Page 16 of Dragon Chaos Around

“NovaCraft. Your primary experiential vendor. The one building the immersive corridor.”

“The one building the centerpiece of my entire creative proposal. The one I personally negotiated a contract with seven weeks ago. The one whose cancellation clause requires thirty days’ notice, which this email does not provide, and whose ‘competing engagement’—” Alani picked up the phone again, reread the relevant sentence. “—is not named, not specified, and not consistent with NovaCraft’s published project calendar, which I checked this morning because I check all my vendor calendars every morning because I am a professional who does not get surprised.”

She stood. The fabric swatches scattered. The pad thai container wobbled on the carpet.

“This doesn’t track.” She paced—three steps to the window, three steps back, the tight circuit of a mind accelerating past emotional response into analytical overdrive. “NovaCraft has never broken a contract. Their reputation depends on reliability. Their lead designer called me last week to confirm the build schedule—he was excited, Crystal. He was sending me concept sketches at midnight. People who are about to bail don’t send concept sketches at midnight.”

“What kind of schedule conflict pulls a vendor seven weeks into a contracted project?” Giselle was already on her tablet, pulling NovaCraft’s corporate filings. “Their public schedule shows two active engagements besides ours. Neither conflicts.”

“Exactly.” Alani stopped pacing. The analytical engine that her father had given her—the one that processed risk and pattern and anomaly with the computational instinct of a man who’d built a hedge fund on reading market signals before anyone else—locked onto the discrepancy with a focus that burned away the initial shock like morning sun clearing fog. “A vendor who’s excited about a project doesn’t bail without explanation. A vendor who’s under contract doesn’t breach without cause. And a ‘schedule conflict’ that doesn’t appear on their public calendar isn’t a schedule conflict.”

She looked at Crystal. Looked at Giselle.

“This is sabotage.”

The word landed in the hotel suite like a stone dropped into still water. Crystal’s expression shifted from concern to the particular sharpness that made her a formidable ally in any conflict—the Yoo steel beneath the warm exterior. Giselle’s pen resumed, faster now, the scratch of a woman switching from project management to threat assessment.

“You need evidence before you make that accusation,” Crystal said. Not disagreeing—grounding. The emotional anchor doing her job.

“I need a replacement vendor before I make any accusation.” Alani scooped her work phone off the floor and pulled up her contacts. The list scrolled—eight years of relationships, favors banked, trust earned, a network she’d built handshake by handshake across every major convention market in the country. “If NovaCraft is out, I need someone in. Yesterday. I need experiential design capacity at the same quality level, available for immediate deployment, willing to take a compressed timeline on the biggest villain convention on Earth.”

“That’s a short list,” Giselle said.

“That’s why I’m starting now.” Alani was already dialing. “Crys, pull the vendor backup matrix—the one I built after Phoenix in ’23 when the LED supplier ghosted us. Giselle, I need NovaCraft’s contract on screen. I want to know every clause, every penalty, every leverage point. And check their corporate relationships. If someone pressured them to drop us, there will be a trail.”

Crystal was on her laptop in seconds. Giselle had the contract loaded before Alani finished the sentence.

The phone rang in her ear. Once. Twice. A voice picked up—a vendor she’d worked with in Chicago, a woman whose experiential design team had won three industry awards and who owed Alani a favor from a convention crisis in 2024 that involved a fire suppression system, a celebrity’s emotional support peacock, and a last-minute redesign that Alani had pulled off in nine hours.

“Maya. It’s Alani Nores. I need you, and I need you now, and the project is the Silverscale Villains Only Comic Convention.” A pause. She heard the intake of breath on the other end—the sharp recognition of what that name meant. “I know. I know it’s short notice. I know you’re going to need to move your Atlanta timeline. Here’s what I can offer⁠—”

She talked. She negotiated. She pivoted from charm to data to urgency—because convention directing was not event planning. It was crisis management with a decorating budget.

The pad thai went cold. The fabric swatches stayed scattered. The hotel suite transformed from a debrief space to a war room in the span of a single phone call, and Alani Nores worked—focused, joyful, relentless—converting every obstacle into fuel.

Two hours later, she had three potential replacement vendors in active negotiation, a legal review of NovaCraft’s breach initiated, and a preliminary timeline that cut the build window by five days but—with overtime, creative compression, and enough caffeinated determination to power a small city—remained achievable.

She set her phone down. Looked at Crystal and Giselle, who had worked beside her in seamless coordination the way they always did—Crystal tracking relationships and communications, Giselle tracking logistics and contracts, the trio operating as the precision instrument they’d been building since their first convention as teenagers.

“Someone doesn’t want this convention to succeed,” Alani said. “And I’m going to find out who.”

Her personal phone buzzed on the nightstand. She picked it up.

CHAOS: Your corridor construction is progressing well. The structural reinforcements in Zone 2 are ahead of schedule.

She stared at the message. He was texting her about construction progress at nine-thirty on a Friday night.

He was watching the construction. From the mezzanine. Again.

She typed back before her better judgment could intervene:

ALANI: Were you on the mezzanine today?

CHAOS: I review all major construction activities within my venues.

ALANI: Your floor plans were upside down yesterday.

The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Disappeared. A ten-second pause that she imagined—with a clarity that bordered on cinematic—as a dragon staring at his phone with the expression of a man who had been caught doing the thing he was pretending not to do.