Page 48 of Dragon Chaos Around

“I’ll run the access logs. But, old man—” The warmth crept back into his voice, the friendship reasserting itself beneath the tactical layer. “You kissed this woman four days ago. You showed her your archive. She held your cape and called you Dragon King and you carried the damn thing through Brooklyn like a war trophy. Do not—” A beat. “—do not make the mistake of treating her like a civilian in your Line when she has already proven she is a general.”

The call ended. Chaos opened his eyes. Manhattan’s morning light had shifted from silver to the first pale gold, and the Javits Center’s glass panels blazed, and the convention that an extraordinary woman was pouring her creative genius into every waking hour was under attack from within.

He did not call Alani. He did not text. He opened the security dashboard and began the work of hunting the leak, and the forty-eight-hour clock started, and the dragon’s protective instinct hummed its ancient, wrong-headed certainty that solitude was the answer to every threat.

Rowan was right. He was going to regret this.

TWENTY-FOUR

CHAOS

The forty-eight hours lasted a couple.

Alani found the ConVault listing at 9:23 a.m.—two hours and thirty-six minutes after Chaos had seen it. She did not call him first. She did not text. What she did, according to the operational log that Giselle would later compile with devastating thoroughness, was the following:

9:23 a.m.: Identified the leaked programming schedule on ConVault.

9:24 a.m.: Cross-referenced the leaked document with internal version timestamps. Confirmed it matched the current master schedule, last updated at 8:47 p.m. the previous evening.

9:31 a.m.: Pulled access logs from the project management system using director-level credentials. Identified the 11:14 p.m. export from the vendor-liaison shared terminal.

9:38 a.m.: Contacted ConVault directly. Requested takedown under Silverscale’s intellectual property protections. ConVault complied within twenty minutes—Alani’s reputation in the convention industry carried weight that most corporate lawyers envied.

9:42 a.m.: Checked competitor convention sites for additional distribution. Found two. Initiated takedown requests for both.

9:56 a.m.: Compiled a timeline of all three disruptions—NovaCraft’s withdrawal, the registration data leak, the programming schedule—and plotted them on a calendar. Identified the shrinking intervals. Recognized the acceleration pattern.

10:04 a.m.: Texted Crystal and Giselle.

ALANI: Someone on the convention team is feeding our data to competitors.

GISELLE: Hold. Let me pull up the Gryphon Ventures thread.

CRYSTAL: The NovaCraft trail?

ALANI: It’s not isolated anymore. Three leaks. Escalating. Someone has access to our internal systems and is using shared terminals to cover their tracks.

GISELLE: The vendor-liaison office has six people with badge access. I’m pulling their schedules against the export timestamp now.

ALANI: Do it. And cross-reference everyone who had access to the registration database when it leaked two weeks ago.

CRYSTAL: What does Chaos know?

10:07 a.m.: Alani paused.

She sat at the desk in her hotel suite, the morning light catching the edges of her laptop screen. Her coffee had gone cold. The remnants of last night’s work—lighting specs, seating charts, the villain-lair sequence she’d been proud of eighteen hours ago—spread around her in organized chaos. On her phone, the group chat waited for her response to Crystal’s question.

What did Chaos know?

She thought about it. The Silverscale security network, which she had been briefed on during onboarding—a monitoring system that flagged any unauthorized use of convention data. Rowan, who ran security with quiet efficiency that predated the concept of corporate espionage. The access logs, which Chaos reviewed daily because he reviewed everything daily because the man treated operational oversight the way other people treated breathing.

He knew. He had to know. The security system would have flagged the ConVault listing within minutes. Rowan would have been on the phone before the notification finished loading. And Chaos—the dragon whose monitoring of convention logistics bordered on the obsessive, who had tracked NovaCraft’s cancellation through his own security feeds before Alani had reported it—would have seen the leaked schedule before she woke up.

He knew, and he had not told her.

ALANI: I’ll find out.

TWENTY-FIVE