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006

Author: Amaka
last update publish date: 2026-03-31 00:06:12
đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€

By the time I woke up the next morning, the chaos was still there.

Of course it was.

For a tiny second, I actually hoped yesterday was some kind of bad dream, something my brain cooked up just to annoy me. But the moment I reached for my phone and saw the notifications still flooding in like my life was trending for sport, reality settled in properly.

Yeah.

Still pregnant.

Still engaged.

Still losing my mind.

“Fantastic,” I muttered under my breath, sitting up in bed and
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  • Chaos Is My Crown   123

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€ Jen arrived two hours and fifty-eight minutes after I called her, which I noted only because Jen was always early, never on time, and the fact that she walked through that door at the absolute edge of the window I’d given her told me she’d hit traffic, or hadn’t slept at all, or both. She had a tablet in one hand and a coffee in the other, and she stopped just inside the doorway to look at the kids first, the way every decent person did before they looked at me, before they got to business. “They’re breathing on their own,” I said before she could ask. “Thank God.” She exhaled, set the coffee down, and pulled a chair close. “Okay. Where do you want to start?” “Everything,” I said. “From five years ago to right now. I want names, dates, contracts, anyone brought in, anyone removed, every shift in personnel around this family that I wasn’t paying attention to because I was busy pretending I’d retired from all of it.” Jen didn’t blink at the tone. She just opened the

  • Chaos Is My Crown   122

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€I walked back into Room 14 and pulled the chair back into the small gap between both beds, the same chair Jacob had been sitting in earlier, still slightly warm from where he’d been, and I sat down and took one small hand in each of mine the way I had hours ago, like nothing had moved at all, even though everything had.Loveth’s fingers curled slightly around mine in her sleep.Dean’s chest rose and fell with the steady mechanical rhythm of the ventilator, that quiet hiss and click that I had stopped hearing as a sound and started hearing as a countdown, though I couldn’t have told you toward what.I watched them both for a long time and let my mind, against my own permission, drift toward the version of tonight where things had gone differently. Where the call had come too late. Where there had been nothing left for anyone to do.I let myself feel the full weight of that for exactly one breath.Then I closed the door on it, the way I closed the door on everything I co

  • Chaos Is My Crown   121

    đŸ–€ Jacob đŸ–€That banter or maybe I should just call it what it actually was, a simple yet sweet conversation was something I genuinely had not been expecting tonight.Not after the slap.Not after Chairman Fisher told me to leave the room like I was a delivery boy who had overstayed his welcome.Not after everything else that had happened in the last several hours, which, when I actually stopped to count it all up, was an amount of chaos that most people don’t experience in a full year, let alone one night.But there we were. Me with my terrible vending machine coffee. Her sitting across from me with that look on her face that said she was choosing, deliberately, to let the moment be light instead of heavy. And somehow it worked. Somehow for one entire minute the weight of everything else the children on ventilators, Stella’s missing legs, the mystery caller, Amara typing at three thirty in the morning somehow all of that stepped back just far enough to let two people who used to know

  • Chaos Is My Crown   120

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€I found Jacob exactly where I expected to find him. Not by Stella’s room, not by the elevator pretending he was about to leave the hospital like a reasonable person who had just been dismissed by a wheelchair-bound mafia chairman, but in the small visitor’s lounge near the children’s ward, sitting in one of those terrible plastic chairs with a vending machine coffee in his hand that he was very clearly not drinking.He looked up when I walked in.“So,” he said, “your dad threatened me with his eyes for a full three minutes before he even started talking.”“That’s restraint, actually,” I said, sitting down across from him. “Normally people get the eyes for thirty seconds before he moves on to actual words.”“I feel so honored.”“You should.”He looked down at the coffee in his hand like it had personally wronged him.“This is the worst coffee I have ever had in my life,” he said. “And I once drank something a flight attendant handed me during turbulence that I’m fairly

  • Chaos Is My Crown   119

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€â€œAre you going to tell me what’s going on?” I asked the moment the door shut behind Jacob.Papa didn’t answer immediately.He sat there for a moment with his hands still folded in his lap, his eyes fixed on some point past my shoulder, and I recognized that look one he got right before he told you something that he himself was still angry about, the kind of anger that hadn’t cooled down enough yet to be delivered calmly.Then he started talking.“The girl said something about someone approaching her with a good offer,” he said, and his voice carried that specific edge that I had only heard a handful of times in my entire life, the one reserved for things that genuinely offended him on a personal level rather than just inconvenienced him. “All she had to do was shake up our family. That’s how she put it. Shake up. As if she was describing a cocktail recipe and not five years of orchestrated destruction.”I felt my jaw tighten.“She said she never intended to kill anyon

  • Chaos Is My Crown   118

    đŸ–€ Jacob đŸ–€If I am being honest, I really did not care whether Stella lived or died.I know how that sounds.I know exactly how that sounds coming from her own brother standing in a hospital corridor while she lay there with both legs gone and a fifty percent chance of never opening her eyes again, but five years does something to a person’s capacity for grief over someone who spent those same five years trying to destroy everyone I loved.What I cared about was the phone call.What I cared about was the fact that the voice on that call had threatened my children with a precision that suggested deep knowledge of this family, and the way it had referenced Stella made it sound less like Stella was the architect of all of this and more like Stella was a tool someone else had picked up and used.Which meant Stella might have answers.Answers I needed to keep my children safe.Answers that might lead me to the child I might have somewhere else entirely, a thought I had been carrying alone

  • Chaos Is My Crown   046

    đŸ–€AlexandrađŸ–€My phone rang before I could settle fully into my next move. I didn’t even need to look at the screen to know it was important. The timing alone said enough. Nothing around me was moving quietly anymore.I picked up immediately.“Yes.”“President
 we have a problem.”Timmy’s voice was

  • Chaos Is My Crown   045

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€â€œI’m sorry
 but I can’t help you with that.” The second gynecologist I’m seeing today said it the same way the first one did, this time it sounds more like a broke record.Soft voice. Careful tone. Fear sitting clearly in her eyes like I walked into her office carrying something da

  • Chaos Is My Crown   044

    đŸ–€ Jacob đŸ–€ Stella once told me something I didn’t take seriously at the time. “When a man throws all his cards on the table,” she said, looking way too pleased with herself, “there is a possibility for hope.” At the time, I thought she was being dramatic. Now? I’m starting to see what she meant

  • Chaos Is My Crown   040

    đŸ–€AlexandrađŸ–€I opened the car door and slid in without breaking my pace, my expression still calm, still controlled, but my mind
 my mind was not quiet. It was moving, connecting, questioning everything I had just walked away from.“Drive,” I said.The car pulled out immediately.I leaned back int

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