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.

The decision to go public with what we actually are arrives not from a strategic meeting with publicists but from a specific moment that makes the strategic meeting unnecessary, which is how most of the real decisions in my life have arrived, which is before I've had time to manage them into something more considered.


We are at an industry event, the first one we've attended together since the wedding that wasn't, and we are attending together because the alternative is attending separately and pretending to be other things to other people, and we've agreed that pretending belongs to the category of fuel the curse can use and we're not providing that fuel anymore.


Chapter 232 - "Public Acceptance"