Page 2 of Dragon Chaos Around

Oh, I like her already.

“Emberlaine.” Gerri crossed the terrace with her champagne raised. “I’m delighted you could make it. I’d say the trip was long, but I suspect your sense of distance is different from mine.”

Emberlaine accepted the greeting with a nod that managed to be both warm and sovereign. “Ms. Wilder. Your invitation was… persuasive.”

“I used the good stationery. Hand-calligraphed. I find that beings who remember the invention of the printing press appreciate analog correspondence.”

A flicker at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile—not yet—but the architectural suggestion that a smile might one day be constructed in that location. “You did your research.”

“Always.” Gerri handed her a champagne flute and gestured toward the terrace’s best vantage point—a curved glass nook overlooking Central Park to the north and the glittering canyon of Midtown to the south. “I do my research the way your son runs his conventions. Thoroughly. Obsessively. With the understanding that missing a single detail is the difference between triumph and catastrophe.”

The flicker deepened. She raised the champagne to her lips, tasted it with the careful attention of a woman who remembered vineyards that no longer existed, and inclined her head in approval.

“You mentioned my son in your letter.”

“I mentioned that I might be able to help.”

“Help.” She tasted the word the way she’d tasted the champagne—carefully, with twelve centuries of context. “My son is approaching eight hundred years old. He has survived plagues, wars, the dissolution of monarchies, and the invention of social media. He runs a global entertainment empire with the kind of precision that makes lesser men weep. He has not taken a mate.” A pause. The silver eyes hardened. “Ever.”

Gerri sipped her own champagne. “Eight centuries is a long time to be alone.”

“It is an obscene amount of time to be alone.” The words landed with the weight of maternal frustration refined over more years than most dynasties survived. “He has convinced himself that attachment is a vulnerability he cannot afford. That every human life is a loss he will eventually be forced to endure. He has armored himself against affection so completely that his own Line members have stopped trying to breach it.” Emberlaine’s jaw tightened—the only break in her composure, and devastating for its rarity. “I have been patient. Dragon-patient, Ms. Wilder. I have waited centuries for my son to open himself to the possibility that love is not a wound to be avoided but a fire worth tending. My patience has reached its natural conclusion.”

“And that conclusion brought you to me.”

“That conclusion brought me to the only woman in the Western Hemisphere with a perfect record.” Emberlaine’s gaze pinned her. “Three matches. Three matings. Wolf, bear, lion. All thriving. All with women who were—by every account I have gathered, and I have gathered many—not merely suitable but extraordinary.”

Gerri allowed herself a moment of professional satisfaction. Brief, controlled, and not at all humble. “They are extraordinary. I don’t match ordinary people, Emberlaine. Ordinary people figure it out on their own. The people who come to me are exceptional in ways that make them exceptionally difficult to pair. Your son⁠—”

“Is the most difficult man alive.”

“I was going to say exceptional. But, yes. That too.”

Emberlaine almost smiled. The architecture advanced significantly. “Do you have someone in mind? Or do you intend to begin a search?”

Gerri opened her mouth to answer—and the terrace doors swept open again.

Marisol Nores entered a room the way tropical weather entered a temperate zone: with warmth that rearranged the emotional climate before anyone registered the shift. She was fifty-eight, exquisitely preserved, and dressed in ivory and gold that complemented her Filipina coloring with the kind of effortless harmony that required enormous effort to achieve. Her dark hair was swept into an elegant twist. Her jewelry was restrained, expensive, and chosen with the deliberateness of someone who understood that true wealth whispered.

She also carried a gift bag from a patisserie in Quezon City that she set on the nearest table with casual authority—she had been bringing food to gatherings since before any of her children could walk.

“Gerri.” Marisol pressed cheeks with her in the European style—left, right, the ghost of contact that communicated affection without disturbing lipstick. “The terrace is stunning. The cookies are unreal. Is that a dragon with toe beans?”

“Individual toe beans. I’m not an amateur.”

“You are a visionary.” Marisol surveyed the room with the quick, warm assessment of a socialite who had cataloged every face at every event she’d attended for three decades. “This is the largest gathering yet.”

“And growing. Apparently saving people’s children from romantic despair creates loyalty. Who knew?” Gerri touched her arm. “Marisol, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

She steered her toward the glass nook where Emberlaine stood with her champagne, silhouetted against the Midtown skyline like a figure from a very old and very expensive painting. Marisol’s step faltered for half a second—the instinctive hesitation of a human body registering the proximity of an apex predator—before her social training overrode biology and carried her forward.

“Marisol Nores, may I introduce Lady Emberlaine Silverscale. Emberlaine, this is Marisol Nores. We serve on the Asian American Arts Foundation board together. She is one of the most formidable women I know, and I know every formidable woman in this city.”

Emberlaine extended her hand. Marisol took it. The handshake lasted exactly two seconds—long enough for Emberlaine to register Marisol’s warmth and steady grip, long enough for Marisol to register that Emberlaine’s skin ran several degrees above normal human temperature.

“Silverscale.” Marisol’s dark eyes sharpened with recognition. “As in Silverscale Entertainment? The Villains Only Convention?”

“As in my son’s empire, yes.”