His Queen of Chaos
"That's not a real threat, you'd enjoy that too much."
"Take the deal, Zariah."
I'd taken the deal.
Tasha was already in a booth, and she looked good, which was somehow the first betrayal.
I'd braced for the wreck of her, the strung-out ghost, the woman the drugs and the running had left behind, the version I'd built into my mind over nine years to make the abandonment survivable. Instead my mother looked well. Hair done. Nails done, a fresh gel set catching the fluorescent light. A good wool coat folded on the seat beside her, better than anything Tasha had owned in all the years of the marriage, and something about the wellness of her, the expensiveness of her, set a small cold alarm ringi