All Chapters of His Queen of Chaos : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

ZariahThe door to the Sunday-school room opened without a knock.I felt it before I saw it, the way you feel a storm cell change the pressure in a room, a low animal recalibration in the base of my skull. Deacon Freeman had been standing in the corridor a moment ago, I'd heard him there, the shuffle of his good shoes, his willingness to hover as long as I needed hovering. He was gone now. Something had moved him. And into the yellow light, filling the doorway from jamb to jamb, ducking his head an inch to clear it, came the man from the tree line.Except now I saw all of him.Six and a half feet of him, easy, in a black suit that had never in its life touched a rack, the shoulders of it fell like water. Dark skin. A beard trimmed to a blade's edge along a hard jaw. And eyes that did the thing the man under the oaks had done, the thing nobody at a funeral was supposed to do: they didn't look at me the way men looked at a pretty girl, or the way mourners looked at the bereaved. They loo

ZariahThe back hallway of Providence Missionary Baptist smelled of mildew and hymnals and the ghost of every fish fry the church had ever thrown. I'd run down this hallway in patent-leather shoes as a little girl, chasing other little girls, my father's laugh somewhere behind me in the fellowship hall. I ran down it now in a funeral dress I'd bought that morning, a stranger's cedar-and-danger smell at my shoulder, a crash and a scream fading behind me, and I thought, with the strange clean lucidity that comes when the body decides it's going to survive, I will never be able to come back to this church.A woman was waiting at the back door.Not what I expected. I'd built a picture, in the ninety seconds I'd had to build it, of the men who worked for a man like Malik St. James: thick necks, dark glasses, gun-shaped bulges. The woman at the door was maybe five-six, lean, in slacks and a fitted blazer and flat shoes made for running or kicking, with her hair pulled back so severely it loo

ZariahThe elevator required a palm, then a code, then a key card, in that exact order, and Malik gave it all three without appearing to move, a flat hand pressed to a black glass panel, a rhythm of taps I couldn't see, a card touched to a reader that blinked from red to green. I watched every step of it the way I watched everything now, the way a woman planning a future escape catalogues her cage. Palm. Code. Card. Palm I don't have, code I don't know, card that isn't mine. Three locks, and I'd need all three, and I was already doing the math on how a person might get all three when Noe peeled off at the garage level with a flat "I'll make the calls," and the doors closed, and it was just the two of us.The car was a mirrored box the size of a walk-in closet. It rose without any sensation of rising, silent, the numbers climbing on a small display, 3, 8, 15, and there was nowhere to look that wasn't him, because the walls were mirror and so he was on every side of me, six and a half fe

Chapter 9: Noe's Text MalikI did not go to bed.I went to the study, the real one, the one at the north end of the floor with the door that read a palm and the window that looked out over the darker, cheaper half of the city, the half I'd come up out of, and I stood at the glass with the lights off and let the phone in my hand finish ruining my night.Noe's text had come in while the girl was crying over peach pies. I'd read it twice in the great room and made my face do nothing, because the girl watched everything now and I was not going to hand her the shape of a threat she couldn't do anything about. I read it a third time now, alone.Crowe put paper out. Confirmed by two sources. Contract on the girl, OPEN, not exclusive. Means every gun in the metro knows there's money on a Brooks by morning. Council already asking why she's breathing. Vance loudest. They want her handled as a message, soon, public, clean. I told them you'd call. You need to call, M. Tonight.An open contract.I