Page 18 of Dragon Chaos Around

Not from the convention budget—that was Silverscale’s money, allocated through the shared oversight structure she’d negotiated with Chaos. She’d cover the difference from her own personal development fund. The trust fund money she’d earmarked for the year’s convention attendance, cosplay materials, and the emergency reserve she maintained for exactly these situations.

It would mean skipping the Tokyo anime convention in November. It would mean scaling back her cosplay build budget for the next three months. It would mean explaining to her father—whose ambient surveillance instincts after forty years of reading financial patterns would flag why her quarterly expenditures showed a line item that looked suspiciously like a vendor bailout absorption.

She would eat it because the alternative was walking into the next meeting with Chaos Silverscale and admitting that her cornerstone vendor had collapsed and the cost overrun was a problem she needed help with.

Not happening. Not in this lifetime. Not in his eight lifetimes.

Her phone buzzed against her shoulder. She shifted it to check the notification without dropping Maya.

GISELLE: NovaCraft legal review complete. Their cancellation clause has a 30-day notice requirement. They gave 3. Breach is clean. We can pursue damages.

GISELLE: Also I found a link. NovaCraft’s parent company received a new investment round six months ago. Lead investor: Gryphon Ventures. Gryphon’s portfolio includes 14 media companies.

GISELLE: One of them is a subsidiary of Griffin Media.

Alani’s grip tightened on the phone. The dawn wind pulled at her sweatshirt. Below, Manhattan continued its dawn shuffle—unaware, unconcerned, a city too big to register the implications of a single corporate thread connecting a vendor dropout to a competing media conglomerate.

Sabotage. Confirmed.

She filed it. Not because it wasn’t urgent—it was—but because she was running a triage operation and the immediate priority was getting the replacement vendor locked, the build timeline secured, and the immersive corridor back on track. The corporate espionage investigation would happen. The NovaCraft breach would be pursued. But first, the convention.

Always the convention first.

“Maya.” She brought her attention back to the call. “I need your team on-site by Wednesday. Full crew. Construction starts on the east wing Thursday morning.”

“We’ll be there. Alani—” A pause. The silence of a peer recognizing the scale of what Alani had accomplished in thirty-one hours. “You pulled this off in a day and a half.”

“I pulled this off in a day and a half because I’ve got the best network in the industry and a cousin who doesn’t sleep.”

“Your cousin is terrifying.”

“My cousin is efficient. The terror is a side effect.”

She ended the call. Leaned against the balcony railing. The dawn had committed—golden light spilling between the towers, catching the glass facades of Midtown and turning them into a wall of fire. The city woke in layers: honking taxis, delivery trucks, the growing murmur of eight million people beginning another day with the assumption that the ground beneath them was stable.

Alani looked at the timeline on the glass door. Looked at the sticky notes. Looked at the text from Giselle with the Griffin Media breadcrumb that would, eventually, explain why NovaCraft had abandoned a contract they’d been excited about.

She was exhausted. She was triumphant. She was running on four hours of sleep spread across two nights and enough espresso to concern a cardiologist.

And she was going to walk into the next convention meeting and present the solution as if the crisis had never existed.

EIGHT

ALANI

The meeting was at two p.m. on Monday. Alani arrived at 1:45.

She’d slept. Not enough—six hours between Saturday night and Monday morning, grabbed in ninety-minute intervals between vendor calls—but enough. She’d showered, styled her hair into the kind of effortless waves that required significant effort, and chosen her outfit with strategic care—walking into a room carrying bad news required the same stage management as walking into one carrying a keynote. Looking like you’d spent a weekend in crisis was a form of losing.

Burgundy today. A tailored wrap dress that moved when she moved, held its structure when she stood still, and communicated a particular combination of femininity and authority that she’d calibrated over years of convention industry meetings where the men wore rumpled polos and the women were expected to compensate with twice the preparation and half the credit. Gold earrings. The heels that meant business. Nails freshly done—she’d squeezed in a manicure between vendor calls on Sunday because self-care during crisis was not vanity, it was infrastructure.

Crystal and Giselle flanked her. Crystal in navy, steady as bedrock. Giselle in charcoal, clipboard loaded with a vendor transition brief so thorough, it could have passed a congressional audit.

They entered the operations office at the Javits Center—the neutral ground that Alani had established as their meeting point—and found Chaos already seated.

He looked up when she entered. Those silver eyes tracked from her face to her shoes and back with the speed of a scanner that no human eye should have been able to match. She caught the micro-pause—a fraction of a second where the scan slowed at the wrap of the dress across her waist—before the professional mask reasserted itself.

Not the time. Not the time. Burgundy was a tactical choice for confidence, not for his benefit.