All Chapters of Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

POV: Vivian AshfordThe event is a film industry reception in Hollywood Hills, the kind that gets scheduled on a Wednesday evening because Wednesday evenings feel less formal and the guest list is smaller and the conversations are supposed to be more genuine, and I have been here for two hours doing the work of being present and professionally engaged and I am done and I want to go home.Marcus offered his driver. I said no, because the Marcus situation is one I am navigating with the specific care of someone who has made a decision they are not entirely certain about and who needs to maintain enough independence to be able to revise it if necessary, and accepting his driver felt like a category of dependence I was not ready for.I have my own car. A convertible I bought three months ago because Los Angeles requires a car and the convertible was the one that made the drive up PCH feel like something worth doing, which it is, on the right evening.Tonight is not the right evening, as i

POV: Catherine RhodesI wait three weeks.I want to be clear about that, because the three weeks matter, because they represent the time I spent processing the specific information that Sienna gave me after the gala, and the hospital coverage, and the photographs of Chase in a Los Angeles hallway at two in the morning, and the specific quality of a man's face in a paparazzi photograph taken through a hospital window that tells you everything you need to know about the geography of his heart.I wait three weeks because I am not a woman who acts from immediate pain. I have been that woman before, in the divorce, and the decisions I made from immediate pain in the divorce were the worst decisions I made, and I am not going to repeat them.I wait three weeks, and I process, and I arrive at the conclusion that was available to me the morning after the Carlyle, which is that I knew, I have always known, and that the specific quality of knowing a thing and choosing to proceed anyway does not

POV: Chase SterlingThe Forbes interview is Callum's idea, which means it is a good idea that I am going to execute in a way that makes it Callum's problem, which has become the standard dynamic of our professional relationship."Cover story," Callum says, in the Tuesday briefing. "The Heir Who Never Sleeps. We want to reframe the past seven months as strategic rather than personal. Aggressive acquisitions, fast decisions, establishing dominance in the market at an age when most heirs are still learning the org chart.""And the personal coverage," I say."Gets recontextualized as someone who lives at the same intensity professionally and personally," he says. "High stakes, high energy, moves fast. It's a coherent narrative.""Who's interviewing.""Sarah Chen. She's done three Forbes covers in the past two years. Sharp, inclined to be favorable to success stories, and she responded very warmly to our outreach.""Fine," I say."Chase." He looks at me with the expression he has developed

POV: Ethan Beckett The DNA test kit cost forty-nine dollars and required a cheek swab and three weeks of waiting and the particular discipline of a journalist who knows how to sit with unconfirmed information without acting on it prematurely, which is a discipline I have been practicing since I was twenty-two and which has never cost me as much as it has cost me in the past three weeks. I sent the swab in under a false name. The results arrive on a Thursday morning by email, which is the delivery method of the service I used, and I am at my desk when the notification comes in, which means I have my coffee and my laptop and nowhere to go for the next however long this takes, which turns out to be approximately forty-five seconds to read and approximately three hours to process. The report is precise and clinical in the way of scientific documents, which is to say it gives you the information without any acknowledgment of what the information means to the specific human being rea

POV: Chase SterlingHelena's house in Greenwich Village is not what I expected, which is itself something I should have anticipated, because nothing about my mother has ever been what I expected.The outside is a narrow brownstone on a quiet block, the kind of building that exists in this neighborhood in large numbers and which does not announce itself. The inside is a different category of thing entirely. She has been in this rental for three weeks and she has made it into something that resembles, in specific and specific ways, the house in New Orleans where I spent the summers of my childhood, the smell of it the same, the specific combination of dried herbs and candle wax and old wood and something underneath all of that which I have never been able to name and which belongs, I understand now, to the practice.She has a workbench along the north wall. Candles in various stages of use. Jars of things I cannot identify. The grimoire, the large original one rather than the portable v