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 count them afterward, in the specific way of someone doing a postmortem on something that felt permanent and turned out not to be, and eleven days is how long the quality of the gala and the alliance and the public kiss and the brief freedom lasted before the curse found what Helena warned it would find, which is us, only us, with no one else left in the field to absorb what it generates.


The shift is gradual and then sudden, which is the pattern I know from every phase of this story, the way the changes build below the visible surface and then break through in a form that makes them look new when they have actually been arriving for days.


Chapter 213 - "Curse Escalates"