Page 1 of In the Midst of Chaos

Chaos.It was pure chaos.

I wasn’t just talking about the way people were shouting or how the men looked terrified. I was talking about the feelings inside of me.

The way my heart was beating hard without stopping. The way it started to take off like the rumble of motorcycles in synch and then halted a beat as my body fought the urge to shut down.

“Wa-a-s-s he b-b-ad, Daddy?” I asked my father as I looked up at him. Perhaps I should have been scared, but my daddy would never let anyone hurt me. He held onto my hand and smiled sadly at me.

“Evil, good, right, or wrong, it’s all about perception. To our family, he was bad, Finley, but to his, he was their world.”

Suddenly, I felt sick.

“W-w-why?” I asked, and he knew I asked why they did what they did.

“Because this is who we are, Finnie. This is what we do, and I want you to go into this world with eyes wide open.”

I looked at the clearing in front of me and then my eyes found his—Nashton’s—and he didn’t look terrified like I was. When our eyes met, he smiled at me. That smile brought a piece of warmth to me, and it was enough to stop my body and my mind from going cold. That smile was enough to distract me from the ugliness that was happening around me.

Nash’s father, Axton, walked to where my father stood, holding my hand. He had a scowl on his handsome face.

“I can’t believe you brought her here.”

“Nash is here too,” my daddy replied dismissively.

“He’s fifteen. Finley is just achild.”

My father looked at Nash and the grin he was sporting. Then he looked down at me, and my lip trembled under my father’s heavy gaze. He squeezed my hand gently, letting me know he was sorry for what I had just witnessed.

“My daughter is a woman in a world where men think they own them. I am not teaching her how to be a princess. I am teaching my daughter how to be a king.”

Chapter One

Seven YearsLater

The cool air hit my cheeks as the limousine turned into the manor’s long driveway. Straightening up, I was glad I had put the partition up so the driver couldn’t see the discomfort on my face. The trees behind the manor were in varying stages of a fire. From red, orange, and yellows—they looked beautiful. Everything here was filled with beauty at first. That’s the thing about beauty though—the longer you stared at it, the more you were bound to find imperfections.

As I shifted in my seat, the cold leather rubbed against my skin. My skirt was probably a little too short for the type of meeting I was having, but I had a point to prove. My light brown hair was now lilac, and my attitude only got worse the older I got. I loved my father and my mother, but they didn’t treat me with kid gloves. They knew I wasn’t made out of glass, so they let me fall, and hard, so I would remember that pain and turn it into power.

I didn’t have my parents for long, but the time I did have with them, I cherished. Especially my father, since I lost my mother when I was eleven. He’d taught me so many life lessons in the thirteen short years he was in my life. Well almost thirteen he passed a few months before my birthday. He raised a girl he didn't get to see turn into a teen, he didn't get to see the woman he made.

When the car halted, I felt my cold dead heart taking one simple beat. I used to feel a lot. Then I felt so much I just burned out. It’s like my body said, “fuck this shit, we are going psycho,” and then nothing.

“Welcome home, Miss Primrose,” Dion, my old butler and confidant, said, and I almost laughed. Crull Manor stopped being home the moment I got kicked out of it.

“I smiled at the old man who had taken care of these grounds since the day we arrived. Before I took a step, I took in the spacious house.”

Crull Manor, a place of dreams and nightmares.

“Wish me luck, Dion,” I mumbled.

“You don’t need luck, Miss. The boys have been restless awaiting your arrival.”

Yeah, that was what I was afraid of. I was going to have three pissed-off Crull boys on my hands, and once upon a time, I would have been sick with dread at the thought of disappointing them—but they never felt the same way toward me. They didn’t know why I left in the middle of the night—well, one of them did. He didn’t care that he tore my heart out while it was still beating.

Squaring my shoulders in case one of those assholes was watching through the many windows, I made my way up the stairs—one foot in front of the other, with fear and excitement coating my skin.

The house was just like I remembered it. Not much had changed in the last three years I was gone.

It was too refined and classy for filth like us. I was done pretending like we were civilized; the more I thought about it, we had never been. We didn’t live by civilian law.

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