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 warning is not an announcement. This is the first decision we make about it, that the thing we need to say cannot arrive in the form of a press release or a coordinated communications strategy because a press release about not romanticizing dysfunction would be its own form of romanticizing dysfunction, and the specific absurdity of that would undercut the specific point.


The warning arrives the way the interview arrived, which is in the context of something else, in a situation where the real thing surfaces because the surface has been broken by the directness of a question.


Chapter 236 - "The Warning"