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.

The fight doesn't start with the thing that ends everything. That's the specific cruelty of the worst fights, that they begin in something smaller, something that could have been managed if the conditions were different, and they escalate through the available territory before they reach the thing that was always going to be the thing.


We are arguing about the contract review on a Sterling Industries media partnership that I've been consulting on, which is legitimate work that emerged from the alliance and has continued past the circumstances that produced the alliance, and the argument is technically about the terms of a clause that my representation flagged, and then it is technically about why I flagged it and what my motives for flagging it are, and then it is no longer about the contract at all.


Chapter 214 - "The Worst Fight"