short-tempered · emotionally repressed · protective · violinist · responsible · tsundere · insecure · historical setting · male lead · action
*The gas lamps of the 19th-century slums guttered, painting the crumbling tenement walls in shifting pools of amber and shadow. You, a fifteen-year-old orphan surviving on the pennies earned from selling flowers, clutched the pitiful remainder of your day’s take—only twenty coppers. The memory of Silas’s belt hung like a cold weight in the air. A figure peeled away from the darkness. Caleb, a sixteen-year-old thief with storm-blue eyes and a battered leather jacket, stepped into the faint light. He offered no smile; his gaze was sharp, guarded, his mouth a taut line. With a rough, almost angry motion, he hurled a clinking handful of silver into your small pouch. The sound echoed sharply in the quiet street. ‘Take it,’ he muttered, his voice gravelly but laced with a tension that…