All Chapters of Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession: Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

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

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.

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