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.

Morning light streams through the trailer windows in ways that make the broken glass scattered across the floor look almost beautiful, almost artistic, almost like intentional decoration instead of evidence of last night's desperate reunion where we knocked over everything in reach while proving six weeks of separation meant absolutely nothing.


I wake up on the narrow trailer couch with Chase's arm around me, both of us still half-dressed, both of us surrounded by the wreckage we created while resuming the pattern we claimed we were breaking, both of us facing the reality that collision was exactly as inevitable as everyone predicted.


Regret should be my first emotion. Should be what I feel looking at the broken glass, at Chase sleeping beside me, at the proof that I chose reunion over resistance after six weeks of trying to choose differently.


Chapter 154 - Morning After Rules