Research Begins

POV: Sienna RhodesThe New York Public Library's special collections division closes at six on weekdays, which means I have been here since nine this morning and I have been given nine hours to find what I am looking for, which is either enough or not enough depending on whether what I am looking for wants to be found.I am looking for Helena Moreau Sterling.Not the person. The record of the practice.Practitioners leave traces, which is something Helena told me in one of our early conversations, which is something she said with the specific wry awareness of someone describing the professional hazard of their own field. Magic leaves marks on the world the way any significant force leaves marks, not always visible, not always legible, but present, and the marks that Helena Moreau left in the New York occult community of the late nineties and early two-thousands are what I am here to find.The archivist who manages the special collections division is a woman named Dr. Osei who has the

The Underground Party

POV: Vivian Ashford The invitation comes through Marcus, which means I almost don't go, which means the fact that I end up going is entirely attributable to the specific quality of a Saturday night in January when you have been recovering from an accident and a Forbes insult and a tell-all piece and three weeks of carefully managed public composure, and someone offers you a masked party in a basement club in the Meatpacking District and your ribs have healed enough that dancing is theoretically possible and sometimes the theoretical becomes the actual. The club is called nothing, officially. It has a symbol on the invitation, a geometric shape, and an address and a time, and the dress code is formal and masked, which is the kind of instruction that sounds pretentious and is actually just liberating. I wear a black dress and a gold mask that covers my eyes and half my face and I take a car there alone, which Marcus protests and which I do anyway, and I walk into the basement space

Tabloid Frenzy

POV: Vivian AshfordI wake at six-fifteen to forty-seven missed notifications, which is the number before I stop counting, and the video has eight million views, which is the number Diana texts me at six-seventeen with the specific tone that even text can carry when someone has been awake since two managing a situation.I watch the video.It is, objectively, extraordinary footage. The lighting is cinematic and the camera is steady and the forty-five seconds of it are the forty-five seconds of two people who have been performing indifference for seven months discovering in real time that the performance was never sustainable. I watch it with the specific quality of someone watching themselves from the outside, which actors learn to do and which is still uncomfortable when the footage is this personal.I put my phone down.I make coffee.I drink the coffee at my kitchen counter in Silver Lake in the January morning and I think about the wall in the underground club and the gold mask on

Marcus's Manipulation

POV: Vivian AshfordThe IG live runs for twenty-two minutes and generates the kind of coverage that Diana describes, in her ten o'clock call the next morning, as either the most brilliant or most catastrophic unmanaged media moment she has witnessed in her professional career, and she has not yet determined which."The comments are split," she says. "Fifty percent think you're the most honest person in Hollywood. Fifty percent think you're publicly self-destructing.""Both halves are partially right," I say."Vivian," she says, in the tone she uses when she is setting aside professional mode for personal mode. "Are you okay?""I'm functional," I say, which is different and true.She accepts this, which is one of the things I value about Diana.Marcus does not accept this. Marcus calls forty minutes later, after I have had time to see the live's clip circulating and to watch the fifty-percent-honest and fifty-percent-catastrophic split play out in real time, and his voice is in the con

All Chapters of Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession: Chapter 41 - Chapter 44

Research Begins

The Underground Party

Tabloid Frenzy

Marcus's Manipulation