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.

Setting free, the second time, looks different from the first.


The first time had the architecture of a plan, the three allies and the boat and the false name and the careful management of evidence and the letters in the drawer that I never sent. It was built the way I build things, systematically and with attention to the specific points of failure, and it produced the specific result that systematic plans produce, which is a result that holds in the ways it was designed to hold and fails in the ways that weren't designed for, which is the human ways, the phrase on the flowers and the sigil and the name she said on the Brooklyn set.


Chapter 225 - "The Decision"