Page 49 of Dragon Chaos Around

ALANI

She found him in his office at the Javits Center—the executive suite on the mezzanine level that overlooked the convention floor, where build crews were assembling booth infrastructure and the immersive installations were taking shape in the cavernous hall below. He was standing behind his desk with Rowan, both of them bent over a tablet displaying a chart she recognized from twelve feet away.

Access logs. Timestamped. Color-coded by user. The same data she had pulled two hours ago.

She stopped in the doorway. Rowan saw her first—his head lifted with the alertness of a dragon registering a shift in the room’s energy. His expression performed a rapid sequence: recognition, comprehension, and a brief, undisguised wince that told her everything she needed to know about the conversation he and Chaos had already had about this moment.

Chaos looked up. His eyes met hers. Silver, steady. The dragon knew what was coming.

“You know,” she said.

Not a question. The two words dropped into the office like a stone through glass.

Chaos straightened. Set the tablet on the desk. “Alani⁠—”

“How long?”

Rowan stepped back. The movement was deliberate—the second-in-command clearing the field, removing himself from the blast radius with the practiced grace of someone who had been managing Chaos’s mistakes for four hundred years. He caught Alani’s eye on the way out. The look he gave her was not apologetic—it was respectful. A nod between equals.

He closed the door behind him.

“How long have you known,” Alani said, “that someone on my team is leaking convention data.”

“The ConVault alert triggered at six-forty-seven this morning.”

“And you chose not to tell me.”

“I planned to tell you once the source was identified. The investigation⁠—”

“The investigation that you are conducting about a breach of my programming schedule from my project management system targeting my convention without informing me.” Each my landed with a force that had nothing to do with volume. Her voice was level. Controlled. The same calm she deployed when a celebrity guest threatened to walk mid-convention or a vendor missed a critical deadline—the crisis voice, the one that meant she was not panicking and the person she was addressing needed to understand that fact immediately.

“The decision to delay⁠—”

“How long were you going to wait?”

“Forty-eight hours. To build a complete intelligence picture before involving⁠—”

“Before involving me.” She stepped into the office. Her heels were silent on the carpeted floor—a detail that registered distantly, the absence of the sharp click that usually announced her arrival. She had dressed for a production day: structured jacket, dark jeans, boots from the workshop. Work clothes. War clothes. “Before involving your convention director in an investigation into a security breach of her own event.”

“Alani.” His voice dropped. Not the careful, controlled drop of a meeting—the involuntary descent that happened when the dragon pressed against the surface. “The nature of this threat may extend beyond corporate sabotage. The pattern suggests coordination. Resources. The kind of organized operation that⁠—”

“That what? That I can’t handle?” The words arrived sharp. Not yelling. Sharper than yelling—the precise, measured delivery of a woman choosing each word with surgical intent. “Say it. Tell me what you think I can’t handle.”

He stared at her. The office temperature rose—a slow, ambient shift that fogged the glass wall overlooking the convention floor. Below them, build crews moved through the space in hard hats and high-vis vests, assembling the physical infrastructure of an event that was under attack from within, and neither of them looked down.

“I was trying to protect you.”

The words hung. She watched them settle into the air—the honest, ancient, fundamentally flawed logic of a dragon who could not, even after the archive and the workshop and the kiss that still burned in her muscle memory, break the habit.

“I know you were,” she said. Her voice shifted. Not softer—rawer. The controlled edge giving way to its more dangerous cousin: disappointment. “I know that’s what you were doing. And that is exactly the problem.”

She crossed to his desk. Pulled out her phone. Set it on the surface between them—the screen displaying her own timeline. Three disruptions mapped. Intervals calculated. The shrinking pattern identified. The vendor-liaison access logs pulled and filtered.

“I found this in two hours,” she said. “Without your security team. Without your monitoring system. Without the resources of a multi-billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate. I found it with a laptop, a phone, and eight years of convention experience that taught me what sabotage looks like because I have been handling sabotage since before I could legally rent a car.”

He looked at the phone. At her timeline. At the work she had done—the same work his security team had produced, arrived at independently, through a different path that reached the same answer. She watched the recognition land.

“You identified the escalation pattern,” he said.