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 wake on my own couch, which is where Ethan and Sienna put me the night before based on the evidence of the blanket that's been placed over me with the specific care of people who are angry at someone and love them anyway.


The penthouse is quiet. Morning light is doing what morning light does, arriving without asking whether its arrival is welcome, and the quality of the hangover is specific in the way that hangovers are specific when they are the culmination of a month rather than a single night, the weight of accumulated bad decisions presenting their bill simultaneously.


I lie still for a moment. Then I sit up. Then I go to the bathroom because that's where the evidence will be clearest, which is the mirror, and I need to look at it the way I need to look at things I've been avoiding, which is directly and without the management that avoidance provides.


Chapter 216 - "The Realization"