Lahat ng Kabanata ng His Queen of Chaos : Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

Zariah’s POVI stood outside the station in the humid dark, under a buzzing sodium light, with the taxis idling at the curb and my father's Bible in the bag on my shoulder and my mother's confession still ringing in my ears, and I pulled up the only other number in the burner, and my thumb hovered over it.Every stupid, proud, self-protective instinct I owned screamed at me to call Naomi instead. Call the fixer. Call the professional. Keep it clean, keep it distant, hand the address to the organization the way a source hands a tip, stay a step removed, don't give the man the satisfaction of knowing I couldn't stay away, don't let him hear in my voice that four days on a bus-station bench had taught me the difference between free and safe and that I'd chosen wrong and was choosing again. Call Naomi. Keep my dignity. I made a stand, protect the stand.I looked at the two options on the screen. Naomi Reeves. Malik St. James.I thought about a man kneeling on a bathroom floor with a graze

Zariah’s POVWe flew separately into Fort Lauderdale, and I understood the geometry of it before Naomi finished explaining: two people publicly linked by a subpoena and a scandal did not board the same jet to the same city where they intended to make a man disappear.I flew commercial, under the name of a paralegal friend who owed me a favor and asked no questions, in a middle seat between a honeymooning couple and a man who slept the whole flight, and I spent the two hours with my father's Bible in my lap and a legal pad I filled and refilled in the flat handwriting I'd inherited from him, building the machine that would take Isaiah Crowe apart. Malik came in three hours later on a chartered plane registered to a shell three companies deep, alone but for a pilot who'd flown worse cargo. Darius stayed in Atlanta to hold the fracturing empire together and keep Little J from checking himself out of a hospital bed to help. Naomi came ahead of both of us and had already, by the time my rid

ZariahThe payphone at the little Coconut Grove marina office was a relic, sticky-buttoned, smelling of salt and other people's quarters, and I fed it eight dollars in silver at four-fifteen in the morning because a payphone was the one thing on earth that could not be pulled from my hand, cloned, subpoenaed, or read off a tower. I'd learned that in a seminar on client confidentiality I'd sat through in a cold law school lecture hall two years ago, taking notes I never imagined I'd use like this, to help a kingpin's enemy disappear into the machinery of the state.I had spent the flight down building the weapon in my head, and now I built it out loud, in the dark, to a stranger."Delia Okafor?""It's four in the morning." The voice was thick with sleep and thin with suspicion, a South Florida rasp. "Whoever this is, you'd better be either in a cell or on fire.""Neither. Yet." I pressed the receiver hard against my ear and watched, through the salt-crusted office glass, the black water

Malik’s POVThere was a night between the plan and the boat, and I spent the first half of it doing the thing I did best, which was reading a war and finding the move that ended it, and the second half doing the thing I did worst, which was lying to the woman asleep on the couch about what that move was going to cost.I stood at the window of the stucco house with the hibiscus hedge black against the streetlight and turned the whole board over in my head one more time. Two legs of the stool were down. By dawn Crowe would be alone on the water. And there was a version of tomorrow I'd already decided on, hours ago, in the flat quiet way I decided the things that mattered most, the version I hadn't written on Zariah's legal pad, because she'd have crossed it out.I would go to the boat alone. I would end Crowe there. And if Rhee, four hundred miles north, moved faster than Zariah's paper and turned up with a Florida body and a warrant, then I'd let her have him, the arrest, the collar, th

Zariah’s POVI heard the car in the drive at dawn and made myself not run to the window.I'd spent the night doing the thing I'd promised myself I wouldn't do, which was imagine every version of the morning where he didn't come back, the arrest, the body, the noble stupid martyr's end I'd argued him out of at two in the morning and only half-believed I'd succeeded in. I'd reread the same page of my father's Bible eleven times. I'd made coffee I didn't drink. I'd sat with my back to the window because Naomi had told me, flatly, that watching the driveway wouldn't make the car come faster and would only make me look like a woman who'd forgotten she was terrifying.So when I heard the engine cut and the door of the stucco house open, I stayed exactly where I was, at the kitchen counter, and let him come to me.He came in with the sea on his hands.I could smell it before I turned, salt and the particular cold of open water, and I turned and there he was, filling the doorway the way he fil