Lahat ng Kabanata ng Chaos Is My Crown: Kabanata 131 - Kabanata 140

🖤 Alexandra 🖤Fuck you, Alexandra. How dare you get your panties soaked just from his forehead on yours?I stood in front of the mirror in the hospital’s ladies’ room, both palms braced against the cold porcelain sink, and glared at my own reflection like it had personally betrayed me. Which, in a sense, it had.How dare you get like that just because his forehead was on yours. I pointed at myself in the mirror, fully aware I had lost whatever was left of my dignity the second I started lecturing my own reflection out loud. What the heck, woman.I could control my heart. Life had taught me exactly how to lock that particular door and walk away from it. I could control my brain. God knows I’d spent half a decade proving that, building a whole new empire back up from nothing while raising four children mostly alone, no breakdowns, no slipping. But my body, specifically my pussy apparently, had never gotten the memo that Jacob Grey was supposed to be a closed case.It was like I tur

🖤 Alexandra 🖤Coming back into this building after years away from this life brought a strange, specific kind of clarity with it not excitement exactly, though something close enough to it that I didn’t trust myself to examine it too closely. I’d spent five years convincing everyone, myself included, that I’d outgrown rooms like this. Standing in one again, I understood how much of that conviction had just been exhaustion wearing the costume of peace.God, I couldn’t wait to torture the truth out of her.I sat down across from Amara, close enough that there was no pretending this was anything but personal between us now. “Start at the beginning,” I said quietly. “And Amara? I’d choose your next words very, very carefully.”“I have nothing to say to you.”It came out flat, almost rehearsed, and something in me that I’d kept leashed for five years simply stopped being patient with her.I don’t fully remember deciding to move. I remember the knife was already in my hand Jen always kept

🖤 Jacob 🖤There’s another Jacob Grey.I sat with that sentence the entire drive back from the basement, turning it over and over like a stone I couldn’t get a clean grip on. What the hell was actually going on. I didn’t even understand the shape of the plot I was supposedly living inside anymore, five years of running from a danger I thought I understood, and tonight alone had already rewritten the rules of it twice.“Hmm. Lex, can I ask you something?” I said, turning to look her directly in the eye once we were back in the car, because if I was going to start pulling at threads, I wanted to watch her face while I did it.“Ask away,” she said.“Five years ago,” I said slowly, “was your family the only one responsible for the Grey family’s downfall? Or did you have help from the inside. Someone close to me.”She didn’t flinch, didn’t look away, just considered the question with the same level focus she gave everything tonight. “I genuinely didn’t have anything to do with your family

🖤 Alexandra 🖤Stella is a pure evil genius. I have to give her that much, even sitting here furious enough to put my fist through a wall. How does one woman play this many people her own family included, and make every single move look like grief, like coincidence, like bad luck, instead of what it actually was?I walked out of Papa’s office with the entire sack of files he’d handed me, and instead of going to my room, I went straight to my own office down the hall the one I’d had set up here since I was a teenager, separate from the basement office downtown, because some habits of needing my own space to think had started long before I ever needed an empire to run.I didn’t know what to believe anymore. That was the part sitting heaviest in my chest as I shut the door behind me. I’d walked into that basement hours ago thinking I had Stella in custody, thinking I was back in control of something after five years of feeling like I’d lost my grip on all of it. Now I understood that th

🖤 Jacob 🖤One full week. Seven days of round-the-clock digging, seven days of Jack and my new team running down every lead, every shell company, every ghost address that Stella’s name had ever been attached to and nothing. She was everywhere in the paperwork and nowhere in the world. The woman had built herself a life so thoroughly off the visible grid that even people whose entire profession was finding the unfindable were coming back empty-handed.The fake Stella in Lex’s custody still hadn’t woken up. Which meant the one person physically within our reach, the one person who could theoretically give us a room number, a city, a single concrete detail about where the real Stella was operating from, was still lying in a hospital bed doing absolutely nothing useful for anyone.I’d spent the week at the Airbnb Jack had extended indefinitely, working through files during the day and driving to see the kids every evening, which was the only part of any given twenty-four hours that felt