《Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession》全部章節：第 71 章 - 第 78 章

POV: Vivian AshfordThe film gets a standing ovation and I cry in the bathroom afterward, which I will deny if anyone asks.It is the good kind of crying, the kind that happens when something you worked for actually lands the way you hoped it would, and I give myself three minutes with my back against the stall door before I fix my face and go back out to the afterparty, where Petra is still glowing and the champagne is very good and for once I am not thinking about Chase Sterling at all.Then it rains.February rain in LA hits fast and everyone scrambles inside, laughing and holding their drinks over their heads, and I step out of the way of the rush and end up under a narrow overhang on the side of the building where the rain is hitting the concrete two feet from my shoes and the cold air is a relief after two hours of warm indoor air and champagne.I hear him before I see him.He comes to stand beside me and neither of us says anything for a moment, just stands there getting partia

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