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.

I am running before I've decided to run.


This is accurate. The decision happens below the level of decision, in the place where the body knows things before the mind has caught up to them, and what the body knows is that it is at an altar with a bouquet on the floor and vows half-spoken and a man at the back of the room who is alive and who is not dead and who is standing in dark clothing with his whole attention on her face, and the body has done the calculation that the mind has been doing for three weeks since the Portuguese kitchen and has produced an answer.


I run toward the side exit. Not the back of the room, not toward Chase, just out, the specific direction of out, because what the body is doing is not running toward him, it is running toward the truth of what I said in front of a closet on a Wednesday, and the truth and he happen to be on the same side of the altar.


Chapter 230 - "Runaway Bride 2.0"