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Collateral Damage
publish date:
2026-04-05 09:11:42
Latest chapter
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Brothers at War
POV: Ethan BeckettI give myself one night.One night to be angry without doing anything about it, which is the discipline I have developed over seven years of journalism, the practice of letting the emotion move through before acting on it, because the actions you take from anger are never the right ones.One night is what I give myself and one night is what I take, and in the morning I put on my jacket and I go to Sterling Tower.The lobby security recognizes me because I have been here enough times in the past year that my face is in their system, and I walk past them without stopping because I am not going to give anyone in this building the opportunity to make a call that results in me being asked to leave before I get to the forty-fourth floor.I take the elevator.I walk through the glass and chrome of the forty-fourth floor with the specific quality of someone who has made a decision and is executing it.Chase's assistant stands up."Mr. Beckett, you don't have an appointment—
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Takeover Attempt
POV: Ethan BeckettThe magazine is called Meridian, which is not the Sterling subsidiary, different word, and I have been writing for it since I was twenty-three and it gave me my first real investigative platform, and the editor who hired me, a woman named Joan, took a chance on a kid from Iowa with a chip on his shoulder and a nose for stories that matter, and I have been loyal to it the way you are loyal to the first place that believed in you.I find out about the acquisition on a Tuesday, not from Joan, not from the editorial team, from a financial journalist I know who texts me at seven in the morning: Heads up. Heard something about your magazine's parent company. You might want to look into it.I look into it.It takes about forty minutes.Meridian Media Group, which owns four publications including mine, sold a controlling stake to a holding company called Northbrook Capital three weeks ago. Northbrook Capital was incorporated in Delaware eighteen months ago. Its registered a
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Engagement Announcement
POV: Chase SterlingThe push notification comes at nine-seventeen during a board meeting about the Hartley acquisition, which has finally moved into its final phase, and I look at my phone under the table because I have the habit of checking notifications during meetings and which I should stop doing and have not stopped doing.The notification is from a news app.It has her name in it.And Ethan's.And the word engaged.I look at it for a moment that is longer than the length of a notification glance, long enough that Bernard notices and stops talking mid-sentence, and I put the phone face-down on the table and I look at the acquisition documents in front of me and I breathe."Continue," I say.Bernard continues.I look at the acquisition documents.I read the same sentence four times without absorbing it.Bernard finishes his section and hands to the CFO and the CFO begins and I am sitting at the head of this table with ten people in this room and the push notification face-down bes
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Ethan Proposes
POV: Vivian AshfordEthan books the rooftop without telling me what it is for, which should have been a signal, but Ethan takes me to dinner sometimes just because he knows I have not eaten properly and he is that kind of person, and I did not read the signal because I was not looking for it.The rooftop is beautiful. March in New York has finally decided to be almost spring, the kind of evening where the cold is thin enough that a coat handles it, and the city is doing its thing below us, and there are candles on the table and the skyline is glowing the way it does when the light is exactly right, and I sit down and I look at it and I think, for one genuinely good moment, that everything is going to be okay.Then I look at Ethan's face.He has the expression he gets when he has decided something and is going to say it and has been rehearsing how to say it, which is different from the journalist's face and the friend's face, more exposed than either."Ethan," I say."Let me say it," h
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Grimoire
POV: Sienna RhodesI come back the next day.Helena doesn't seem surprised. She opens the door before I knock, which I have stopped finding unsettling about her, and she has tea already made and the grimoire is off its stand and on the worktable, which means she has been thinking about what I asked and has decided something."Sit down," she says.I sit.She goes to the worktable.She opens a drawer and she takes out a small knife, which is the kind of knife I recognize from my research, ceremonial but functional, and she looks at me."The grimoire is blood-locked," she says. "The Moreau family has kept it that way for four generations. It opens to the blood of the practitioner or the blood of the subject.""You don't have Chase's blood," I say."I took a sample the night I examined his hand," she says. "After the garden party. When he didn't feel the cuts."I sit with that.She touches the blade to her fingertip.A drop of blood falls on the cover of the grimoire.Nothing happens for
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 The Sterling Estate
POV: Chase SterlingThe Sterling estate in Greenwich is forty-two acres of money made visible, which is what old wealth does when it has enough of it and enough time, it builds gardens and puts walls around them and calls it a home. The house itself is Georgian revival, eleven bedrooms, a ballroom
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
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