Page 21 of Dragon Chaos Around

This is inadvisable.

His fingers tightened on the volume. The archival sleeve crinkled. Somewhere above him, the penthouse’s climate system cycled through its midnight rhythm, and the city that never slept hummed its persistent electric lullaby, and Chaos Silverscale stood three levels beneath the earth surrounded by a lifetime of stories and made a decision that his rational mind would spend the next several days regretting and his dragon would spend the next several days celebrating.

He would leave it on her desk. No note. No attribution. No context that would frame it as what it was—a piece of his hoard, selected with the precision of a being whose entire emotional architecture was built around the curation of valuable things, offered to a woman who had earned it by solving an impossible crisis in forty-eight hours and refusing to ask for help.

No note. Because a note would require admitting the impulse. And Chaos Silverscale had not survived eight centuries by admitting impulses.

He carried the volume upstairs. Set it on his desk beside the silver cufflinks. Stared at it.

This is not happening.

His dragon, unhelpfully, radiated satisfaction so intense that his body temperature spiked three degrees and the glass of water on his desk fogged with condensation.

TEN

CHAOS

He left it at 6:15 a.m.

The Javits Center was empty at that hour—construction crews didn’t arrive until seven, and the operations staff filtered in between seven-thirty and eight. Chaos had a master key to every room in the venue. He let himself into the temporary office that Alani used during on-site production days—a glass-walled room off the main exhibition hall, currently decorated with her construction timelines, vendor schedules, and a framed print of an anime villain that she’d hung on the first day with a level she’d brought from home.

The office smelled like her. Not the perfume—the warmth beneath it. The human scent that his dragon tracked through rooms and across distances with an accuracy that would have been alarming if he’d allowed himself to examine it.

He placed the manga on the center of her desk. No note. No wrapping. The archival sleeve intact, the volume positioned with the cover facing up so that the villain on the cover would be the first thing she saw when she sat down.

He left. Took the elevator to his penthouse. Poured an espresso. Drank it at the window while the dawn turned Manhattan gold.

He did not think about the manga. He did not think about her face when she found it. He did not think about the expression that a woman who loved villain stories would produce when she discovered a first edition of her favorite franchise sitting on her desk like a message from a universe that understood her.

He thought about vendor timelines and security protocols and the sixteen items on his morning agenda.

He thought about nothing else.

His dragon called him a liar with such clarity that his espresso rattled in its saucer.

At 9:27 a.m., a text arrived.

ALANI: There is a first edition Villain’s Requiem on my desk.

He stared at his phone. His thumbs hovered over the keyboard. Eight centuries of rhetorical mastery. A vocabulary refined across every era of the English language. The diplomatic skills that had navigated the fall of empires, the rise of democracies, and the invention of the internet.

CHAOS: I’m not aware of what you’re referring to.

Her reply arrived in six seconds:

ALANI: There are six copies in the world. It is sitting on my desk. In an archival sleeve. At a convention owned by a man who has been collecting villain memorabilia for seven hundred years.

CHAOS: Perhaps the previous office occupant left it.

ALANI: The previous occupant was a facilities manager named Greg. Greg’s interests include fantasy football and moderate-to-aggressive climate control. Greg did not leave a first edition manga valued at approximately $40,000 on a desk he vacated three weeks ago.

Chaos set the phone down. Picked it up. Set it down again.

His dragon was radiating a smugness so profound that his skin carried a visible metallic sheen—the faint silvery glow that surfaced when his internal state overwhelmed his control. Rowan would notice. Rowan noticed everything.

The phone buzzed.

ALANI: Thank you. I don’t know who left this, since apparently it is a MYSTERY, but it is the most thoughtful thing anyone has ever given me and I am sitting in my office trying not to cry on a priceless artifact.