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Family Secrets Part One
publish date:
2026-04-06 09:56:23
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Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Marcus's Manipulation
POV: Vivian AshfordThe IG live runs for twenty-two minutes and generates the kind of coverage that Diana describes, in her ten o'clock call the next morning, as either the most brilliant or most catastrophic unmanaged media moment she has witnessed in her professional career, and she has not yet determined which."The comments are split," she says. "Fifty percent think you're the most honest person in Hollywood. Fifty percent think you're publicly self-destructing.""Both halves are partially right," I say."Vivian," she says, in the tone she uses when she is setting aside professional mode for personal mode. "Are you okay?""I'm functional," I say, which is different and true.She accepts this, which is one of the things I value about Diana.Marcus does not accept this. Marcus calls forty minutes later, after I have had time to see the live's clip circulating and to watch the fifty-percent-honest and fifty-percent-catastrophic split play out in real time, and his voice is in the con
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Tabloid Frenzy
POV: Vivian AshfordI wake at six-fifteen to forty-seven missed notifications, which is the number before I stop counting, and the video has eight million views, which is the number Diana texts me at six-seventeen with the specific tone that even text can carry when someone has been awake since two managing a situation.I watch the video.It is, objectively, extraordinary footage. The lighting is cinematic and the camera is steady and the forty-five seconds of it are the forty-five seconds of two people who have been performing indifference for seven months discovering in real time that the performance was never sustainable. I watch it with the specific quality of someone watching themselves from the outside, which actors learn to do and which is still uncomfortable when the footage is this personal.I put my phone down.I make coffee.I drink the coffee at my kitchen counter in Silver Lake in the January morning and I think about the wall in the underground club and the gold mask on
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Underground Party
POV: Vivian Ashford The invitation comes through Marcus, which means I almost don't go, which means the fact that I end up going is entirely attributable to the specific quality of a Saturday night in January when you have been recovering from an accident and a Forbes insult and a tell-all piece and three weeks of carefully managed public composure, and someone offers you a masked party in a basement club in the Meatpacking District and your ribs have healed enough that dancing is theoretically possible and sometimes the theoretical becomes the actual. The club is called nothing, officially. It has a symbol on the invitation, a geometric shape, and an address and a time, and the dress code is formal and masked, which is the kind of instruction that sounds pretentious and is actually just liberating. I wear a black dress and a gold mask that covers my eyes and half my face and I take a car there alone, which Marcus protests and which I do anyway, and I walk into the basement space
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Research Begins
POV: Sienna RhodesThe New York Public Library's special collections division closes at six on weekdays, which means I have been here since nine this morning and I have been given nine hours to find what I am looking for, which is either enough or not enough depending on whether what I am looking for wants to be found.I am looking for Helena Moreau Sterling.Not the person. The record of the practice.Practitioners leave traces, which is something Helena told me in one of our early conversations, which is something she said with the specific wry awareness of someone describing the professional hazard of their own field. Magic leaves marks on the world the way any significant force leaves marks, not always visible, not always legible, but present, and the marks that Helena Moreau left in the New York occult community of the late nineties and early two-thousands are what I am here to find.The archivist who manages the special collections division is a woman named Dr. Osei who has the
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Dominic's Past
POV: Helena MoreauThe scrying pool is different from the mirror.The mirror shows the present, the living surface of what is happening now, the real-time image of a person or a place. The pool is older and more costly and shows what the mirror cannot, the past, the specific events of times that have ended and which live now only in the particular kind of memory that certain practitioners can access.I have not used the pool in four years.The last time I used it was to watch Dominic's wedding to Constance, which I do not do for pleasure but which I do occasionally when the grief of the curse needs to be reminded of its own origin, when I need to see the specific moment that everything became what it became.Tonight I use it for Chase.He needs to see it.He needs to understand not just what I built but why I built it, and why is not a thing I can explain adequately in language because why is built from feeling and feeling cannot be fully translated.So I will show him.The pool is in
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Curse Reveals
POV: Chase SterlingHelena's house in Greenwich Village is not what I expected, which is itself something I should have anticipated, because nothing about my mother has ever been what I expected.The outside is a narrow brownstone on a quiet block, the kind of building that exists in this neighborhood in large numbers and which does not announce itself. The inside is a different category of thing entirely. She has been in this rental for three weeks and she has made it into something that resembles, in specific and specific ways, the house in New Orleans where I spent the summers of my childhood, the smell of it the same, the specific combination of dried herbs and candle wax and old wood and something underneath all of that which I have never been able to name and which belongs, I understand now, to the practice.She has a workbench along the north wall. Candles in various stages of use. Jars of things I cannot identify. The grimoire, the large original one rather than the portable v
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Witch in the Shadows
POV: Helena MoreauThe Sterling Industries building is forty-four floors of glass and steel in midtown Manhattan, and I have been standing across the street from it for twenty minutes in the October cold, looking up at the floor I know is his, watching the lights.I flew in from New Orleans this mor
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Beckett Complication
POV: Vivian AshfordEthan suggests dinner in the way that feels like a natural extension of a conversation rather than a formal proposal, which is either very good social instincts or very good journalism, and I suspect it is both. He texts on a Wednesday: There's a place in Los Feliz I think you'd
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Rhodes Affair Part Two
POV: Chase SterlingThe after-party is at a townhouse in the West Seventies that belongs to a woman named Diane, who is apparently Catherine's friend from her philanthropic circuit, and it is exactly what Catherine described: quieter, smaller, the kind of gathering where people have already done th
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Rhodes Affair Part One
POV: Chase SterlingThe Whitmore Foundation Gala is the kind of event that exists primarily to be photographed, which means the venue has been selected for its bones rather than its comfort, and the lighting is designed to make everyone look like the best version of themselves, and the champagne is
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