All Chapters of His Queen of Chaos : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

MalikI woke at 5:40, the way I always did, before the alarm I never set, and for the first time in twenty years I did not immediately catalogue threats.I catalogued her.Zariah was still asleep, which was itself a small miracle. She slept like a woman braced for a fire drill, I'd learned that in the weeks she'd been under my roof, learned it from the way she surfaced at every settle of the building, every distant elevator chime, every foot in the hall. But she'd gone all the way under sometime in the night and stayed there, sprawled across two-thirds of my bed with the boneless confidence of the truly exhausted, one arm flung over my chest, her cheek mashed to my shoulder, a line of drying drool at the corner of her mouth I was never going to tell her about. Her curls were an absolute catastrophe. The gold chain had twisted around to the back of her neck. The sheet had slid to her waist, and I could see the marks I'd left on her in the dark, a bruise blooming at the slope of her brea

Zariah’s POVHe tried to make me breakfast.This was a mistake, and I, wrapped in one of his shirts at the kitchen island, wet hair dripping down my back, both hands around a mug of coffee that was, I had to admit, excellent, watched it become a mistake with open, undisguised delight."Is that, are the eggs supposed to be that color?""They're fine." Malik stood at the range with his back to me, shoulders set, addressing the pan like it was a subordinate who'd disappointed him. He'd put on gray sweatpants and nothing else, and the bandage on his side was fresh, and the scars across his back caught the gold morning light coming off the city, and I was trying very hard to focus on the disaster in the pan and not on the geography of him, because focusing on the geography of him was how I'd ended up sore in ten places."Malik. They're gray. Eggs are not supposed to be gray. That is a color eggs achieve through suffering.""I run a criminal empire and three legitimate corporations." He said

MalikThe board met in the long room on the fortieth floor, the one with no windows and no phones and a table older than the empire, and I let them wait eleven minutes before I walked in, because a king who arrives on time has told the room the room controls the clock.They were all there. Rutherford, silver at the temples, who'd run numbers for my father before I was old enough to hold a gun. Bishop, older still, the closest thing the organization had to institutional memory and therefore the most dangerous man in it. The money people in their good suits. Vance at the far end, neat, unreadable, a man I had trusted with a great deal for a great many years. Naomi against the wall by the door, arms crossed, watching the room the way she watched a crowd for the one wrong pair of hands. Darius by the other wall, loose and smiling faintly now, which meant he'd stopped being worried and started being ready.Rutherford laid it out because the old heads had elected him to. He was good, I gave

ZariahMalik hadn't wanted me to go alone. That had been a fight, a short, cold one, in the back of the car, with Naomi driving and Darius up front pretending to be furniture."She's my mother," I'd said. "Not a hit. I'm meeting my mother in a diner off Cascade. You cannot send a war party to watch me eat pancakes with the woman who raised me.""The woman who left you," Malik had said, flat, not cruel, just precise, which was worse. "Who reappears the same week your father dies. The same week Crowe writes you a note. The same week somebody feeds us a manifest. The same week you finally let someone past your walls. You don't find the timing loud?"I'd found the timing deafening. I hadn't wanted to give him the satisfaction. "I'm going in alone. You can sit in the car and glower, you're good at glowering. You claimed me to your family, congratulations, the whole city knows. But you don't own my mother and you don't get to be in the room when I find out what she wants after nine years."H

Malik’s POVI came to her three days into the ice, and it almost broke, and later I would think that almost was the most dangerous word in the language.Three days. Three days of her being polite. I could have handled fury. Fury I understood, fury was a thing you could work with, a heat with a shape. But she'd gone courteous, and courtesy from Zariah Brooks was a locked vault, and every meal we took at opposite ends of a table built for enemies had felt like the early days again, the first week she'd hated me, except worse, because now I knew exactly what the other side of the ice felt like and I was locked out of it.We'd circled each other for three days like the old choreography, knives and distance, careful passes in wide hallways, and it had built the way it always built between us, the friction turning to heat whether either of us wanted it to, the current running under the frost. And when she snapped at me in the kitchen on the third night, over something that didn't matter, som