Page 30 of Dragon Chaos Around

“Mom.”

“Hmm?”

“Did you pick these plates on purpose?”

Marisol’s spoon didn’t pause. “I don’t know what you mean, mahal. They’re our best china.”

Alani carried the plates to the dining room and did not throw any of them, which she considered a significant personal achievement.

FOURTEEN

ALANI

The doorbell rang at seven o’clock. Not six fifty-eight. Not seven-oh-two. Seven o’clock, sharp, in a way that suggested the man on the other side had been standing on the stoop calibrating his arrival to the second.

Alani intercepted the door before Isla could. Before Daniel could descend from his study with the highlighted spreadsheet. Before Marisol could emerge from the kitchen in her full hostess armor. Alani opened the door because this was her life and her family and her dragon⁠—

Not your dragon. Not your— he is standing on your parents’ stoop in a midnight cashmere sweater and he brought FLOWERS.

Chaos Silverscale stood on the Nores family stoop in evening light, looking more human than she had ever seen him—no suit jacket, no armor of tailored wool, just midnight cashmere that did unreasonable things to his shoulders and dark trousers. And in his left hand—his left hand, the one that signed billion-dollar contracts and had apparently also learned floral arrangement at some point in his impossibly long life—a bouquet. Not the generic, cellophane-wrapped variety. A curated arrangement of sampaguita and white roses, the jasmine-scented Filipino national flower woven through stems with a care that made the bouquet look like a piece of art.

Sampaguita. He had brought sampaguita to a Filipina mother’s dinner table.

“Ms. Nores.” His voice carried the measured calm of a man walking into a known tactical situation with full preparation.

“You brought sampaguita.”

“Your mother’s foundation bio mentions Philippine cultural preservation. The flowers seemed appropriate.”

“You “researched” my mother’s foundation bio to select dinner flowers.”

His jaw shifted. The micro-expression she’d learned to read—the one that meant he’d been caught being thorough and didn’t appreciate having his thoroughness narrated. “I research all social engagements.”

“You researched my mother.”

“I researched the host. The host happens to be your mother. The overlap is incidental.”

Behind Alani, Isla’s voice floated from the staircase: “That’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in person and I have worked with Chris Hemsworth.”

“Isla.”

“I’m stating an objective aesthetic observation. It’s what I do. I’m an actress.” Isla appeared at Alani’s shoulder, fuzzy socks and all, and extended her hand with the direct confidence of an actress who shook hands with studio heads before breakfast. “Isla Nores. The sister. The one who’s going to be watching you like a scene study all evening and I apologize in advance for nothing.”

Chaos took her hand. “Miss Nores. I’ve seen your work. Your physicality in the Meridian films is remarkably precise.”

Isla’s eyes went wide. She released his hand, turned to Alani, and mouthed “Keep him” with the subtlety of a billboard.

“Come in.” Alani stepped aside. Chaos crossed the threshold into the Nores household, and the temperature shift was immediate—not the dragon kind. The house kind. Warmth pressed in from every direction: cooking heat from the kitchen, the golden glow of lamps Marisol kept perpetually lit because she believed overhead lighting was hostile, the layered scent of adobo and gandules and lumpia and fresh flowers and the specific atmospheric density of a home where five strong personalities had been loving each other at full volume for three decades.

Alani watched him register it. The micro-pause at the doorway. A deeper breath than his usual controlled rhythm. His gaze sweeping the foyer: family photos climbing the staircase wall in mismatched frames, a hand-carved santo from Marisol’s grandmother beside a painted vejigante mask from Daniel’s family in Ponce, fresh calla lilies on the entry table because Marisol believed a house without flowers was a house without intention.

He saw a home. Alani watched him see it and understood—with a clarity that tightened her throat—that he hadn’t stood inside one in longer than she could imagine.

FIFTEEN

CHAOS

The dining room was an ambush dressed as hospitality.