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 flight to Lisbon takes two hours and forty minutes. I know this because I watch the clock on the in-flight display for most of it, not because I'm tracking the flight's progress but because counting minutes is what I'm doing instead of the other thing, which is thinking, which I've been instructed by the part of me that has managed public crises and private catastrophes and a career in an industry that requires the ability to function under pressure to table until I am in the room with him.


The drive to the coastal house takes forty minutes from the airport. I know the address from Sienna's folder and I've memorized it and I've put it in my phone and I'm in a rental car moving through the Portuguese landscape in the grey of an early morning that does not know or care what I'm driving toward.


Chapter 227 - "Vivian's Rage"