LOGINShare
First Blood
publish date:
2026-03-27 06:08:08
Latest chapter
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession The Business Takeover
POV: Marcus WebbIt starts with Harmon.Geoffrey Harmon's office calls at seven-fifteen on a Thursday morning, which is the time that serious calls come when the people making them want you to know they have been awake for hours already and have made their decision with a clear head in the early morning dark, which is the corporate equivalent of a knife through the mail slot before you've had your coffee.Harmon Capital is withdrawing its investment in Webb Entertainment, effective end of quarter, with the standard ninety-day notice period beginning immediately.I listen to the call standing in my kitchen in my robe and I say the correct professional things and I ask the correct professional questions and I get off the phone and I stand at my kitchen counter for a moment and I think about the Sterling Industries meetings that my people flagged two weeks ago and which I told myself I had time to manage.I did not have time to manage them.By nine o'clock, two more calls have come in. A
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Marcus's Obsession
POV: Vivian AshfordThe audition is for a film called The Cartographer's Wife, a period drama set in 1920s London, written by a director named Saoirse Flynn who has made two films that I have watched four times each and who is, by every measure I know how to apply, exactly the kind of filmmaker I want to be working with at this stage of my career.The role is the wife of the title, a woman who has been drawing her husband's maps for fifteen years without credit, and who spends the film deciding what to do about that, and it is the kind of role that wins awards and changes careers and which I would crawl across glass to audition for.Marcus says no.He says it on a Tuesday morning during our weekly call, in the measured tone he uses when he has made a decision and is presenting it as a conversation as a professional courtesy rather than an actual invitation for input. "Flynn's project has distribution problems," he says. "The financing is unstable. I don't want you attached to somethin
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 morning. I told no one. There is no one to tell, which is the shape my life has taken over the past twenty-three years of choosing isolation over the complications of being known, and I have made my peace with that shape, mostly, in the way you make peace with a decision whose consequences you understand completely and would make again.The building is exactly what Dominic would have built if given unlimited resources and no one to tell him when enough was enough. Which is to say it is impressive and cold and tells you everything about the man who commissioned it in the first place. I look at it the way I look at most things connected to Dominic, with the particular combination of aesthetic ack
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 like. No agenda, no follow-up questions. Just dinner, if you want.I look at the text for a while before I answer.The rational part of my brain, the part that has been managing my public image and my private decisions with increasing rigor since graduation, notes several things simultaneously. Ethan Beckett is writing a profile of me for Vanity Fair. Ethan Beckett is also, as of approximately six weeks ago, someone I called at one in the morning after Chase leaked college photographs of me, and who answered, and who said useful things in a steady voice, and who has texted twice since to check in without requiring anything from me in return, which is a quality I have not encountered very oft
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Vision of Fire
POV: Sienna RhodesThe dream starts the way the bad ones always do, which is ordinarily.I am in a room I don't recognize, clean and well-lit, the kind of neutral space that exists in dreams as a stage rather than a location, and Vivian is there, and Chase is there, and the three of us are simply existing in the same space the way we did for four years at Columbia without any of the weight that space now carries.Then the fire starts.Not dramatically. Not an explosion or a sudden wall of flame. It begins at the edges of things, the baseboards, the corners of the ceiling, small and almost polite, the way a candle catches a curtain, with patience and without hurry. I watch it and in the dream logic I understand that I should be alarmed but cannot locate the alarm, the way you understand in a dream that something is wrong without being able to make your body respond to the wrongness.Vivian and Chase don't see it.They are standing facing each other, not talking, just looking, and the fi
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession Pillow Talk Betrayal
POV: Chase SterlingThe slap is on the front page of every entertainment outlet by midnight.There are seven photographs of it, from four different angles, which tells me the press presence at that premiere was heavier than I anticipated and also that someone had the specific anticipation to position a camera correctly, which means either I am more predictable than I thought or Vivian is, or both of us are, which is probably the most accurate answer.I sit in the back of the car on the way home from the premiere and I look at the photographs on my phone, one after another, and I think about the expression on Vivian's face in the half second before her hand moved. I know that expression. I have a catalog of her expressions built up over four years of paying close attention, and that particular one, the one where something she has been holding very carefully for a long time finally exceeds its container, is one I have seen exactly three times.The last time I saw it, she was holding a r
You may also like
SEX WITH THE VIRGIN MAID
Wild Dreams2.1M viewsWarning: My Mommy is A Savage!
Seeking A Peaceful Life2.1M viewsMadam Winters’s Fight For Her Children
Summer Wine1.2M viewsTo Be Yours Again
Taylor1.0M viewsDating The Wrong Brother
M.M.268 viewsThe Divorce That Ruined Him
Garnet254 viewsThe Little Canary of the Alpha
Elle Misha88 viewsMy Best Friend's Father: The Man I Shouldn't Want
ETHEREAL BLISS97 views
