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 first week without Vivian in my life in any form is the week I discover what the baseline actually is, which is nothing good.


I've been without her before. There have been periods, weeks and months, the six months of no contact that lasted twenty-two days, the London stretch, the various distances we've constructed and dismantled over four years, and in all of them there was always the awareness of her in the world, the specific background frequency of knowing she exists and is somewhere doing something and could be reached, and that awareness is so constant and so structural that I've never been able to identify it as a separate thing, never been able to locate where the awareness ends and I begin.


Chapter 215 - "Chase's Spiral"