홈 / Romance / Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession / 챕터 1 - 챕터 10

Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession의 모든 챕터: 챕터 1 - 챕터 10

44 챕터

Graduation Day (Part 1)

POV: Chase SterlingThe morning of graduation is supposed to be the best day of my life.I keep telling myself that as I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, straightening my collar for the fourth time. The tie is wrong. I redo it. The ring box in my jacket pocket feels like it weighs twenty pounds, pressing against my ribs with every breath I take. I've had the speech memorized for two weeks. I've rehearsed it in the shower, on the walk to class, lying awake at three in the morning while Vivian slept beside me, her hair fanned out across the pillow like something out of a painting.Today is the day.I let out a slow breath and check my watch. She's two floors up. We agreed to meet before the ceremony, just the two of us, before the chaos of cap and gown and family photographs swallowed the whole morning whole. I know her schedule better than I know my own. She'll be finishing her coffee, probably checking her reflection one last time, probably already a little impatient.That's fin

Graduation Day (Part 2)

POV: Chase SterlingThe ceremony is already in full swing by the time I find my seat, and the applause is the kind that fills a space so completely you stop hearing it as individual sound and it becomes something more like weather. I sit down between two people I've known for three years and will probably never see again, and I stare straight ahead, and I keep my hand flat against my thigh so I stop reaching for the ring box in my pocket.She's up there.Of course she is. Vivian Ashford is always exactly where the light is brightest. She's standing at the edge of the stage with the other honor students, perfectly composed, her dark hair pinned back, her gown pressed like she ironed it herself at six this morning, which she absolutely did. She's looking out over the audience with that expression she has, the one that reads as serene confidence to everyone in this auditorium and reads to me, after three years, as the very specific kind of calm that means she's already won and she knows

The Reveal

POV: Vivian AshfordI find out the same way everyone else does, which is the part that makes it unbearable.It's forty-eight hours after graduation and I'm sitting at Mara's kitchen table with a coffee I haven't touched, still running on the particular kind of adrenaline that comes from having your perfect moment publicly detonated, and Mara sets her phone face-up on the table between us without saying a word.The headline takes about three seconds to load.STERLING HEIR SURFACES: Chase Sterling, 22, Confirmed as Sole Heir to Sterling Group Fortune. Net Worth Estimated at $2.3 Billion.There is a photograph. It's Chase, but not the Chase I know, not the Chase who showed up at my door at nine in the morning with a tie he'd knotted wrong and a ring box in his jacket pocket. This Chase is standing outside a glass building in a suit that costs more than my entire wardrobe, next to a man I recognize from financial news as Aldous Sterling, silver-haired and severe, with the same jaw and the

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 at the head of the conference table in the forty-second floor offices of Sterling Industries with a leather portfolio open in front of him and his hands folded on top of it, and he does not look at me when I walk in, which tells me he already knows exactly what this morning contains and has decided in advance not to be the one who makes eye contact when it happens.Dominic is already seated.He doesn't look up either, which is vintage Dominic, which means we are all going to sit in this room together and pretend that the last seventy-two hours didn't happen, which is also vintage Dominic, which is maybe the most Sterling thing I've ever witnessed in my life.I take the chair across from him.

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 afternoon light in a way that makes everything look more golden than it actually is. I have a bed, a secondhand couch, three boxes of clothes I haven't fully unpacked yet, and a view of the hills that I stand in front of every morning with my coffee and remind myself counts as a win. It is smaller than my dorm room was. I don't care. It is mine, and no one I grew up with knows the address, and that feels, for now, like exactly the right amount of freedom.I have been here eleven days.I have a meeting in two hours with Marcus Webb.Marcus Webb's production company occupies the top two floors of a building in West Hollywood that someone spent a great deal of money making look like it cost eve

First Blood

POV: Vivian AshfordThe role is called Margot.She is a twenty-three-year-old woman who grew up with nothing and clawed her way into a world that wasn't built for her, and she is brilliant and ruthless and quietly devastating, and the script is the best thing I have read since I got to LA, and I want it the way I have wanted very few things in my life with the particular clarity of knowing this is exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment.I've read it four times. I've made notes in three colors. I know every scene Margot has and I have thought about each one from the inside out, the way my acting coach at Columbia taught me, the way that separates the people who perform a role from the people who become it.I am going to become Margot.I have been awake since five practicing the sides in front of the bathroom mirror, which is a thing I would be embarrassed about if anyone could see me, but no one can, and this is the advantage of living alone in a city that doesn't know you

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 very good because bad champagne at a charity gala is the one thing that will actually generate negative press coverage.I have been here for forty minutes and I have already closed two deals, deflected one journalist, and had a conversation with the deputy mayor that will be useful in approximately six weeks when Sterling Industries needs a permit expedited. This is what these evenings are for. I understand that now in a way I didn't before the will reading, the way you understand a language once you've lived in the country, not just studied it in a classroom.Dominic is not here. He is somewhere in the Hamptons doing whatever Dominic does when he isn't actively making my life more complica

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 the performance portion of the evening and are now doing the actual living portion.There are maybe twenty people. Good wine, low lighting, a jazz record playing from somewhere I can't identify. People talk in small clusters, the conversations looser than they were at the Whitmore, the laughter more genuine.Catherine knows everyone. She moves through the room with the ease of a woman in her element, her hand occasionally brushing my arm to include me in an introduction, and I let myself be included, and I say the correct things, and I watch her.She is good at this. Warm without being excessive, interested without being performative. People light up when she talks to them, which is a genuine

Exposed

POV: Vivian AshfordThe press junket is for a short film, twelve minutes long, that I shot three weeks ago for a director named Petra Okafor who has won two festival awards and who Marcus connected me with as a consolation after the Margot project collapsed. It is a good short film. My performance in it is the best work I have done since Columbia. I am genuinely proud of it, which is not a feeling I have had about my own work very often, and I have been looking forward to today for that reason.The junket is at a hotel in West Hollywood, a small room with a press backdrop and a round of chairs and six journalists who have seen the film and have questions, and Petra beside me, and Marcus in the back of the room watching with his arms folded and the expression of a man auditing an investment.I am in the middle of answering a question about the character's relationship to silence as a form of language, which is the kind of question I love, which is the kind of question that lets me talk

The Beckett Introduction

POV: Vivian AshfordMarcus tells me Vanity Fair wants a profile.He says it the way he says most things that are good news, with the particular measured delivery of someone who wants you to understand that this happened because of him, that the door opened because he was standing next to it. "They reached out to us," he says, during our Tuesday check-in call, which has become a fixture of my week in the way that things you didn't choose become fixtures when you sign contracts. "Feature piece. Emerging talent focus. The photographer is Lena Marsh, which is significant.""Who's the writer?""Ethan Beckett. He's done profiles for them before, good ones. Smart guy, knows how to make his subjects look human without making them look weak." A pause. "Which is what we want right now, given the last few weeks."Given the last few weeks. Marcus's way of referencing the Rhodes affair coverage without naming it, the way he references most things that make him uncomfortable, by implication and euph

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