Chaos Tryst Read Online Free Page A

understood why the separated members weren’t allowed to move out of the district or to join their loved ones on the opposite side. And there were other consequences. With all the misery the structure caused it had come naturally to dub it Fanaweigh’s Scar.
    Ari huffed. All this grief because the ogre king, the Grand High Oni—she glanced heavenward—had come to blows with the late Lord Goblin-kin during a poker game, and subsequently raised the magical wall to separate ogre territory from the goblins’. To hear the grapevines tell it, the Grand High Oni had also led the Lord Goblin-kin to a horrible death. One too awful to think on let alone to name. According to her mother, the king of the ogres still wasn’t satisfied and continued to exact revenge from the Lady Goblin-kin—the late lord’s daughter and heir to his throne.
    Fanaweigh’s Scar really ought to come tumbling down…
    Ari’s phone rang and the fact she couldn’t help but answer meant only one person was calling.
    “ Okaasan, are you going through some strange kind of separation anxiety?”
    Ari swiped at her nose with her knuckles. It had begun to itch, and the itching led to twitching. And the twitching reminded her of him…
    “Yes, Kit, your father has gone out and although you are slim comfort, I do what I must to entertain myself,” her mother replied.
    “Nice.” Ari’s gaze raked the coffee shop. She couldn’t tell whether she was giddy or nauseous. Probably both.
    “You thought you’d learned acerbity from your baba? ”
    “I was confused.” Ari’s nose spasmed in pace with her plodding heart. Don’t let it be him.
    “Obviously,” Inari said dryly.
    The “What do you want, crazy lady?” Ari murmured did not the match the Let it be him. Don’t let it be him. Let it be him. Don’t let it be him cart wheeling through her mind.
    Inari’s robes rustled over the line and Ari imagined her mother resettling herself in exasperation as she so often did, her tiny feet curled beneath her on the chaise.
    “Did you return the Grand High Oni’s necklace yet?”
    “Not yet. Next stop.”
    “It is important to note, the goblin-kin are often lonely.”
    Ari quirked a brow. “What are you? A fortune cookie? Way to be stereotypical, Mommy. And he’s an ogre not a goblin.”
    “I am Japanese, so no, not a fortune cookie. And yes, this is what I have said.”
    Ari choked on a chuckle and dropped her forehead into the palm of the bent arm resting on the table. “Sure you did. Can I go now? I’m feeling funny again…”
    Her mother didn’t get an opportunity to answer. Or if she did Ari didn’t hear it. She was too busy bolting to her feet as a man sat down in the chair across from her. The ungainly movement caused the front of her thighs to catch the underside of the table and it tumbled over. Teacup and pot, cookies, plates and all. Only the table survived the fall intact.
    Ari clicked her Bluetooth off without another word to Inari.
    The man looked from her to the floor, back to her, and down to the floor again before leaning over to right the fallen furnishing. There was nothing he could do for the other items except allow the busboys to do their jobs.
    Ari didn’t care either way.
    She slapped both hands over her nose, sat with a thud and slid down as far as remaining in her chair would allow.
    It was him. The source of her twitchy nose. The beat her heart skipped. The purple prose in her diary.
    It was like the first time she’d seen him all over again. She’d been a little one then, riding between her parents on the Orient Express out of Paris. They’d been on their way to Vienna…or Istanbul—she couldn’t remember which. The family traveled all of Europe and the Orient over and again in the 1800s. Her father avoided America in those days because appearing in his true West African aspect would have been dangerous. The deepest skin tone he could have affected without the threat of enslavement had been Arab royalty and the