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.

Hollywood moves on. This is the thing about Hollywood, the thing I've watched from the outside of it for years through Vivian's life inside it, which is that it has an exceptional metabolism for scandal and story, digesting each one and moving to the next with a speed that is either efficient or heartless depending on your perspective and your position relative to the story being digested.


The Sterling-Morrison-Ashford-Chen quadrangle, as one podcast host called it with the specific enthusiasm of someone who has been following a serialized drama for years, is processed and filed within a month. The statements were clean. The departures were clean. The coverage moved on to other things, other people, other sets of circumstances offering the specific combination of beauty and dysfunction that the industry appetite requires.


Chapter 204 - "Alone Again"