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 doesn't leave after the warning. This is unusual. She normally delivers what she came to deliver and then she is simply not there anymore, the way a weather system passes through and moves on, and the room adjusts back to its normal temperature and pressure and you process what she said in her absence. Tonight she stays. She refills the teapot. She sits with the particular settled quality of someone who has more to say and is deciding how to say it.


I watch her from across the table. Chase has gotten up and is standing at the window in the posture he adopts when he is thinking something he won't share, hands in pockets, weight slightly forward, the city doing its usual indifferent glittering below him. The warning Helena delivered is still in the room with us, taking up the space that words take up when they're the kind that can't be unfelt.


Chapter 184 - "The Sacrifice"