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Ethan Proposes

last update publish date: 2026-06-23 09:53:03

POV: Vivian Ashford

Ethan 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
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  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   SATURDAY

    POV: Vivian AshfordI spend Saturday morning watching him.Not in person. On my laptop, in the Silver Lake apartment, with my coffee going cold beside me, pulling up every piece of footage I can find from the past ten months. Press interviews, red carpet moments, the Forbes interview, the clip from the board meeting hallway, the #SterlingBrothersWar footage from the office.I watch them in order.I watch them the way I watch footage of my own performances, which is analytically, the specific skill of someone who has been trained to read bodies and faces and the gap between what a person says and what a person means, and what I see when I apply that skill to Chase Sterling across ten months of public footage is something I have been too close to see before.He hurts after.Every single time.The Forbes interview, the pull quote moment, he is smooth and pleasant and the interviewer is charmed, and then there is a cut to him standing outside the building afterward and his face in the two

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Vivian's Realization

    POV: Vivian AshfordI watch the hospital footage three times.Not the public footage, there is no public footage from inside the room, but the footage that exists in my memory, which I have been replaying since I got home last night with the specific quality of something you know you are going to be replaying for a long time.He said: I have loved you since the second semester of sophomore year.He said: I have not stopped for a single day since.He said: I don't know how to be this without hurting you.He said all of it with the flinch following each true thing, the physical cost of the spell making every honest sentence visible in his body, and I sat beside his bed and I held his hand and I watched it happen and I cried when he was asleep and I left before he woke up.And now I am on my couch in Silver Lake with my coffee and the ring on my finger and the footage playing in my head, and I am trying to figure out what to do with what I know.The problem is the following: he won't rem

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Confessions

    POV: Vivian AshfordHelena calls me back within twenty minutes of Chase going quiet on the phone, which means she was monitoring, which means she knew this was going to happen and had contingencies in place, which is very Helena."He's all right," she says, before I can ask. "The spell's physical toll compounded with the curse's resistance. He needs medical attention and rest.""Hospital," I say."I've called an ambulance," she says. "Cedars has his records from the last visit.""I'm coming," I say.A pause. "Vivian. He won't remember what he said. When the spell ends, everything he said under it will feel like something that happened in a dream. He won't know he told you."I sit with that."I'm still coming," I say.He is in a room on the fourth floor when I arrive, pale and hooked to an IV with the monitors doing their work, and it is the second time I have sat beside a hospital bed of his making and both times feel nothing alike.The first time he was beside mine.This time the nur

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Confessions

    POV: Vivian AshfordHelena calls me back within twenty minutes of Chase going quiet on the phone, which means she was monitoring, which means she knew this was going to happen and had contingencies in place, which is very Helena."He's all right," she says, before I can ask. "The spell's physical toll compounded with the curse's resistance. He needs medical attention and rest.""Hospital," I say."I've called an ambulance," she says. "Cedars has his records from the last visit.""I'm coming," I say.A pause. "Vivian. He won't remember what he said. When the spell ends, everything he said under it will feel like something that happened in a dream. He won't know he told you."I sit with that."I'm still coming," I say.He is in a room on the fourth floor when I arrive, pale and hooked to an IV with the monitors doing their work, and it is the second time I have sat beside a hospital bed of his making and both times feel nothing alike.The first time he was beside mine.This time the nur

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   The Truth Spell

    POV: Chase SterlingHelena is furious.Not the quiet disappointed version of furious that she usually manages. The actual version, which I have seen exactly twice in my life, once when I was eight and broke something in her New Orleans kitchen that belonged to her grandmother, and once now, standing in my penthouse at nine in the morning with the Vegas photographs on every screen and her hands flat on my kitchen counter."The party," she says."I know," I say."You went to her bachelorette party," she says."I was at the hotel," I say."Chase.""I know," I say.She looks at me with the dark eyes and the silver-streaked hair and the twenty-three years of this specific exhaustion on her face, and then she does something I was not expecting, which is she reaches into the bag she carries and she takes out a small vial and she sets it on the kitchen counter between us.I look at it.Clear liquid. No label. The kind of container that could contain anything."What is that," I say."Something

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Bachelorette Party Disaster

    POV: Vivian AshfordMarcus books the penthouse suite at the Aria for the whole weekend, which is the kind of gesture that sounds generous and functions as control, because a weekend in a suite Marcus paid for in a city Marcus chose for a party Marcus organized means that the entire event exists within Marcus's architecture, and I understood that when he offered and I said yes anyway because I did not have the energy to plan my own bachelorette party and someone offering to do it felt like relief.That was a month ago.Now I am standing on the balcony of the suite at eleven on a Friday night with a champagne glass and the Las Vegas skyline doing its excessive, beautiful thing below me, and inside there are twelve women I like to varying degrees and a DJ Marcus also hired, and the whole thing is very loud and very expensive and feels nothing like me.Sienna finds me on the balcony.She leans on the railing beside me and looks at the city and doesn't say anything, which is one of her bet

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Hospital Vigil

    POV: Chase SterlingThe plastic chair in the hallway outside room four is the most uncomfortable thing I have sat in since the folding chairs at Columbia's freshman orientation, and I have been in it for four hours.The nurses have asked me twice if I need anything. I said no both times. The second

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Paparazzi War

    POV: Chase SterlingThe strategy is simple and terrible and I implement it on a Tuesday afternoon with the specific efficiency of someone who has stopped examining whether the things they are doing are things they should be doing.My PR director, a man named Callum who has been managing Sterling In

  • Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession   Ethan's Investigation

    POV: Ethan BeckettThe piece I am writing is the longest thing I have attempted in three years of professional journalism, and I am writing it the way you write the things that matter, slowly and from multiple directions simultaneously, building toward a center that I am still not entirely sure I w

  • 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

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