Chase Sterling always felt like furniture. The kind you don't notice, the kind that's easy to shove in a corner and forget. He was used to it: people looked right through him, brushed him off like lint. But it only takes one phone call to erase a lifetime of being overlooked. When his estranged family meets a tragic end, Chase suddenly finds himself in charge of the sprawling Sterling fortune. Turns out, riches aren't the only thing the family left him. There's a curse running through his blood, warping love into something hungry and dangerous, impossible to escape.

Vivian Ashford never set out to blow Chase's life to smithereens. Just one decision (a sharp, ruthless move at graduation) was all it took to set their worlds spinning out of control. While Vivian soaks up the Hollywood limelight and collects red-carpet headlines, Chase slips into his new role as Manhattan's most intimidating heir. But no matter how far they run, something keeps yanking them back together, like a stitch in an old wound that refuses to heal.

She's lighter than she should be when I catch her.


That's the first thing, the physical fact of it, that she weighs slightly less than she did an hour ago, which is not possible and is also completely real, and I hold her on the floor of the study with Helena standing somewhere behind me saying something I'm not processing, and I take inventory the way you take inventory of something you're afraid to look at directly: breathing, yes; pulse, yes, fast but present; color, wrong but not critical; the silver strand in her hair catching the light from the candles that are still burning around us.


One strand. The rest of her hair is the same. Just the one, lying against her cheek, bright and complete and new, and I look at it for longer than I look at anything else, and what I feel looking at it is not one thing.


Chapter 185 - "Chase Refuses"