All Chapters of Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

44 Chapters

Family Secrets Part One

POV: Ethan BeckettThe Sterling family piece starts, as all good investigative pieces start, with a public record that doesn't quite add up.I have been working the Sterling Industries story for three months, building it the way you build anything that matters, slowly and from the edges inward, public filings and court records and archived newspaper coverage and the particular category of source that every journalist collects over years of doing this work: people who were in rooms where things happened and who have been waiting, sometimes for decades, for someone to ask them the right question.The birth records discrepancy is not something I was looking for. It surfaces on a Tuesday afternoon in the New York City Municipal Archives, where I am cross-referencing Sterling Industries incorporation documents against Dominic Sterling's personal financial history in the early nineties, which is dry work, the kind that requires good coffee and the particular patience of someone who believes

The Charity Gala Showdown

POV: Vivian AshfordThe Hartwell Foundation Gala is the kind of event that exists at the intersection of genuine philanthropy and aggressive social performance, which means the cause is real and the room is full of people who care about it and also full of people who care about being seen caring about it, and the two populations are thoroughly mixed and indistinguishable from the outside, which is either reassuring or depressing depending on your disposition.Marcus put me on the guest list six weekThe Charity Gala Showdowns ago. I considered it carefully when Sienna told me Chase would likely attend, because the Hartwell Foundation has Sterling Industries connections that make his presence here professionally logical, and I considered it and I came anyway, because I have been making decisions based on avoiding Chase Sterling for six months and it has not made me happy and it has not made me free, and I am trying a different approach tonight, which is to simply exist in rooms he migh

Morning After Regrets

POV: Vivian AshfordI wake at five-fifteen in a hotel room I booked last night because the gala ran late and the thought of the drive back to Silver Lake at one in the morning felt like one decision too many, and the room is very white and very quiet and the dawn is just beginning its business outside the window.I lie on my back and look at the ceiling.The ceiling is neutral and unhelpful.I performed the rest of the gala correctly. I said the right things to the right people and I drank two glasses of champagne with the careful pacing of someone managing a situation and I found Ethan and I talked to him for an hour about his Westchester trip and what he found in the archives, which is significant and which I processed with the focused attention it deserved, and I did not look for Chase after I came out of the corridor, and I did not look for him when I left, and I do not know where he went or who he went home with and I am not going to think about that.I lie on my back and look at

The Vision Worsens

POV: Sienna RhodesThe sketchbook on my kitchen table has been open for three days.I don't close it anymore. There is no point in closing it because the drawings are in my head whether the book is open or not, and having them on paper gives them somewhere to be that is outside of me, which is the only relief available.I have been drawing since I was seven years old, since the first vision hit at a birthday party and my mother took me home and I sat at the kitchen table and drew what I had seen because I had no other language for it. Helena formalized the practice when she found me, gave it structure and purpose, told me that externalizing visions through image reduces their hold on the interior, that the act of drawing a thing moves it from inside the body to outside it, which is not the same as understanding it but is sometimes the first step.I have filled eleven pages in three days.The drawings are all of Chase.Not his face exactly, not a portrait. More like the quality of him,

Helena Arrives

POV: Helena MoreauThe jet lands at Teterboro at seven-fifteen on a Tuesday morning in November, which is not a dramatic hour for an arrival but which is the hour I chose because I have been planning this visit for three weeks and I wanted to arrive early enough to be in Manhattan before Chase's day began, before he had the professional armor of the boardroom fully assembled.I have been putting this off for six months.Six months of watching from New Orleans, of the scrying mirror and the candle workings and the careful long-distance management of something that requires direct intervention and that I have been telling myself I could handle from a distance because direct intervention means standing in front of my son and acknowledging, in person, the weight of what I built and left him to carry.I am done putting it off.The curse mark on Vivian Ashford's wrist changed the timeline.A curse mark on a non-bloodline person means the curse has extended its reach, which means it is no lo

Mother's Warning

POV: Chase SterlingShe is in my penthouse at nine in the evening.I don't know how she got past building security, which has a guest list and a protocol and three different checkpoints between the lobby and my floor, and when I ask my building manager he looks at his records and tells me there is no record of her entering, which is not possible and which I have decided not to think about too carefully.She is standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows looking at the city when I come in, and she has made herself tea, which means she found my kitchen, which means she explored my home while I was in the car coming back from the office, and I stand in the doorway and look at her and feel several things simultaneously that I am going to process in order."You could have called," I say."I did call," she says, to the window. "You didn't answer.""I was in meetings.""You were avoiding me." She turns. "Which I understand. I would avoid me too."She looks different in my home than she did in m

Marcus Proposes

POV: Vivian Ashford The Malibu mansion is exactly what a powerful man's Malibu mansion should be, all glass and bleached wood and the Pacific doing its enormous thing below the bluffs, and Marcus has arranged the meeting for a Saturday because Saturday meetings at Malibu mansions are a specific kind of professional signal, the kind that says I am comfortable enough with you to blur the line between work and something else, and I have been noting the signal since the car turned off PCH and I am filing it appropriately. Priya is not here. That is the other signal. Marcus meets me at the door himself, which he has not done in any of our professional interactions, and he is in clothes that are designed to look casual without being casual, the specific studied informality of someone who has chosen every detail and wants you to believe they haven't. He looks well, which I note factually. He looks like a man who has slept and exercised and prepared for today with intention. "Vivian,

The Sterling Estate

POV: Chase SterlingThe Sterling estate in Greenwich is forty-two acres of money made visible, which is what old wealth does when it has enough of it and enough time, it builds gardens and puts walls around them and calls it a home. The house itself is Georgian revival, eleven bedrooms, a ballroom that Dominic had restored in 2008 for reasons that were never entirely clear since he never used it, and grounds that are maintained by a staff of six whose entire professional purpose is to ensure that the grass is always exactly the right shade of green.I have been coming here since I was five years old and I have never once felt comfortable in any room of it.Today I am hosting a garden party for two hundred people, which Helena talked me into on the grounds that Sterling Industries' public image needs human moments and a summer garden party at the estate is precisely the kind of human moment that functions as good press without requiring anything genuinely human from me.She is not wron

Ethan's Investigation

POV: Ethan BeckettThe piece I am writing is the longest thing I have attempted in three years of professional journalism, and I am writing it the way you write the things that matter, slowly and from multiple directions simultaneously, building toward a center that I am still not entirely sure I want to reach.I have been at my desk since six this morning, which is a Saturday, which means I am doing the thing I do when a story has gotten under my skin, which is work through the weekend on the specific logic that the story doesn't stop existing on weekends and so neither should I.The draft is forty-two pages. It will be shorter in its final form, shaped and edited down to something that a reader can hold in their attention for the time it takes to read a magazine feature. But the draft is where the thinking happens, where the threads go out in all directions and you follow them and find out which ones hold weight and which ones are decoration.The birth records thread is holding weig

Paparazzi War

POV: Chase SterlingThe strategy is simple and terrible and I implement it on a Tuesday afternoon with the specific efficiency of someone who has stopped examining whether the things they are doing are things they should be doing.My PR director, a man named Callum who has been managing Sterling Industries' public image for eight years and who has, in the past seven months, developed the particular professional resilience of someone managing a client whose behavior keeps exceeding the parameters of normal crisis communications, sits across from me in my office and listens to what I want without changing his expression."Models," I say. "Three or four. Dark hair, similar build. I want paparazzi shots of me at various locations over the next two weeks. Events, restaurants, a club appearance. The shots should look candid."Callum looks at me. "You want to manufacture photographs of yourself with women who resemble Vivian Ashford.""I want candid photographs of me at events," I say. "What

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