Play the devoted wife at his father's dinners. Easy money, clean exit, no feelings. Except he keeps almost smiling at you across the table, and you keep forgetting it is supposed to be fake.
You and Theo run every guild raid together at 2am. The duo no one breaks up. Tonight the boss is down, the loot is split, and instead of logging off he asks if you're free this weekend. In real life. The voice you've known for three years just stepped one foot out of the screen.
You clawed your way to first chair at Hartwell Conservatory. Then Julian Reyes transferred in and the conductor handed him your podium, your solo, and the one spot you bled for. Worst part. She paired the two of you for the spring duet. Now you're stuck in a practice room with the boy who thinks you're beneath him, and neither of you is allowed to quit.
You took the babysitting job for the money and the quiet hours. You did not expect his daughter to grab your hand on day one and call you family. You really did not expect her dad to look at you like that. Daniel is careful, kind, and terrified you'll notice he wants you to stay for reasons that have nothing to do with the schedule. Every dinner you stay for, every goodnight at the door, the line gets thinner.
You and Theo cannot stand each other. You also cannot afford to live alone. So you split the last cheap studio in the city, sign a six month lease, and discover there is one bed, one closet, and zero boundaries. Every annoying habit. Every accidental brush in the dark. Slowly the thing you swore was hate starts looking a lot like something else.
You signed a marriage contract for the money and got a husband who treats you like furniture. Cold mornings, empty dinners, a ring that means nothing. Then one night the wall between your rooms goes thin and you hear him fall apart. Now you can't unhear it, and he can't pretend you didn't.
You are nobody important. A barista, a normal phone number, a normal life. Then a stranger texts you by accident, and the texting does not stop, and three weeks later you realize the stranger is the Crown Prince. He keeps a burner phone just to talk to you, between state dinners and engagement photos with a woman he does not love. His security team has no idea you exist. Neither does the woman he is supposed to marry.
You've waited Salvatore Marchetti's table every Thursday for two years. You know how he takes his coffee and nothing else about him. Tonight you find out exactly who he is, because he just bought the whole restaurant and locked the doors so it's only you and him left inside.
You handed in your two weeks notice and started counting down the days. Then the company hired a new manager for your team, and it turned out to be Adrian, the man you ghosted three years ago without a word. Now he signs off on your last fourteen days, sits across from you in every meeting, and acts perfectly normal. Mostly. The closer you get to your last day, the harder it is to pretend neither of you remembers.
Theo has had a key to your apartment for years. He uses it for plants, for borrowed sugar, for nothing at all. Tonight he lets himself in one more time, and this time he came to tell you why he keeps coming back.
You downloaded a sketchy free app, typed in a dumb random word, and summoned an incubus into your studio apartment. He's smug. He's gorgeous. He does your dishes and will not leave. Neither of you remembers the word that would send him back, which is a problem, because the longer he stays the harder it is to remember why you wanted him gone.
You're the biggest pop star in the country, mid-tour, and your new security lead Mateo is too good at his job and too easy to lean on. The label says he's off limits, the contract says he's temporary, and the cameras say one slip ruins both of you. So you keep telling yourself the way you grab his hand in the crowd is just for the act. Six weeks. You just have to make it to the last show without falling for the one man getting paid to walk away.
You moved in three minutes ago and already got the floor wrong. You knock on 4B thinking it is yours, and instead of awkwardness you get a warm apartment, a stranger with a crooked smile, and a coffee pushed into your hands like it was always meant for you. The catch. You actually live two doors down. So now every hallway, every elevator, every borrowed sugar cup is a chance to see him again.
He's the captain everyone loves and the guy who makes your Mondays miserable. He trips you, talks over you, pretends you're nothing. Then the games end and he's benching himself on purpose, waiting by your locker, walking you home through the quiet streets like none of the daytime stuff ever happened. You're done pretending you don't notice the two versions of him. Now you want to know which one is real.
You and Elliot share a lab bench in organic chem, and you've spent all semester low-key competing for the top spot. When a botched titration tanks your grade through no fault of your own, he quietly redoes the entire experiment overnight so your number doesn't drop. He didn't plan on you finding out. He really didn't plan on how it feels when you thank him.
Three months ago Theo Marchetti made your first week at the firm a public nightmare. You learned to keep your head down and your guard up. So why is he suddenly across the break room shutting down the exact same guy who used to be his audience. And why does he keep looking at you like he's daring you to ask.
You've been crushing on the trainer at Iron Hollow for months and keeping it strictly to side glances. Tonight he finally offers to spot you. His hands land on your hips and the whole careful distance between you just collapses. Now it's a slow burn neither of you is supposed to want, and every rep is an excuse to stand a little closer.
You signed on as the new driver for the Vitale family expecting long quiet shifts and good money. Instead you got Sofia, the boss's daughter, who treats your car like her personal getaway and you like the only person in this house worth talking to. Every late night ride is one more secret you're not supposed to keep. And the man in your mirror is starting to feel like the most dangerous thing in the city, for all the wrong reasons.
You barely know the guy from the back of your lecture hall. Then one Tuesday he's waiting at your bus stop with your exact coffee order and a list of your week he should not have. He says you can't take the 7:42. He won't say how he knows. What he won't say is that he already watched this year happen once, and it ended with you under that bus. Now he has eight months to rewrite the ending, and the hardest part isn't the loop. It's getting you to trust the strange, tired boy who suddenly knows everything about you.
You took a job pouring wine because you needed the money and the hours were quiet. Your boss barely looks at you during service. But every night after the last customer leaves and the lock clicks, Adrian Vale slows down, pours two glasses, and becomes a man you are starting to want more than the paycheck. Closing time is the only honest hour either of you get. The question is how long you can both keep pretending it ends at the door.
You coach the Saturday morning Learn-to-Skate class at Rink 3, where the heater barely works and the same grumpy dad shows up every week with two coffees. He gives one to nobody. His kid Pip is your best little skater and your biggest source of trouble. Somewhere between cold mornings and warm cups, you both start running out of reasons not to ask.
You are the engineer on a rising rock band's debut album. Six weeks locked in a studio with the lead singer, Cassian, who keeps scrapping his own lyrics off-mic and writing new ones. The new ones are about you. Everyone can tell. Nobody says it. Especially not him, until the room clears and it's just you and the talkback button.
You binge-read a manhwa about Seraphina, the rich mean girl who bullies the heroine and gets executed in chapter 40. Then you woke up inside her body, in her gold dress, on her first day back at the Imperial Academy. You know every plot beat, every death flag, every line that gets her killed. All you have to do is not say them. Easy. Except the male lead just sat down beside you, and that is not in the script.
Three years ago Caleb Mercer shoved you into locker 207 and made it the start of a very long freshman year. Now you're a junior, he's the senior everyone watches, and he's suddenly planted himself in front of your locker like a bodyguard you never asked for. Nobody touches your stuff. Nobody talks to you in that hallway. Except him. And he won't say why.
His assistant walked out at lunch and never came back. You were the only one who could cover. Now it's 2AM in his penthouse office and the work is done, but he keeps finding reasons for you to stay. He won't say why. You're starting to think you know.
Your sister was promised to Seo Jiwon to seal a billion-won merger. Three days before the wedding she disappeared with someone else and left a note with your name on it. To save both families from ruin, you took her place at the altar. Now the ring is on your finger, the contract is signed, and the man you married looks at you like a mistake he has to live with. You have one year of a fake marriage to survive. He has every reason to hate you. Neither of you planned for the part where you stop wanting out.
You stopped in for coffee. Now the cute barista knows your order before you say it, your name without your card, and somehow your bus route, your late shifts, the days you skip breakfast. He's gentle about it. He's sweet about it. And every morning the things he knows get a little more specific than they should be.
You were supposed to have the apartment to yourself. Instead you are snowed in with Eli, your roommate's impossibly grumpy brother, who has not cracked a single smile since he got here. Then the power dies. One heater, one long freezing night, and a whole lot of nowhere to look but at each other.
You're a stunt performer who doubled for the biggest actor in the country on one brutal night shoot. You did the fall. He watched, rattled, and afterward you were the only person who talked to him like he was just a guy who'd had a long day. Now your phone lights up at 3am with his name. Nobody can know. Both of your careers say it has to stay that way. Your hearts have other ideas.
You took the corporate job for the paycheck, not the friends. But the guy next to you keeps doing things that don't add up. He covers every late shift. He flinches when the fridge door opens. He's never once eaten in front of you. You're not nosy. You're just bored, and tonight you're stuck on the empty night floor with him and a deadline. The closer you look, the more the small weird things stop looking small.
You split a one-year lease with a stranger to afford the city. He is gorgeous, quiet, and absolutely not normal. The bloody bathroom trash was the first clue. Now you are standing in the kitchen at 3am holding the evidence, and he just walked in.
You run the honor council with a clean record and a clipboard you take way too seriously. Theo Marchetti is the repeat offender you've written up six times this semester. Now you're both sentenced to a week of cleaning the gym after school, and the rules you hide behind start feeling a lot less solid every time he looks at you.
Your father doesn't say I love you. He hires it. This time he hired Adrian Vale, the coldest man on his security team, to follow you everywhere you go. Adrian was supposed to be a wall between you and the world. He wasn't supposed to start watching you like you were the only thing worth guarding. Now there's a rule between you, and both of you can feel it bending.
You work the graveyard shift at a highway gas station with Rhys, the coworker who never eats, never sleeps, and watches the woods like he is waiting for something. Tonight the lot is dead quiet, the lights keep flickering, and he just called you his. The closer you get to him, the more the truth claws its way out. And whatever is moving in the dark past the pumps wants you to come closer too.
Slow burn is romance that makes you wait: the feelings are obvious long before anyone says them out loud. In these interactive worlds, you control the pacing - push the tension, hold the eye contact a beat too long, or keep them in denial for one more chapter. The payoff hits harder because you built it yourself.
Every world above is a branching interactive story: read the opening free, make choices, or write what happens next. How it works.