Page 85 of Dragon Chaos Around

Three words. Three syllables. He had spoken in dragon-voice to crowds that shook buildings. He had issued commands that redirected economies. He had given speeches to dragon councils that altered the political landscape of an entire species. None of it had required the courage of saying “I love you” to a woman in a villain gown at a comic convention while an orchestra played redemption themes and the city watched through glass.

Her hand tightened on his. The mark on her hip pulsed—he sensed it—the claiming mark’s heat registering her body’s responses with an intimacy no distance could diminish. The mark pulsed and her grip tightened and her eyes filled, not with tears but with the brightness that preceded them, and her mouth opened and what came out was a laugh.

A laugh.

Not at him. Not from disbelief. The laugh of someone who had been waiting for the word and who received it and who found, in the receiving, that the emotion it produced was too large for solemnity and too joyful for tears and the only vessel big enough to hold it was laughter.

“You chose the Villains’ Ball,” she said, laughing. “You chose the Villains’ Ball to tell me you love me. While an orchestra plays villain redemption music. At a comic convention. In a jacket I built you.”

“The timing⁠—”

“The timing is PERFECT.” She grabbed the lapel of his jacket—her design, her threading, the dragon-scale embroidery that she had stitched into midnight wool because she loved villains and she loved craft and she loved the man wearing both. She pulled him down. Kissed him.

This was the kiss that happened after the word—the one that tasted like champagne and relief and the specific, irreplaceable joy of two people who had found each other across a distance that should have been impossible and who refused to let the impossibility matter.

She broke the kiss. Held his face. Her eyes bright. Her gown shimmering. The convention glowing beyond the glass behind her.

“I love you too, Dragon King.” A breath. “I have loved you since the archive. Since you stood in a vault full of stories and said “yes” while looking at me instead of the collection. Since you carried a cape through Brooklyn because the wire armature impressed you. Since you counted forty-nine days and seventeen lip-bites and showed me the place where your dragon lives under your skin.”

Her thumb traced his cheekbone. “I love your archive and your dry humor and your villain quotes that nobody recognizes except me. I love that you funded Expressionist cinema through a fake foundation because the art mattered. I love that you went to an animator’s funeral because a cape scene changed how villains entered rooms.”

She paused. Her smile broke wide—the incandescent, unreduced smile—the one she had spent a decade being told to soften, and that Chaos had looked at and called extraordinary.

“And I love that you are an enormous, dramatic, fire-breathing lizard who cannot handle a handshake.”

“Dragon.”

“Lizard. My lizard. Forever.”

He pulled her against him. The Ball swirled around them—the orchestra, the crowd, the thousand guests in villain formal wear, the October night pressing against the glass. None of it registered. The room had narrowed to the space between their bodies and the word that filled it—three syllables, four letters, spoken in a villain’s lair at a comic convention by a dragon and the woman who had walked into his archive and refused to leave.

Across the hall, Crystal pressed her face into Royce’s shoulder and cried the happy tears she had been saving since the walkthrough. Giselle stood beside them with her tablet, recording nothing, watching her cousin hold a dragon’s face in her hands, and for the first time in the documented history of Giselle Torres, the spreadsheet could wait.

At the bar, Gerri Wilder raised her champagne flute in a toast that no one saw. Four matches. Four species. Wolf, bear, lion, dragon. The matchmaker’s work was done.

The orchestra played. The Ball continued. The villain and the dragon held each other in the dark-bright glow of a room that celebrated the characters who chose to be extraordinary.

Her phone would buzz later. The group chat would erupt. Crystal’s all-caps declarations and Giselle’s forensic analysis and the specific, irreplaceable noise of three women who had traveled the entire distance of this story together and who would spend the rest of the evening—and the rest of their lives—celebrating the fact that Alani Nores had found someone who looked at her full-volume, villain-obsessed, cosplay-building, convention-commanding self and said I love you in front of a thousand people and an orchestra and a matchmaker with a dragon-shaped cookie.

But that was later. Right now: the music. The gown. The man. The word.

Love. Spoken by a villain. At a Ball. The way the best stories always ended.

EPILOGUE

THE BOOK CLUB

Gerri

The October air carried a sweetness that had no business being there—autumn settling into its reign, the last warmth of the year curling at the edges like gilt on a love letter. Forty-two stories above Manhattan, in a penthouse that had belonged to a dragon king for decades and now belonged to a dragon king and a convention director who had redecorated with villain-print throw pillows and a cosplay mannequin in the corner of the living room, Gerri Wilder surveyed her empire.

Not the skyline, though the skyline was doing its October best—copper and amber and the first hints of evening violet, the city performing for an audience that included two dragons, a wolf, a bear, a lion, and more mothers per square foot than any room in Manhattan’s history. Not the champagne towers, which were taller than any other because Alani Nores did not believe in moderation and had ordered them from the same caterer who had supplied the Villains’ Ball.

Not even the dessert spread, which had evolved from dragon-shaped cookies into an entire villain-themed patisserie: miniature Maleficent tarts, Darth Vader macarons, a three-tiered cake decorated with fondant silhouettes of every villain referenced across four books’ worth of love stories.

No. Gerri’s empire was still the women in this room. But the room had grown. The empire had expanded. And the dragon-shaped cookies still had individual toe beans, because Gerri Wilder maintained her standards.

She adjusted the silver dragon-shaped brooch on her lapel—the same brooch, the same midnight blue jacket, the same deliberate sartorial statement she had made at the first gathering. Consistency was its own form of power. She counted heads. Twenty-three. The largest assembly in the Book Club’s history, hosted in the most extraordinary venue she had ever claimed for a meeting, surrounded by women whose children she had matched with mates from four different shifter species.