Page 34 of Dragon Chaos Around

ALANI: My mother has already texted my aunt in Manila. My father asked me for your CFO’s direct line. Isla posted an Instagram story of the lumpia that is definitely a coded message to her fan base. And Giselle’s tablet has a new folder labeled ‘Nores Dinner: Field Report.’

ALANI: You survived.

He typed back. The words came without strategy, without his usual verbal discipline editing for impact. Simple words. Honest ones.

CHAOS: Your family is extraordinary.

ALANI: They’re a lot.

CHAOS: They are exactly enough.

The typing indicator pulsed. A long pause. When her response arrived, it was four words:

ALANI: Yeah. They really are.

Chaos set the phone on the seat beside the container of adobo. The car carried him through the city. The dragon within him was quiet—not restless, not tracking, not radiating the urgent heat that had characterized every interaction with Alani since the walkthrough. Quiet. The deep stillness that Isla had identified. The stillness of a being processing too many things to express.

He closed his eyes. The Nores dining room persisted behind his lids—candlelight on porcelain, overlapping voices, the scent of adobo and jasmine. A family that loved without moderation. A woman who softened when he said she was extraordinary and then smiled like the sun returning.

He opened his eyes. Manhattan glittered through the window.

They are exactly enough.

The words repeated in his ribs, and they were the truest thing he had said in longer than he could measure, and the adobo was warm against his side, and the city carried him home.

SEVENTEEN

CHAOS

He rearranged the Shakespeare playbills three times.

The first arrangement was chronological—Iago, Lady Macbeth, Richard III, the order in which he’d acquired them across a century of careful negotiations with estate dealers, auction houses, and one very stubborn archivist in Stratford who had required two decades of persuasion and a donation to the Royal Shakespeare Company that the woman still referenced in her annual letters. The chronological arrangement was correct. It was also clinical, and clinical would not serve.

The second arrangement was thematic. Villains who chose ambition. Villains who chose revenge. Villains who chose power as a substitute for the love they could not name. This arrangement had merit. It also read like a syllabus, and Chaos Silverscale was not conducting a seminar. He was doing⁠—

You are doing the thing you swore you would never do.

He moved the playbills a third time. Settled on a presentation that was neither chronological nor thematic but intuitive—the order in which she would encounter them as she moved through the first level, each one a stepping stone deeper into the collection. Into him.

Rowan leaned against the archive’s entrance. Arms crossed. The bronze-scaled dragon who had watched empires topple and who had seen Chaos negotiate with monarchs, withstand territorial challenges, and survive the invention of the internet without once losing his composure—that dragon was grinning.

“You’re rearranging the Shakespeare,” Rowan said.

“I’m organizing.”

“You organized it in 1847. And again in 1923. And once more in 2011, after the humidity recalibration. You told me the 2011 arrangement was definitive.” Rowan tilted his head. “You’re rearranging the Shakespeare because she’s coming.”

Chaos did not answer. He adjusted the angle of the Iago playbill by two degrees. The parchment was seventeenth century, preserved under UV-filtered glass, and the handwritten cast listing still carried the faintest ghost of ink from a quill that had documented the Globe Theatre’s 1604 season. He’d acquired it from a collector in Venice in 1789.

He had not shown any of this to anyone.

“Old man.” Rowan’s voice shifted—the humor banking, four hundred years of friendship surfacing beneath the teasing. “You’ve never brought someone down here. Not once. Not in all the time I’ve known you.”

“I’m aware.”

“Esmeralde didn’t see it. Neither did Lord Ashbrook, and he was your closest ally for a century. Your mother has been down here twice, both times by her own insistence.” Rowan pushed off the wall. His footsteps echoed on the archive’s stone floor—a sound Chaos had designed the space to produce, each step a reminder that the vault was physical, rooted beneath the city like the foundation of everything he’d built above it. “You’re showing Alani Nores the thing you value more than your penthouse, more than your company, more than the convention itself. You understand what that means.”

Yes.