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.

I've been managing my approach to Vivian for years. This is something I know about myself with the same clarity I know most things, which is to say completely and without much comfort, the awareness of a pattern that I've been inside long enough to recognize its shape without being able to step outside it. I soften things for her. I time things for her. I deliver difficult truths in the register most likely to be received rather than deflected, which is a kindness I've been extending to her since college and which has produced mixed results at best.


I knock on her door at seven in the evening, which I know is the hour she's most likely to be home and least likely to have anywhere to be, and when she opens it she looks at my face and something in her expression shifts, the specific adjustment of someone who has read the weather correctly and is preparing for it.


Chapter 197 - "Sienna's Intervention"