Page 4 of Dragon Chaos Around

She poured herself a fresh glass of champagne and crossed the terrace to join them.

Marisol turned at her approach, eyes bright. “Gerri. Emberlaine has been telling me about her son’s archive. Did you know he has an original Shakespeare folio? A first folio?”

“I did not.” Gerri filed this information with the practiced ease of a woman who collected intelligence the way Chaos Silverscale collected villain memorabilia. “Does he also have a sense of humor? It’s relevant to my process.”

Emberlaine’s expression achieved peak devastating understatement. “My son’s humor has been described by those brave enough to comment as ‘so dry, it constitutes a fire hazard.’ Given that he can produce actual fire, the observation carries weight.”

Gerri laughed. Real laughter—the kind that escaped before her professional composure could catch it. She liked Emberlaine. She liked Emberlaine enormously. A twelve-hundred-year-old dragon with delivery that sharp was a gift from the matchmaking gods.

“Tell me about Alani,” Emberlaine said, turning to Marisol. “Not her resume. I’ve read her resume. Tell me what she’s like in a room.”

Marisol’s entire bearing softened. The socialite armor eased. The mother emerged—warm, proud, and carrying the particular ache of watching a child be magnificent in a world that kept asking for ordinary.

“She fills it,” Marisol said. “Every room she enters, she fills. Not with volume—though the volume is considerable—but with energy. She walks into a convention center seating fifty thousand people, and the staff gravitates toward her because she makes them believe the impossible logistics are actually going to work. She walks into a costume workshop, and the materials practically arrange themselves because she sees what they could become before anyone else does. She walks into a family dinner and—” A laugh, soft and rueful. “And we are all trying to keep up.”

“She is too much for most people,” Emberlaine said. Not a question.

“She is exactly enough.” Marisol’s chin lifted again—that Puerto Rican–Filipino steel that her daughter had inherited along with her cheekbones and her refusal to apologize. “The people who find her too much are simply not enough themselves.”

Emberlaine turned to the skyline. The city sprawled beneath them, vast and electric and indifferent to dragons and matchmakers and mothers with secret agendas.

“My son,” she said, her voice carrying the particular weight of twelve centuries, “has spent seven hundred years convincing himself that the world has nothing left to offer him that he hasn’t already seen and survived. He is wrong. He has been wrong for a long time. But telling a dragon king he is wrong is…” She trailed off.

“Impossible?” Marisol offered.

“Inadvisable.” Emberlaine’s gaze found Gerri’s. “What is required is not someone who will tell him he is wrong. What is required is someone who will simply be so impossibly, incandescently herself that his wrongness becomes self-evident.”

Gerri raised her champagne. The city glittered. Fourteen mothers mingled behind her, trading stories of matched children and unmatched ones, of grandchildren anticipated and interventions plotted, of the beautiful ongoing conspiracy that was the Matchmaker’s Book Club.

“Emberlaine,” she said, “I had already planned to introduce your son to Marisol’s daughter. But hearing both of you describe them in the same evening has confirmed what I suspected.” She smiled. The smile that combined warmth with the surgical precision of a woman who had never once been wrong about a match and intended to keep the streak alive. “This is going to be spectacular.”

Emberlaine raised her glass.

Marisol raised hers.

“To dragons,” Marisol said, and her eyes sparkled with the irrepressible mischief that her daughter had inherited wholesale. “Dragons are my favorite. All that fire.”

Emberlaine’s mouth curved. Not the architectural suggestion of a smile this time. The real thing—rare, warm, twelve hundred years in the making.

“You have no idea,” she said.

Gerri drank her champagne and watched the two women clink glasses against the Manhattan skyline, and allowed herself the small, private thrill she experienced at the beginning of every match. The spark before the blaze. The first note before the symphony. The quiet, absolute certainty that two people who didn’t know each other yet were about to rearrange each other’s lives in ways neither could predict.

Three down, she thought, surveying her empire of mothers and champagne and exquisite dragon-shaped cookies with individual toe beans. The wolf was intense. The bear was surprising. The lion was theatrical. But the dragon…

She finished her champagne.

The dragon is going to be legendary.

ONE

CHAOS

The espresso was perfect. The temperature was wrong.

Chaos set the demitasse on its saucer with a precision that his staff had learned, over decades, to interpret as displeasure. The ceramic click echoed off the penthouse’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Below him, Manhattan baked in September heat—the city sweating through its suit, concrete shimmering, every rooftop air conditioning unit working overtime—but up here, in the climate-controlled silence of the top floor, the thermostat read sixty-eight degrees.

It should have been sixty-eight degrees. He kept it at sixty-eight degrees. He had kept it at sixty-eight degrees for the eleven years he’d owned this building.