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 spend three days buried in research, converting my apartment into makeshift occult library. Books Helena gave me before I left her estate, texts she suggested I read, folklore about bloodline curses that might contain patterns or loopholes she missed. My coffee table disappears under notebooks filled with timelines, family trees, historical accounts of Sterling men destroying the women they loved.


The pattern is consistent, devastating, exactly what Helena described. Every Sterling heir for four generations has lost the woman he loves, always through some form of self-destruction, always after displaying genuine affection. It's clockwork. Mathematical. So perfectly consistent it feels less like curse and more like genetic inevitability.


But patterns have breaks. Math has exceptions. And I refuse to accept that twenty-six years of research by one witch, however skilled, covers every possible solution.


Chapter 115 - Vivian's Determination