Page 47 of Dragon Chaos Around

TWENTY-THREE

CHAOS

The leaked programming schedule appeared on ConVault—a competitor’s convention aggregator site—at 6:47 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, three weeks before the convention opened.

Chaos saw it at 6:48. He had been awake for two hours, working through the pre-production report Alani had sent at midnight, annotated with her running commentary in red ink that he had no business finding charming. The ConVault notification hit his phone, his tablet, and his desktop simultaneously—Rowan’s security monitoring flagged any public mention of Silverscale programming data outside approved channels—and the charming red ink ceased to matter.

The schedule was accurate. Not a rough draft or an outdated version. The document that now sat on ConVault’s front page, available to every rival convention, every competing media outlet, and every vendor looking to leverage the information, was the current master programming schedule—complete with panel times, celebrity confirmations, and the immersive experience rollout that Alani had been refining for weeks. Time slots, room assignments, the sequencing of villain-themed installations designed to create a specific attendee flow pattern. Her work. Exposed.

He called Rowan.

“I see it.” Rowan’s voice carried the flat clarity of a dragon already running tactical calculations. No greeting, no warmth—the mode he shifted into when threats required attention. “The file metadata shows it was exported from our internal project management system yesterday at eleven-fourteen p.m. I’m pulling access logs now.”

“How many people have access to the master schedule?”

“Twelve. Alani, her core team of four, three operations managers, two Silverscale executives, you, and me.” A pause. “The export originated from a device registered to the convention vendor-liaison office. Not a personal device—a shared terminal.”

Chaos stood at his penthouse window. Dawn pressed against the Manhattan skyline—September edging into October, the light arriving later, cooler, the gold thinning toward silver. Below, the city had not yet reached full velocity. In the distance, the Javits Center caught the early light along its glass panels.

“This is the third disruption,” he said. NovaCraft’s withdrawal. The leaked attendee registration data that had surfaced on a convention industry forum two weeks ago—minor enough that Alani’s team had contained it before it spread, significant enough that Chaos had flagged it to security. Now the full programming schedule. The pattern was escalating. Not random. Targeted.

“It’s not random,” Rowan confirmed, reading the silence. “I’ve been running the timeline. NovaCraft pulls out seven weeks before open. Registration data leaks five weeks before. Programming schedule goes public three weeks before. The intervals are shrinking. Whoever is feeding information is accelerating.”

“An insider.”

“An insider with access to multiple data systems and the sense to use shared terminals instead of personal devices. Someone who knows our security protocols well enough to avoid the obvious red flags.” Rowan’s voice hardened. “This isn’t an opportunist. This is planned. Coordinated. And it points at someone on the convention team.”

Chaos turned from the window. The penthouse was quiet—the deep-morning stillness that he had occupied alone for years, the hours before the city woke and the convention machinery began its daily churn. His phone displayed Alani’s last text, sent at 12:03 a.m.: Final immersive corridor lighting specs attached. Tell me the villain lair sequence doesn’t make you want to buy a ticket to your own convention. He had responded at 12:07: The lighting design is exceptional. I already own the convention. She had sent back a string of laughing emojis and a photo of herself at her hotel desk, one eye closed, pen behind her ear, the midnight exhaustion of a woman who worked as if sleep was a suggestion her body could override by force of will.

She was brilliant. She was tireless. She was—four days after a kiss in Brooklyn that had rearranged the interior of his chest—the person he most wanted to protect from the threat now crystallizing around her convention.

Tell her.

The instinct was correct. He recognized it. She deserved to know. She was the convention director. The leaked schedule was her work product. The investigation would impact her team, her programming, her creative vision. By every rational metric, she was the first person who needed this information.

He picked up the phone. Put it down.

Tell her. Now. Do not do the thing you always do.

The instinct was older than reason. Absorb the threat. Contain it. Resolve it alone, before it could touch the people around him. He didn’t examine the logic. He acted on it.

He knew it was wrong. He chose it anyway.

“Don’t tell her yet,” he said to Rowan. “Give me forty-eight hours. Identify the insider. Trace the data chain. I want a complete picture before we involve the convention team.”

The silence on the line lasted three seconds. Long, by dragon standards.

“She’s going to find out,” Rowan said. “She monitors ConVault. She checks competitor sites every morning. She’s going to see the leaked schedule and trace the source and reach the same conclusion we reached, and when she discovers that you already knew⁠—”

“Forty-eight hours.”

“—when she discovers you already knew and chose not to tell her, the fact that you were trying to protect her is not going to matter. The only thing that’s going to matter is that you didn’t trust her enough to include her.”

Chaos closed his eyes. The penthouse hummed its high-altitude quiet. Rowan was correct. The analysis was flawless. And the dragon within him—the ancient, instinct-driven engine that had been governing his responses to threats since before the Norman Conquest—overrode the analysis with the same blunt authority it had always wielded.

“Forty-eight hours,” he said for the third time.

Rowan sighed. The sigh of a dragon who had watched his alpha make strategic errors for four hundred years and had learned that the most efficient response was to prepare for the fallout.