All Chapters of Chaos Is My Crown: Chapter 171 - Chapter 179

179 Chapters

170

🖤 Jacob 🖤“From your dead sister?” Mitchell said.“Mitchell.” Caleb’s voice came out flat and sharp in the same breath, the specific tone he used when he’d reached his limit without ceremony. “Shut up.”For once, remarkably, she did.I stood in the hallway holding a dead woman’s will and looked at it for another moment, and then I opened it completely, pulled the full document out of the envelope, unfolded it, and read.The first page was exactly what I expected.Legal language.Names.Dates.The kind of carefully constructed sentences that made even the simplest things sound like they required three lawyers and a court order to understand.I skipped past most of it.The first page listed the executor.The second page listed the beneficiaries.The third page contained a section about her assets.I read that one more carefully.Then I stopped.“What?” Mitchell asked.I looked up.She was standing beside Caleb now, no longer bouncing with excitement or trying to peek over my shoulder.

171

🖤 Alexandra 🖤I stared at the document in my hands. Then I looked at Jacob before I looked back at the document.“How did I end up in your sister’s will?”Jacob didn’t answer immediately… That was becoming a problem. He had developed this deeply irritating habit of staring at things whenever he was processing them, and normally I found it attractive because apparently my standards had collapsed somewhere during the last few weeks. But right now, I needed an answer.“Jacob.”He looked up at me.“How did I end up in your sister’s will?”“I don’t know.”“That is not an answer.”“It’s the only one I have.”I looked back down at the document in my hands.The pages were still sitting on the table between us, formal and legally binding and written in the kind of language that made ordinary human beings require lawyers just to understand what they were agreeing to. Stella’s name appeared at the top of every page.Stella Grey.My biggest enemy. The woman who had murdered my father.The woman

172

🖤Jacob🖤I stood in front of what was left of the building and did not say anything for a long time.The structure was still standing, technically. The bones of it were there. But everything else was gone, or going, the smoke still rising in the dark in thin gray columns that the wind kept pulling sideways. Jack’s people were moving around the surrounding with the organized efficiency of people who had stopped trying to save something and moved into the phase of figuring out what had happened.My family had been in there.My grandparents. My parents. The people who had sent me to Asia so I would not be present while they destroyed my sister’s life. The people who had dedicated how I live my whole life.I did not know if they will survive. Jack had not told me that yet and I had not asked, which told me something about the state I was in, because normally I would have asked immediately. My family were not perfect people. That was the most diplomatic version of a sentence that had con

173

🖤Alexandra🖤“My intention was to kill your children.”I said the words out loud, alone in the living area, because hearing them in my own voice made them real in a way that watching Jacob’s face while he told me had not quite managed.Stella Grey had intended to kill my children. All of them.Not as a side effect. Not as collateral. As a strategy. A calculated coldly reasoned strategy in which four five year old human beings were a variable to be eliminated in order to produce a faster result from their father.Stella Grey had looked at those four children in her mind and decided they were useful leverage.“Fuck Stella,” I said, to the empty kitchen. “I hope you rot in hell.”It came out with more venom than I expected, which told me something about the distance between how I had been processing this situation intellectually and what was actually sitting in my chest underneath all the intellectual processing. I had spent two weeks thinking about Stella Grey with the careful, complic

174

🖤Jacob🖤Dear lord~~~ how can she be this cute when she was angry.I knew better than to say that out loud. I had learned, over the time of living inside the Fisher Hale estate with varying degrees of official invitation, that there was a specific list of things you did not say to Alexandra Fisher Hale, and “you look cute when you’re angry” was somewhere near the top of it, probably right below “you remind me of your father when you do that” and “are you sure you need all seventeen of those files.”So I said nothing and watched her pace the kitchen the following morning while the coffee brewed and the children ate breakfast with the cheerful obliviousness of people who were five years old and had more important things to think about, like whose turn it was to pick what they watched after school.“I don’t want the properties,” Lex said.“Okay,” I said.“I don’t want the money.”“Okay.”“I don’t want anything that has Stella’s name attached to it.”“Okay.”She stopped pacing and looked

175

🖤Jacob🖤I had never been this nervous in my life.Which was a significant statement given the life I had lived. I had walked into a building where a shooter was waiting. I had survived things that should have produced a permanent immunity to nerves.And yet.I was standing outside Papa’s study door in the Fisher Hale estate at ten in the morning, unable to knock.What if he said no.What if he looked at me across that desk and said no, and then I had to walk back out of this house and tell Lex, and the whole careful, improbable, extraordinary thing we had been building for the past several weeks collapsed because the man who had raised her also means the world to her and lost his partner to my sister’s plan decided that Jacob Grey had already cost this family enough.What if he hated me.The man had never sat at the same table with me since I moved myself into this house.But not eating meals with someone was different from handing them your daughter.I knocked.“Come in.”Papa wa

Epilogue 1

🖤 Alexandra 🖤I had always believed that love came with a price and the biggest fallacy of all time.That was the first thing life taught me. If someone loved you, eventually they would leave. If they did not leave, they would be taken. If they were not taken, they would betray you. Love was temporary. Loss was permanent. For years I had built my entire life around that belief. Every company I built, every decision I made, every wall I put up, every sleepless night I worked through, every version of Alexandra Fisher Hale that the world feared had been constructed by a woman who simply refused to lose again.And then Jacob Grey happened… he forced his way into my life in the most craziest manner and sincerely I am grateful he did. His obsession gave me my babies and they mean the world to me.That was the part nobody in the self-help books warned you about. Not the first time love arrived, which was something people wrote entire libraries about. The second time he came into my life

Epilogue 2

🖤Alexandra🖤He led me through the garden toward the rose garden at the far end of the estate. The one my Dada had planted years ago, before I was old enough to have opinions about roses, back when this house was louder and fuller and dada’s laugh was still a sound that existed in the world. Papa had never changed the flowers. He said some things deserved to remain exactly where love had left them. White roses and pink ones and soft red ones that Dada had always insisted looked happiest together, which was the kind of opinion only someone who genuinely loved things could have about flowers.When we reached the centre of the rose garden I stopped.The children were already there.All four of them, standing in a row with the uncharacteristic stillness of people who had been specifically asked to be still and were making their best effort. Mitchell beside Caleb. Papa under the roses instead of the oak tree, his newspaper gone, his hands folded in front of him. Jen, who never came to ga

Author note

We did it. 🤍 Alexandra finally got her happily ever after. After everything. Thank you so much for giving this book a chance and staying with me until the very last page. As a writer, I can’t fully describe how much that means to me. For the past four months, Alexandra and Jacob have lived in my heart, and somehow they found a home in yours too. Thank you for showing up chapter after chapter, laughing with them, crying with them, getting angry with them, and loving them even when I put them through absolute chaos. To every single reader who left a comment, shared a theory, sent gifts, voted, or simply read quietly in the background, thank you. Every bit of your support mattered more than you know. Before you go, I have one small favour to ask. Please take a moment to return to the book’s main page and leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review. It may seem like a small thing, but reviews make a huge difference. They help new readers discover Alexandra and Jacob’s story, keep the book visible, and r

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