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.

Helena looks at me on the floor of her living room for a long moment. The looking is not unkind. It is the specific quality of attention she gives to things that require full witness rather than quick assessment, the looking of someone who understands that what they're seeing is significant and is not going to rush past it.


I get up. I find a chair. I sit in it with the specific posture of someone who has just done something vulnerable in a room with another person and is now recalibrating.


Chapter 217 - "Helena's Refusal"