Page 40 of Dragon Chaos Around

The elevator reached the lobby. The doors opened. Manhattan’s night air rushed in—September carrying the first edge of October, the city’s fragrance of exhaust and possibility. Alani stepped into it.

ALANI: He’s been loving the same things I love since before my country existed and he showed it to me like he was handing over something breakable and I held it and I didn’t drop it and Crystal

ALANI: I think I’m in trouble.

CRYSTAL: Sweetie. You’ve been in trouble since the walkthrough.

ALANI: Bigger trouble.

CRYSTAL: I know. I know you are.

Alani pocketed her phone. Hailed a cab. Gave the driver her hotel address and pressed her face against the window as the city scrolled past—Midtown towers giving way to the West Side, the streets thinning. Her reflection stared back from the glass: mascara smudged, hair disarranged, eyes bright with the aftermath of tears and the beginning of an emotion she was not ready to name.

In her ribs, the ache persisted. The good kind. The kind that meant a space had been opened that hadn’t existed before—a room built in a single evening by a man who had shown her his whole heart filed and cataloged and preserved behind glass, and who had looked at her looking at it and said yes in a voice that meant you are what I’ve been keeping all of this for.

The cab carried her through the city. Above her, forty-two stories up, a dragon stood in his penthouse and looked at the staircase that descended into his archive—the archive that now carried her fingerprints on Level Two and her laughter on Level One and her tears on the deepest level where the stories he loved most lived.

She didn’t know that. Not yet.

For now: the city. The night. The ache. The trouble she was in.

And the growing, undeniable, terrifying certainty that the trouble was mutual.

EIGHTEEN

ALANI

She was going to regret this.

Not the way she regretted most decisions—the mild, fleeting kind that surfaced during brunch and vanished after a mimosa. This was going to be the industrial-grade variety. The kind that required multiple group chat debriefs and a spa day and possibly a formal apology to the borough of Brooklyn for whatever was about to happen to its cultural reputation when a nearly eight-hundred-year-old dragon king walked into a cosplay workshop for the first time in his immortal life.

“He’s going to hate it,” Alani said, adjusting the LED strip she was wiring into the breastplate of her villain armor. The soldering iron hissed. The scent of melted flux mixed with the workshop’s baseline fragrance of fabric adhesive and industrial-strength coffee. “He is going to walk in here and see the hot glue guns and the foam scraps and the spray paint fumes and his entire aesthetic is going to have an allergic reaction.”

Crystal looked up from her sewing machine. She had a pin between her teeth and a measuring tape looped around her neck and she was mid-stitch on the bodice of her competition costume—a structured corset in midnight blue with hand-sewn crystal detailing that caught the workshop’s fluorescent lighting and fractured it into tiny stars. “His entire aesthetic is a climate-controlled vault three stories underground. This is a converted warehouse in Bushwick. The man is going to experience atmospheric whiplash.”

“He’ll adapt.” Giselle sat cross-legged on the workshop floor, surrounded by reference photos and a tablet displaying her construction timeline. She was hand-painting the filigree on a set of foam gauntlets with the focus of a neurosurgeon and the speed of someone who had been building competition-grade cosplay pieces since she was fourteen. “He adapted to the family dinner. A cosplay workshop is a lateral move.”

“A lateral move.” Alani set down the soldering iron. “Giselle. The man collects original Shakespeare playbills. He funded German Expressionist cinema through a fake Weimar-era foundation. His idea of casual art appreciation involves a multi-level vault with museum-grade climate control. And I am bringing him to a warehouse where the playlist is anime villain theme songs and the bathroom has a sign that says ‘Villains Wash Hands Too.’”

“I made that sign,” Crystal said. “It stays.”

“The sign is not the problem.”

“The sign is art.”

Giselle tapped her tablet without looking up. “He arrives in forty minutes. Your breastplate wiring is incomplete. Your wig styling is at sixty percent. And you are spending your remaining prep time catastrophizing about a man who gave you a first-edition manga from his private hoard because your enthusiasm made his dragon lose its mind. He’s going to be fine.” A beat. “I, however, am going to need more paint.”

Alani exhaled. Picked up the soldering iron. Got back to work.

The costumes were taking shape. Three villain characters from a popular anime—the rival trio whose betrayal arc in season two had made Alani cry on a transcontinental flight and commit to a group cosplay within thirty seconds of the credits. She was building the leader: full armor, LED-integrated breastplate, a cape with internal wire structure that allowed it to hold dramatic poses on command. Crystal was constructing the strategist: elegant, structured, a costume that prioritized silhouette over spectacle. Giselle was hand-painting every detail of the mystic: intricate gauntlets, layered robes, a staff topped with a crystal orb she’d 3D-printed and sanded smooth.

They were entering the Silverscale Convention’s group cosplay competition under aliases. Alani could not resist competing at a convention she was directing. She recognized this as a character flaw. She had accepted it and moved on.

“What’s our entry name again?” Crystal asked.

“Team Nocturne.”

“And nobody will recognize the convention director competing in her own competition?”