All Chapters of His Queen of Chaos : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

ZariahThe blood on my shirt had gone from wet to tacky to a stiff brown map of the exact moment I'd broken Isaiah Crowe's nose, and I sat very still in the metal folding chair and let it dry, because a woman with another man's blood down her front was a woman who had already survived the worst thing the room had planned for her, and I wanted Terrence Vance to have to look at it.They'd re-tied my hands. Tighter this time, and behind me, which their instructor should have done in the first place, the first flush of a plan going wrong, corrections made too late. I filed that too. I'd been filing everything for going on six hours now, the way I'd learned to in this life I never asked for: give me long enough with a fear and I started taking notes on it, and I'd had a very long time.Two men in the room. Vance by the door. The other one, younger, jumpy, keeps looking at the door like he's waiting to be told what he is, near the far corner. Crowe iced his nose and left. Lawyer not here yet

Malik’s POVThere was a version of me that existed only in the first two seconds after one of my own hit the ground, and it was not the King, and it was not the thing in the mirror, and it was not the man who loved the woman clutched to my chest. It was something older than all three, and it wanted one thing, and the thing it wanted was to stand up into the fire and walk into it until it stopped.I did not do that. I would spend a long time being proud and ashamed of it in equal measure."Down," I snarled, and put my body over Zariah's the way I'd promised the whole world I always would and returned fire over the pallets one-handed with a precision that had nothing to do with the screaming in my skull, three rounds, and the muzzle flash from the north side went dark. Darius was already moving, I saw him low and fast across the concrete, saw him hit his knees and skid the last two feet to where Little J lay, and heard my brother's voice go up into a register I'd heard exactly twice in m

Malik’s POVThe doctor came out a little after one in the morning, wiping his hands, and said the words that made the whole house exhale at once."Through and through. Missed the artery by a hair I don't want to think about, missed the joint entirely. He'll keep the arm. He'll keep everything. He's twenty-six and furious he can't have a beer and he's asking for someone named, " the doctor consulted the specific miracle of his own memory ", for the lady with the cake. That's a direct quote. The lady with the cake. He wants it in writing that he took a bullet and is owed dessert."Darius made a sound that was mostly a laugh and partly something he wiped off his face fast, and went back into the room. Naomi leaned against the wall and closed her eyes for exactly one second, which for Naomi was a collapse. And I stood in the hallway of a safe house with a woman under my arm and felt the single largest thing I had felt all night, which was not relief, because relief was too small a word, it

Malik’s POVShe opened the door in the morning. That was the part I would hold onto, later, when the three days got bad, that she'd opened it, that she'd found me sitting against the wall exactly where I'd said I'd be, gun across my knees, eyes bloodshot, unslept, and she'd looked down at me for a long moment and something had softened in her face and she'd said, quiet, you actually sat here all night, like it was a thing she was filing away in the place she kept the things that mattered.I'd thought, for about six hours that morning, that we were going to be all right.Then the world came for the empire, and it came the way the world always did when a king showed a soft spot: all at once, from every direction, through the crack the softness had opened.By noon on the first day, the story was in the press. Not the true story, a better one, engineered, Crowe's parting gift bled into three friendly outlets from somewhere south. Real estate magnate linked to Southside violence. Grieving l

ZariahThe Greyhound station on Forsyth smelled like diesel and burnt coffee and every bad decision my mother had ever made, and I had been sitting on a molded plastic bench in it for the better part of four days' worth of resolve, condensed now into two hours I could not make my legs walk out of.I'd found a room the first two nights, a motel off Memorial that took cash and asked nothing, and I'd spent them lying on top of the covers in my clothes, reading my father's Bible not for God but for the maps I'd hidden in it, the key still taped inside the back cover, and telling myself I was resting before the next leg. On the third day I'd come to the station. On the fourth I'd made myself stay. And now it was night, and the counter was twenty feet away, and I had done everything a person could do to buy a ticket except buy one.The ticket I kept pricing was forty-one dollars. Birmingham, then a connection to Memphis, then somewhere I didn't have a name for yet. I had a little over six hu