All Chapters of His Queen of Chaos : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

MalikThe hand was warm and thick and it stank of cheap cologne, and I held it in both of my own the way you'd hold a hand to shake it, and I made myself go very quiet inside so that nothing I did next would be sloppy.Sloppy is for men who feel things in the moment. I feel things later. That is the arrangement I made with myself at sixteen, in another room with worse light, and it has kept me alive and kept Darius alive and built an empire on top of the ashes of the house we grew up in. In the moment there is only the work. The feeling comes at three in the morning, in the dark, when it's safe, when there's no one left to protect.Right now there was only the work, and the work was this hand.The drunk was crying already. That happens. Men who put their hands on women in other men's houses are, almost without exception, cowards who have simply never been introduced to the consequence, and the introduction tends to reduce them fast. This one was called Deshawn something, low-level, ran

MalikThe card was in my breast pocket, and it was the only thing on earth I wanted to burn.I'd read it twice in the time it took to walk Zariah off the club floor, and both times the same cold arithmetic had run under my skull. Marcus told us everything. Every name, every route, every key. If Crowe had Marcus's names, then Crowe had leverage on half the men who kept my empire standing upright, judges, a councilman, two captains in the property division, a distributor network that ran from Savannah to Charlotte. If Crowe had Marcus's routes, that explained three years of loads that vanished on the interstate, three years I'd blamed on bad luck and worse discipline, three years of bleeding money north and burying it in the ledger as attrition. And if Crowe was writing calligraphy to the daughter, it meant the last thing, every key, was still in play. It meant the ledger, the real one, the physical one that decides who owns Atlanta for the next ten years, had not been found, and that Za

MalikThe safe house was a townhouse in Kirkwood under a shell company three layers deep, unremarkable brick, blackout blinds, a panic room behind the pantry that Zariah would never need to know existed. I'd built it for exactly this night, the night everything else failed, and I had prayed in my own godless way that I'd never have to spend it. I was spending it. I'd spend anything. That's the whole man, under everything.The house filled fast with the low competent murmur of an organization doing what it was built to do. Noe took Reggie to the kitchen table to patch the arm and to run the plates and to start the machines that would find out who in my own house had handed a killer a fob. Darius stood in the front window with the lights off and a gun in his waistband and a fury on his face that I recognized because it was my own, boxed differently. Little J's cars circled the block. The doors were locked. The blinds were down. For the length of one night, I had a fortress the size of a

MalikI got the last of the silk off her over the heels she still wore and let it fall on the marble, and sat back on my heels and just looked at her, because I am a man who takes what he wants and right now the only thing I wanted was to look.Zariah Brooks, bare on the edge of my vanity in a safe house I'd built for the worst night of my life, one hand braced on the mirror and the other still buried in my hair, my blood faint on her jaw and gold light on her skin. She was flushed all the way down her chest, watching me look at her with an expression caught between mortified and imperious, like she couldn't decide whether to close her legs or open them wider, and the tension of that was, God help me, the most beautiful thing I'd been allowed to see in years."You're staring," she managed. Breathless. An echo of the dance floor, and we both heard it."I'm memorizing." I pressed a kiss to the inside of one knee, then the other, watching her breath hitch. "Three days you've told me I'll

ZariahI didn't wake so much as get evicted from sleep.One minute I was under, dreamless, heavy, buried in a robe that smelled like a man I was supposed to hate, and the next I was awake in the gray hour before real morning, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling, my heart slamming like I'd run somewhere in the dark. The safe house was quiet in the wrong way. Not peaceful quiet. The held-breath quiet of a house full of armed people trying very hard not to wake anyone.I lay there and took inventory of myself the way my father taught me to take inventory of a room. What's true. What's a lie. What's dangerous.True: a man had grabbed me at a bar and Malik had broken his hand in a hallway. True: a ghost had sent me champagne and a confession in fountain pen, your father sang so beautifully at the end. True: a van had opened up on a concrete drive and Malik St. James had turned his back to the guns and made his own body the wall between me and the dark, and taken a graze doing it, and never onc