Page 23 of Dragon Chaos Around

Not a copy. Not a restoration. The original 35-millimeter print from Pinnacle Studios’ 1944 limited theatrical run—one of eleven surviving prints worldwide, and one of only three in playable condition. He’d acquired it in 1962 from the estate of a studio executive who had kept it as a personal trophy. The film was a masterwork: a noir thriller centered on a female antagonist whose intelligence, charisma, and moral complexity had rendered the nominal hero irrelevant within the first twenty minutes of screen time. Laura Blackwell had delivered a performance so compelling that audiences had written letters to the studio demanding the villain win.

Alani had referenced it in passing. A forty-five-second detour in a programming meeting. A fantasy suggestion she’d lobbed into the air with the cheerful confidence of a woman who understood that the best ideas were the ones too ambitious for the current budget.

She didn’t know it existed in his archive.

She didn’t know that he had watched the original theatrical run in a cinema in Manhattan in the winter of 1944, sitting in the third row with a hat pulled low because a dragon in wartime New York drew attention he didn’t need. She didn’t know that he’d returned four times. That Laura Blackwell’s performance had confirmed an instinct he’d carried since the medieval morality plays: that villains were the characters who made stories worth telling. That the film reel in his archive was not a collectible but a cornerstone—one of the earliest artifacts in a collection that had grown, over decades, into the hoard that defined him.

She didn’t know any of this, and his dragon didn’t care.

His dragon wanted to give it to her.

The descent into the archive at one a.m. had become, he noted with alarm, a pattern.

Three days since the manga. Three days since his phone had burned with her texts—the ones about being fourteen, about a laptop with one working speaker, about a villain’s speech that changed her life—and the memory of those messages sat in his ribcage with a weight that made breathing feel like a conscious decision. He hadn’t replied beyond the preservation guidance. He hadn’t needed to. Her words had lodged themselves in a space he’d thought sealed shut, and every time he recalled the phrase “the single most meaningful object I have ever held,” his body temperature spiked.

Now he stood in the film vault. The air was cooler here—fifty-eight degrees, lower humidity, optimized for cellulose acetate preservation. Silver film canisters lined the shelves in chronological order, each labeled in his own handwriting because he trusted no one else with the archive’s indexing. His handwriting had evolved across centuries—medieval script to copperplate to the spare, angular lettering he used now—and the labels in this section spanned five decades of acquisition, each canister a window into a villain’s story he’d loved enough to preserve.

The Woman in the Shadows. 1944. Canister 47-B. Third shelf, left side.

He lifted it from the shelf. The canister was heavier than the manga had been. Physically heavier—a full 35-millimeter reel in its original housing—and heavier in a way his dragon registered with an urgency that bypassed rational thought entirely. The manga had been a gift. This was an escalation. The courtship mechanics were clear even to the part of his brain that kept insisting the courtship mechanics were not in play: the first treasure had been personal to her. The second treasure was personal to him.

I saw this film in 1944. I sat in a darkened theater and watched a villain command the screen and I understood, with a clarity that has not faded in eighty years, that THIS is why stories matter.

He was giving her that. Not the reel—the experience. The weight of decades of loving a story, compressed into a metal canister and left on a desk for a woman who would understand its value because she was the only person alive who might love it as fiercely as he did.

This is the second treasure in five days.

He was aware.

The escalation is documented. The first gift targeted her passions. The second gift exposes yours. In the courtship progression, the third gift will⁠—

He stopped the thought. Placed the canister in a protective transport case he kept in the vault for exactly these movements. Sealed the case. Ascended the staircase. Walked through the penthouse without turning on the lights—the skyline provided enough ambient glow, and besides, he could navigate his own territory in total darkness. Dragon sight. One of the few advantages of his biology that never felt like a complication.

He set the transport case on his desk. Beside the silver cufflinks he’d removed three hours ago. Beside his phone, which held no new messages from Alani because she was asleep at one a.m. like a person with a normal circadian rhythm and healthy boundaries.

Unlike you, who is selecting treasures from your hoard in the middle of the night like a dragon who has lost control of his own courtship instincts.

Chaos stared at the transport case.

“I’m not courting her,” he said aloud. To the empty penthouse. At 1:14 in the morning.

The penthouse did not respond.

His dragon, however, radiated the kind of smugness that could have heated the entire building and left no room for doubt about who was winning this argument.

He left it at five-fifty a.m. Same protocol. Master key. Empty office. The scent of her—warm, layered, persistent in a way his dragon cataloged with embarrassing thoroughness—hanging in the air from the previous workday.

He placed the transport case on the center of her desk. Beside the archival sleeve that still held the manga—she kept it at her workspace, he noted, not at the hotel. She carried it with her. His dragon nearly cracked the office window.

No note.

He took the elevator back up. Poured espresso. Drank it at the window.

He did not monitor the security feeds. He had security feeds for every room in the venue, including the operations offices. He did not pull up the camera for her office at nine-twelve a.m. when his system logged her badge scan at the building entrance. He did not watch her walk into the office. He did not see the moment she noticed the transport case. He did not observe the way she set down her coffee, her bag, her phone—set down everything she was carrying with a deliberateness that suggested her hands needed to be empty for what came next. He did not watch her open the case.

He did none of these things because monitoring an employee’s personal reaction to an anonymous gift via security camera was a violation of professional ethics, personal boundaries, and approximately four federal statutes.

He watched every second of it.