All Chapters of His Queen of Chaos : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

ZariahNaomi pressed the key card into my hand at the private hangar, on the tarmac, with the engines still ticking as they cooled.It was a matte black rectangle, unremarkable, the kind of thing a thousand people in Buckhead carried without thinking. But I looked down at it in my palm and understood immediately what it was and what it meant, and my throat closed, because Naomi Reeves did not do sentiment and this was, unmistakably, sentiment wearing the disguise of logistics."Penthouse access," Naomi said, flat as ever, already looking at her phone. "Elevator forty-two. Full clearance, your own credential, your own biometric on file, not his guest list, not his say-so. Yours." She let a beat pass. "The first time you rode that elevator up, counselor, I ran the palm lock on you from a tablet like you were a package being delivered. I want you to notice the difference. Nobody's locking anything on you tonight. You tap the card. The car comes down. You get in or you don't. Whatever happ

Zariah’s POVThe doors were shut. The exit was gone. And I stood in the sealed tower with my heart going like a fist on a door and looked up at the man who ran a city and had just tried, one final time, to give me away, and decided I was done letting him doubt it."You might own Atlanta," I said, and started walking toward him, unhurried, my heels quiet on the marble, closing the last of the distance he'd refused to close himself. "You might own this whole gold city and every man in it who wears your little crown pin. You might own the tower and the towers around it and the cars and the club and the entire careful gray machine. But you never owned me. Not for one single day. Not the day you dragged me up here in a black dress with a debt I never signed. Not any day since.""Zariah." My name, raw, like it hurt to hold."You know why?" I stopped in front of him, close, closer than I'd been allowed the whole flight, and tipped my chin up to that cold face that only ever warmed for me. "Be

ZariahI was still shaking through the aftershocks when he came down over me, and I got my hands on him and finished what I'd started in the hall, the last of his shirt buttons, then the shirt gone off his shoulders and dropped somewhere, then my palms flat on the broad dark warmth of his chest, the scars I knew by heart now, the thin healed line of the graze at his scalp. I shoved at his slacks and he helped me, kicking them off, and then he was over me, naked, all of him, cock hard and heavy against my thigh, and I wrapped my hand around him and stroked once, root to tip, and felt him shudder above me and heard the groan punch out of him, and grinned up at him fierce and wrecked."Your turn," I said, stroking him again, slower, watching his jaw clench. "You edged me three times on the floor, King. You want to talk about control? Let's talk about your control."He caught my wrist and brought my knuckles to his mouth and kissed them, the same gesture from a bathroom floor, from a plane

MalikShe slept like a woman who had put down a weight she'd been carrying since February.I lay awake beside her for a long time in the gold dark, propped on one elbow, watching the slow rise and fall of her breathing, the wild spill of her curls across my pillow, the total unguarded loosening of a face that had spent five months braced. I'd watched a great many people sleep in my life, mostly to make sure they never woke up, and I understood that this was a different kind of watching, the kind I'd have called weakness a year ago and now understood was the whole point of having survived anything at all.I should have slept too. Instead I found myself doing something I almost never did: I let myself feel the size of what I had, all at once, without flinching from it. I had a woman in my bed who'd closed her own exit. I had a name that was clean and a city that no longer wanted her dead. I had an empire that was still standing, smaller and grayer and more careful, but standing. I had,

Zariah’s POVThe green dress made Rhee spill her drink again.It happened the exact same way it had at the foundation thing four months back, the detective, off duty and out of her element in the marble ballroom of the St. James Foundation gala, turning at the wrong moment as I came down the grand stair, and the champagne flute tilting a critical inch before Rhee caught it. This time I caught her eye across two hundred heads and smiled, and Rhee lifted the recovered glass a grudging half-inch in salute, one professional to another, and I thought, not for the first time, that the strangest friendship of my life was the homicide detective who'd once wanted to build a case out of my whole existence.Four hundred people. That was the number Malik had given me, and it had turned out to be true, because he was a man who was never wrong about the