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 first two weeks after moving in feel like heaven in ways I didn't think possible when dealing with curses and contamination and three-month timelines before critical consumption. We don't fight. We don't excavate old wounds. We don't perform guilt about choosing proximity over safety. We just exist together in the warded penthouse like normal couple enjoying honeymoon phase of cohabitation.


It's unsettling how easy it is. How natural. How much it feels like this is what we were always meant to be doing instead of fighting and separating and destroying each other publicly.


"We should leave," Chase says one morning while we're drinking coffee and maintaining the careful distance Helena's wards require overnight. "Go somewhere the media can't track us. Somewhere we can just be together without Sterling family obligations or career pressures or supernatural monitoring."


Chapter 146 - Honeymoon Phase