Lahat ng Kabanata ng Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession: Kabanata 51 - Kabanata 60

POV: Chase SterlingI don't read the coverage.This is new. For nine months I have read everything, the tabloids and the gossip accounts and the entertainment blogs, because reading it was a form of control, knowing what was out there, knowing what narrative was running. I stopped doing that sometime between walking out of my own apartment on Saturday morning and now, which is Monday, and I have not read a single thing.I know it is bad because Callum has called six times and texted eleven and his messages have graduated from call me to please call me to Chase I am begging you which is three stages of Callum escalation that I have not previously reached simultaneously.I don't call him.I sit in the penthouse with the grimoire open and a glass of whiskey I poured at noon and have been nursing since and I look out the window at the city, which is doing its Monday thing of being entirely indifferent to my specific situation, which I appreciate about it.Helena came by yesterday and I di

POV: Chase SterlingThe date is Dominic's idea, which I agreed to for reasons that made sense at two in the morning after reading the grimoire and which make less sense in the daylight but which I am committed to now.The restaurant is in the West Village, the kind of place that has a wait list and no sign outside and which is therefore exactly the kind of place paparazzi park outside, and I arranged the reservation myself, which tells me everything I need to know about what I am doing tonight.Elise is already seated when I arrive, which she arranged herself, which is the first interesting thing about her. Most people in her position would arrive second, would make the entrance, would let the room arrange itself around them. She is sitting with a glass of water and her phone face-down and an expression of someone who has been here long enough to be comfortable and is not performing the waiting.I sit down."You told them we were coming," she says, not a question."The reservation was

POV: Sienna RhodesThe address takes me three weeks to find.Not because Helena hides badly, but because she hides well, which is the distinction between someone who does not want to be found and someone who does not want to be found by people who do not know where to look. I know where to look because I have been looking at the edges of things my whole life, the peripheral, the almost-visible, the trail that exists if you are paying the right kind of attention.The church records are in the archives of a small Episcopal congregation in the West Village that has been keeping records of its congregation's affiliated community organizations since 1887, which is longer than most institutions bother, and which means that the Moreau family's connection to a specific study circle that met in the church's basement in the late nineties is documented in a membership ledger that no one has looked at in twenty years.The address in the ledger is not Helena's current address.But it is connected

POV: Vivian AshfordEthan books the rooftop without telling me what it is for, which should have been a signal, but Ethan takes me to dinner sometimes just because he knows I have not eaten properly and he is that kind of person, and I did not read the signal because I was not looking for it.The rooftop is beautiful. March in New York has finally decided to be almost spring, the kind of evening where the cold is thin enough that a coat handles it, and the city is doing its thing below us, and there are candles on the table and the skyline is glowing the way it does when the light is exactly right, and I sit down and I look at it and I think, for one genuinely good moment, that everything is going to be okay.Then I look at Ethan's face.He has the expression he gets when he has decided something and is going to say it and has been rehearsing how to say it, which is different from the journalist's face and the friend's face, more exposed than either."Ethan," I say."Let me say it," h

POV: Ethan BeckettThe magazine is called Meridian, which is not the Sterling subsidiary, different word, and I have been writing for it since I was twenty-three and it gave me my first real investigative platform, and the editor who hired me, a woman named Joan, took a chance on a kid from Iowa with a chip on his shoulder and a nose for stories that matter, and I have been loyal to it the way you are loyal to the first place that believed in you.I find out about the acquisition on a Tuesday, not from Joan, not from the editorial team, from a financial journalist I know who texts me at seven in the morning: Heads up. Heard something about your magazine's parent company. You might want to look into it.I look into it.It takes about forty minutes.Meridian Media Group, which owns four publications including mine, sold a controlling stake to a holding company called Northbrook Capital three weeks ago. Northbrook Capital was incorporated in Delaware eighteen months ago. Its registered a