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Aftermath
publish date:
2026-07-02 13:28:16
Latest chapter
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Sienna Confronts Helena
POV: Sienna RhodesThe address takes me three weeks to find.Not because Helena hides badly, but because she hides well, which is the distinction between someone who does not want to be found and someone who does not want to be found by people who do not know where to look. I know where to look because I have been looking at the edges of things my whole life, the peripheral, the almost-visible, the trail that exists if you are paying the right kind of attention.The church records are in the archives of a small Episcopal congregation in the West Village that has been keeping records of its congregation's affiliated community organizations since 1887, which is longer than most institutions bother, and which means that the Moreau family's connection to a specific study circle that met in the church's basement in the late nineties is documented in a membership ledger that no one has looked at in twenty years.The address in the ledger is not Helena's current address.But it is connected
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Vivian's Jealousy
POV: Vivian AshfordThe blogs give Elise the headline by Thursday morning.The Woman Who Tamed Sterling: Elise Vanderwood Is Everything Vivian Ashford Wasn't.I read it twice because I am apparently a person who reads things twice when they are designed to cause maximum damage, and then I put my phone in my trailer and I go to set and I ruin two takes of a scene I have been doing well for three weeks.The scene is the one where my character finally stops lying to herself about what she wants, which is the central scene of the film, which is the scene Andreou has been building toward since the first day of production, and I have been doing it well because I understand this character from the inside in a way I have not understood a character in a long time.Today I cannot find it."Again," Andreou says, from behind the monitor, in the patient tone of someone who has not yet decided to be impatient.I reset.I do it again.It is technically correct and completely empty, which is the spec
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Perfect Woman
POV: Chase SterlingThe date is Dominic's idea, which I agreed to for reasons that made sense at two in the morning after reading the grimoire and which make less sense in the daylight but which I am committed to now.The restaurant is in the West Village, the kind of place that has a wait list and no sign outside and which is therefore exactly the kind of place paparazzi park outside, and I arranged the reservation myself, which tells me everything I need to know about what I am doing tonight.Elise is already seated when I arrive, which she arranged herself, which is the first interesting thing about her. Most people in her position would arrive second, would make the entrance, would let the room arrange itself around them. She is sitting with a glass of water and her phone face-down and an expression of someone who has been here long enough to be comfortable and is not performing the waiting.I sit down."You told them we were coming," she says, not a question."The reservation was
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Elise Vanderwood Arrives
POV: Chase SterlingDominic's board events have a specific quality that his garden parties and his charity galas do not have, which is the quality of a room full of people who are there because they want something from Sterling Industries and are performing enthusiasm about the canapés while they wait to find out if they are going to get it.I go because not going would give Dominic a public narrative about instability in the current leadership that I cannot afford right now, which is the calculation that has been driving most of my professional decisions since the corruption files dropped three weeks ago.Dominic is already working the room when I arrive, which is the thing he does, and I accept champagne and begin the professional circuit, and I am twenty minutes in and thinking about leaving when Dominic appears at my elbow with a woman I don't recognize."Chase," he says, in the tone he uses for public performances of fatherhood. "There's someone I'd like you to meet."I turn.Eli
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Aftermath
POV: Chase SterlingI don't read the coverage.This is new. For nine months I have read everything, the tabloids and the gossip accounts and the entertainment blogs, because reading it was a form of control, knowing what was out there, knowing what narrative was running. I stopped doing that sometime between walking out of my own apartment on Saturday morning and now, which is Monday, and I have not read a single thing.I know it is bad because Callum has called six times and texted eleven and his messages have graduated from call me to please call me to Chase I am begging you which is three stages of Callum escalation that I have not previously reached simultaneously.I don't call him.I sit in the penthouse with the grimoire open and a glass of whiskey I poured at noon and have been nursing since and I look out the window at the city, which is doing its Monday thing of being entirely indifferent to my specific situation, which I appreciate about it.Helena came by yesterday and I di
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Breaking Point
POV: Vivian AshfordI go to him two days later.Not because I planned to. I wake up on a Saturday morning and I lie in bed for an hour thinking about the rain and the blood on his face and the way he said please like it cost him something, and then I get up and I get dressed and I get in the car.His building's security has had my name on a list since the charity collaboration started, which is a Callum decision I have never acknowledged and Chase has never mentioned, and the elevator takes me to the penthouse floor and I knock on his door at ten in the morning.He answers in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a coffee in his hand and the expression of someone who was not expecting me and is not surprised to see me, which is a combination that only Chase Sterling manages."Vivian," he says."We need to talk about the other night," I say.He steps back and lets me in.The penthouse looks lived in now, which is different from the last time I was here, the grimoire on the coffee tabl
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Helena Arrives
POV: Helena MoreauThe jet lands at Teterboro at seven-fifteen on a Tuesday morning in November, which is not a dramatic hour for an arrival but which is the hour I chose because I have been planning this visit for three weeks and I wanted to arrive early enough to be in Manhattan before Chase's da
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession New Beginnings
POV: Vivian AshfordLos Angeles is exactly what I needed it to be, which is to say it is enormous and loud and full of people who are too busy becoming something to spend much time asking you what you left behind.My apartment is in Silver Lake, third floor, west-facing windows that catch the late
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Inheritance
POV: Chase SterlingThe Sterling family attorney is a man named Gerald Foss, who has been handling this family's affairs for thirty-one years and has the carefully neutral expression of someone who has witnessed enough Sterling drama to have developed a professional immunity to all of it. He sits a
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Reveal
POV: Vivian AshfordI find out the same way everyone else does, which is the part that makes it unbearable.It's forty-eight hours after graduation and I'm sitting at Mara's kitchen table with a coffee I haven't touched, still running on the particular kind of adrenaline that comes from having your
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