Page 13 of Dragon Chaos Around

He stared at the message.

She tested me.

She had embedded a deliberate error in her own presentation to gauge whether he would identify it. A trap dressed as a mistake. A chess move disguised as a miscalculation.

His dragon vibrated with an intensity that threatened the pen in his grip.

He typed a response. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted it. Settled on:

CHAOS: Noted. Your actual timeline is still optimistic by three days.

Her reply arrived in four seconds:

ALANI: Make it two and you have a deal.

CHAOS: Two and a half.

ALANI: Done. Pleasure doing battle, Mr. Silverscale. Same time Thursday?

He set the phone on the smoked-glass table. The screen glowed with her name. The conference room hummed with recycled air and the ghost of her argument and the fading static charge that his dragon refused to reel back in.

The dragon had not stirred for anyone. Not once, in all the long years. Until her.

This is concerning.

His phone buzzed once more.

ALANI: Also your conference room is freezing. I’m billing you for the cardigan I had to buy on the way over. Consider it a line item.

He did not smile.

His reflection in the dark presentation screen suggested otherwise.

FIVE

CHAOS

The compromise was elegant, equitable, and left him wanting to tear up the contract.

Four days of negotiation. Eleven emails. Three meetings where Alani Nores sat across from him and dismantled his counterpoints with the surgical joy of a woman who had found her favorite sparring partner and intended to keep the match going indefinitely. The final terms were hammered out on a Thursday afternoon in the Javits Center’s operations office, which smelled like laminated floor plans and industrial-strength coffee and carried none of the strategic advantage his own conference room provided.

She’d insisted on neutral ground. He’d pointed out—again—that the Javits Center was his ground. She’d smiled and told him that any ground she was standing on was hers, and the worst part was that she was correct.

The terms: Alani retained creative control over experiential programming, cosplay integration, social media activations, and the immersive villain experience corridor. Chaos retained control over panels, talent relations, the collector’s showcase, and the Villains’ Ball. Vendor management split between them based on category. Budget authority shared, with approval thresholds that she’d negotiated up by twelve percent through a counteroffer so cleanly structured that his CFO had emailed him afterward to ask if she was available for quarterly budget reviews.

Fair. Professional. A clean division of authority that respected both their expertise and gave neither of them everything they wanted.

He hated it.

Not the terms. The terms were sound. He hated that she had been right about enough of his convention’s weaknesses to earn creative control over a third of its programming. He hated that her vendor data analysis had been more current than his own team’s. He hated that she had negotiated with patient, cheerful ferocity—winning the right points, not all of them—and that her strategic instinct rivaled his own.

Most of all, he hated that the compromise meant more time in her orbit. Shared budget oversight required weekly meetings. Split vendor management required daily coordination. The convention floor—currently an empty cathedral of concrete and possibility—would become a shared workspace where his territory overlapped with hers for the next five weeks.

Five weeks of proximity. Five weeks of the scent that his dragon tracked like a compass bearing. Five weeks of her voice cutting through the convention center’s industrial hum, landing in his ribcage like a tuning fork struck at the exact frequency he’d spent centuries trying to forget.

“You’re staring at a floor plan like it insulted your mother.”

Rowan appeared beside him on the Javits Center mezzanine—the elevated walkway that circled the main exhibition hall and provided a commanding view of the convention floor below. They stood at the railing, the hall spread beneath them. Construction had begun on the immersive experience corridor in the east wing. Alani’s contractors moved through the space with organized urgency. She did not tolerate missed deadlines.