Page 50 of Dragon Chaos Around

“I identified the escalation pattern, the shared-terminal evasion, and the probable department of origin. I also initiated takedown requests on ConVault and two additional distribution sites, all of which complied within thirty minutes.” She picked up the phone. “I’m very good at my job, Chaos. You hired me because I’m very good at my job. And then you treated the first real threat to the event I’m directing as a problem to be handled around me instead of with me.”

The silence that followed was nothing like the silences they’d shared before. Not the charged quiet of the archive. Not the breathless pause of the workshop. This was the silence of two people standing on opposite sides of a mistake, and the mistake was not the kind that could be smoothed over with wit or defused with charm.

“I can handle a corporate spy.”

“This isn’t corporate.” His voice had gone very quiet. The layered resonance of the dragon pressing forward—not in threat but in urgency. “The coordination. The resources. The way the disruptions are targeting the convention’s infrastructure specifically—this has a sophistication that goes beyond a media company poaching data. This is dragon.”

The word landed. Dragon. Not metaphorical. Not figurative. The specific, species-level designation that meant the threat operated on a scale and with a logic that human corporate tactics did not reach. She absorbed it. Processed.

“Then teach me,” she said.

He blinked.

“Teach me how dragons handle it.” She stepped closer. The desk no longer between them—she’d moved around it, into his space, close enough that the heat radiating from his body pressed against her skin. Close enough to see the tension in his jaw and the way his hands had curled into fists at his sides. Not from anger. From restraint. The instinct to reach for her warring with the recognition that he had not earned the gesture in this moment.

“Don’t handle it for me,” she said. “Handle it with me. I am not a subordinate to be shielded from threats because the threats are bigger than human. I am the director of this convention and I am—” She stopped. Regrouped. “—and I’m the woman who stood in your archive and held your stories and didn’t drop them. I can hold this too. But you have to let me.”

TWENTY-SIX

ALANI

He stared at her. The gold in his eyes burned—not the territorial flare of their earliest meetings, not the aroused heat of the workshop. This was different. Brighter. The specific shade that surfaced when his dragon registered a truth that his strategic mind had been working to avoid.

No one had spoken to him like this. Eight hundred years, and not a single person had stood in his office and told him that protecting them was not the same as respecting them, and been right, and been furious, and been the most compelling sight in the room while doing it.

She waited. Not satisfied. He saw it in her stance—the arms crossed, the weight forward, the chin lifted at the angle that meant she had more to say and was deciding whether he’d earned the hearing.

“The instinct to contain threats alone is—old.” The words came out without strategy. “I knew it was wrong when I chose it. I chose it anyway because the alternative was allowing a threat to touch you.”

“Then learn,” she said. Not gentle. Not cruel. Direct. The voice of a woman who loved the version of him that kept stories for seven hundred years and who refused to accept the version that kept people in the dark. “You’ve had a few years to practice being alone. Start practicing being with someone.”

The words echoed in the office. The convention floor hummed below. The fogged glass cleared as the temperature stabilized—his emotional output evening out, the dragon’s fire settling from surge to steady burn.

“The insider,” he said. “Rowan has narrowed the access window to six individuals in the vendor-liaison department. Three were off-site during the registration leak. Two have been with Silverscale for over a decade. One is a recent hire—brought on three months ago through an agency referral.”

“Which agency?”

“An independent staffing firm called Convention Talent Solutions. Small operation. Registered six months ago.”

She pulled up her phone. Typed. Her thumbs moved with the speed of a woman who researched threats the way she researched vendors—with exhaustive, caffeinated determination. “Convention Talent Solutions. One client. One placement. No web presence beyond a registration page.” She looked up. “A shell company.”

“That’s our assessment.”

“Your assessment. It’s about to be our assessment.” She pocketed the phone. “I want full access to the security investigation. Every update. Every lead. I’ll coordinate with my team to manage the operational impact—programming security protocols, vendor communication lockdowns, data-access restrictions. You handle the intelligence side. I handle the convention side. We share everything.”

He studied her. The woman who had cried in his archive and kissed him in a cape and who now stood in his office reorganizing his threat-response protocol with the confidence of a field commander who had already won the war in her head and was waiting for the battlefield to catch up.

“Agreed,” he said.

“And Chaos.”

“Yes.”

“If you ever keep me in the dark again about a threat to my event, the dragon fight will not be with whoever is sabotaging this convention. It will be with me. And I will win, because I will have the moral high ground and a PowerPoint.” A beat. The first crack in the severity—a glimmer at the edge of her mouth that was not a smile but was no longer the absence of one. “Giselle’s PowerPoints are devastating. You’ve seen the evidence.”

The tension broke. Not shattered—eased. The way a held breath releases into its neighbor.

The gold in his eyes shifted—still bright, still present, but the edge was different. Warmer.