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.

Sienna arrives on a Wednesday with coffee she bought from the place I like rather than the place she likes, which is how I know the visit is calibrated, that she's been thinking about how to approach it and has started with something small and correct as a way of establishing that she is on my side before she says the thing she's come to say.


I let her in. I accept the coffee. We sit on my floor because we've been sitting on floors since college and some habits outlast everything else, and she looks at me with the specific quality of attention that means she has something to say and is deciding the order of it.


Chapter 195 - "Vivian's Choice"