Page 77 of Dragon Chaos Around

ALANI: Take your moment. I’ll be at the Javits. There’s a cosplay competition bracket that needs my attention and a Villains’ Ball lighting scheme that won’t design itself.

She pocketed the phone. Hailed a cab. Crystal and Giselle piled in beside her—Crystal calling Royce to manage the information cascade, Giselle updating three spreadsheets simultaneously on her tablet. The cab merged into Midtown traffic. The Griffin Media tower receded in the rearview mirror—glass and steel, shrinking.

The Javits Center grew ahead of them. Glass and light. The convention’s second week was underway. The cosplay competition launched tomorrow. The Villains’ Ball was three days away. And the corporate threat that had shadowed the event since NovaCraft’s withdrawal—the weeks of sabotage, the mole, the financial trail that led to a CEO who had underestimated a convention director and lost—was ending. Not with a roar. With a binder, a timeline, and a sentence about contracts that Giselle was already adding to the Nores family record book.

Alani watched the Javits Center approach through the cab window. Her LED panels cycled across the Javits facade—purple to crimson to midnight blue. Her colors. Her convention. Defended and intact.

The mark on her hip pulsed. A single, quiet beat of light that only she could see, beneath her clothes, against her skin. The dragon’s signature. A reminder that the woman who had walked into a corporate boardroom and dismantled a CEO was the same woman who had been claimed in a vault and who would walk into a Ball and who would stand beside a dragon king and who had earned every square foot of the ground she stood on.

GISELLE: (sent during cab ride) For the record: I timed the ‘try again’ moment. The silence lasted four-point-seven seconds. Varina Griffin did not blink during those four-point-seven seconds. Neither did you. I have never been more proud to be your cousin.

CRYSTAL: (sent during cab ride) Same. Except the cousin part. I’m proud to be your Crystal.

ALANI: I love you both. Now someone help me figure out the Ball lighting because the villain lair sequence needs a third gradient and I am out of ideas and adrenaline and possibly electrolytes.

GISELLE: Electrolytes are in your bag. Left pocket. I packed them this morning.

ALANI: You’re the greatest human being who has ever lived.

GISELLE: Outdoor event update: convention insurance has accepted the force majeure claim. All vendor contracts voided without penalty. Dragon fight footage has generated nineteen million social impressions since last night. The event is currently being described as ‘the most dramatic convention closing in recorded history.’ Next year’s presales are up three hundred and forty percent. The outdoor event did not ruin the convention. The outdoor event is the convention.

ALANI: Giselle.

GISELLE: You’re welcome.

The cab pulled up to the Javits Center. Alani stepped out. The convention swallowed her—crowds, sound, the pulse of fifty thousand people who had no idea that the woman in the convention T-shirt had spent her morning taking down a media empire and was now pivoting to lighting design without breaking stride.

She broke stride once. At the mezzanine railing, she looked up. Chaos stood at the VIP level. He was already looking. She climbed the stairs—two at a time, heels be damned—and stopped at the top. He had turned to face her. The convention floor moved below them, fifty thousand people and none of them mattering right now. She crossed the walkway. His arms opened and she walked into them. Not a dramatic embrace. A practical one. Her face against his lapel. His chin on her hair. His arms closing around her with the heavy, encompassing hold of a man whose body ran hot enough to warm her through her blazer and whose heartbeat drummed against her ear in the slow, familiar rhythm she had been falling asleep to for a week.

“You moved the deadline,” he said into her hair.

“I moved the deadline.” Muffled against his jacket. She breathed him in—the clean metallic warmth, the faint remnant of morning, the scent that she had started associating with safety and home and the particular comfort of a man who had waited for her in a building they had built. “The collar of this jacket is crooked.”

“The collar is fine.”

“The collar is a disaster. Hold still.” She pulled back far enough to straighten his lapel, her fingers adjusting the silver embroidery she had stitched. He held still. She fixed the collar. Then she kissed him—brief, firm, the kiss of a woman who had taken down a CEO and wanted to celebrate with the one person who understood what it cost. His hand cupped the back of her neck. His thumb brushed the hinge of her jaw. The kiss lasted three seconds. It said everything the group chat would spend the evening trying to articulate.

She stepped back. Smoothed her blazer. Turned toward the convention floor.

There was a Ball to plan.

FORTY-FOUR

ALANI

The gown was a weapon.

Alani had been building it for three months—since before she arrived in New York, since before the walkthrough, since before she knew that the man she’d be wearing it beside could transform into a creature the size of a regional aircraft.

She had started with the silhouette: a fitted bodice that tapered to a dramatic floor-length skirt with a thigh-high slit, because villain gowns required the ability to make an entrance AND an exit. The fabric was matte black silk overlaid with hand-sewn silver thread that traced villain motifs across the bodice and cascaded down the skirt in lines that caught light and fractured it. The back was open to the waist—a design choice she had made for aesthetic reasons that had since acquired personal significance, given that the man zipping her into it would spend the evening trying not to touch the exposed skin.

The silver threading had taken forty hours. She had done it by hand, in hotel rooms and the workshop, during late nights between convention crises. Crystal had helped with the bodice structure. Giselle had sourced the silk from a supplier in Manila who owed the Torres family a favor dating back to the 1990s. The gown was a collaboration—the way all the best villain costumes were—and it was, by any measure Alani trusted, the finest thing she had ever made.

She stood in the penthouse bedroom in her underwear and examined the gown where it hung on the closet door. October morning light streamed through the windows. The convention’s final day was hours away. The Villains’ Ball launched at eight p.m. The cosplay competition—in which Team Nocturne was entered under aliases and fully expected to dominate the group category—ran from two to five. Between now and then: costume prep, hair, makeup, and the small matter of dressing a dragon king in coordinated villain formal wear without losing her mind or her schedule.

The dragon king was in the shower. She could hear the water running. His body temperature turned showers into steam rooms within minutes—a fact she had discovered three days ago when she’d opened the bathroom door to grab her phone charger and been hit with a wall of fog dense enough to obscure the mirror, the countertop, and the extremely naked man whose ambient heat had converted the master bathroom into a tropical climate.

“Chaos.” She raised her voice over the water. “Your suit is on the bed. Do not put it on until I’ve fitted the collar. The accents need to align with the lapel, and if you dress yourself, you will ignore the alignment because you have dressed yourself for eight hundred years and your aesthetic instincts predate my design specifications.”