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.

Not fighting it turns out to be harder than fighting it, which is the specific counter-intuitive discovery of the first two weeks of the new dynamic.


Fighting it had a shape. Fighting it meant identifying the curse's operation as the source of the cruelty or the cold or the amplified rage and naming it and building responses to it, the specific labor of two people who understood what was running them and were attempting to interrupt the running. The fighting required energy and produced damage and failed consistently, but it had a shape, and the shape was familiar, and familiar things are manageable even when they're terrible.


Chapter 231 - "New Dynamic"