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Family Secrets Part Two
Fecha de publicación:
2026-04-17 08:52:53
Jubilee MooresAUTHOR'S NOTE: If you enjoyed this story, LIKE it and add it to your library. Also VOTE for it so it will be shared with more readers.
Último capítulo
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 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 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 someti
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.H
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Kiss in the Rain
POV: Vivian AshfordThe film gets a standing ovation and I cry in the bathroom afterward, which I will deny if anyone asks.It is the good kind of crying, the kind that happens when something you worked for actually lands the way you hoped it would, and I give myself three minutes with my back agai
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Helena's Interference
POV: Vivian AshfordI find the photograph at seven in the morning with my first coffee, which is earlier than I usually check his name but which has been my habit since my mother told him about it and which I have not broken because breaking it would require admitting it exists in the first place.
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