Page 51 of Dragon Chaos Around

“The PowerPoint,” he said. “Was effective.”

“The PowerPoint was a masterpiece and we both know it.” She uncrossed her arms. “Now. Show me Rowan’s access logs. All of them. And the NovaCraft thread from Giselle’s original research. If Gryphon Ventures connects to this shell staffing agency, we have a through-line from the first sabotage to the last.”

She was already moving—pulling a chair to his desk, opening her laptop, the crisis energy converting from confrontation to collaboration without breaking stride. He watched the transformation. Anger to action. Hurt to strategy. The same gear-shift he’d seen during the NovaCraft crisis, when she’d replaced a vendor in forty-eight hours and presented the solution as if nothing had happened.

She did not forgive easily. He could see it in the set of her shoulders, the deliberate space she maintained between their chairs, the way she addressed him with crisp efficiency rather than the warmth of four days ago. The kiss in Brooklyn existed in the same room as the breach of trust in this office, and she was holding both, and she would reconcile them on her own timeline or not at all.

He respected it absolutely.

“Rowan,” he called toward the closed door.

It opened immediately. Rowan stepped in with two tablets and a calm expression that said he had been standing three feet from the door for the duration of the argument and was neither surprised nor sorry.

“Full access logs.” Chaos gestured to Alani. “She’s running the operational response. Full briefing. Everything we have.”

Rowan set a tablet in front of Alani. “The access matrix is on page three. The timeline visualization is mine—I color-coded it by department.”

“Color-coded.” Alani glanced at Chaos. The glance carried layers: annoyance (the investigation was already this developed and she was only now seeing it), grudging approval (the color-coding was excellent), and the faintest trace of the warmth she was withholding as punishment (the warmth existed; she was choosing not to deploy it). “Your security team color-codes their intelligence reports.”

“I’ve had a year or two to refine my organizational preferences,” Rowan said. “Also, for the record: I told him to call you this morning. At six-forty-eight. He did not. I want that noted.”

“Noted,” Alani said.

“Noted and logged,” Rowan confirmed. “In a file that I’ll title ‘Times I Was Right and He Didn’t Listen,’ which currently runs to forty-seven pages and spans four hundred years.” He settled into the third chair. “Shall we begin?”

They began. The investigation unfolded across Chaos’s desk in tablets and timelines and the shared focus of three people who were very good at solving problems.

And in the corner of the desk, untouched but visible, Alani’s phone displayed one last text from the group chat—sent at 10:04 that morning, before she had come to the office, before the confrontation.

GISELLE: Whatever he did wrong, make him fix it before you forgive him. You are worth the full apology.

CRYSTAL: What Giselle said. Also: you’re scary when you’re mad. It’s very impressive.

Alani turned the phone facedown. Got to work.

The investigation was in progress. The forgiveness would follow. But it would follow on her terms, and the dragon who had spent his entire vast existence solving problems alone would learn—was already learning, she could see it in the careful way he angled his tablet so she could read it, in the way he deferred to her operational expertise without being asked, in the way his hand rested on the desk three inches from hers and did not close the gap—that the bravest thing a king could do was not slay the dragon.

It was admit he needed help.

TWENTY-SEVEN

ALANI

His name was Derek Solis. Twenty-six years old. Communications degree from a mid-tier university in Connecticut. Clean background check—no criminal record, no financial red flags, no social media posts that screamed corporate saboteur. He had been hired through Convention Talent Solutions three months ago, placed in the vendor-liaison office, and assigned to manage supply chain communications for the convention’s secondary vendors.

He was also, based on the evidence now spread across Chaos’s desk in five color-coded tabs on Rowan’s tablet, the person who had leaked the programming schedule, the registration data, and—Giselle’s latest finding, delivered at 7 a.m. that morning with the restrained fury of a woman whose professional infrastructure had been violated—the internal contact who had facilitated NovaCraft’s sudden departure by providing a competing offer from a Griffin Media subsidiary.

Alani stared at the timeline. Three days of joint investigation had produced a picture so clean it was almost insulting. Derek Solis had used the shared terminal in the vendor-liaison office because his personal credentials were firewalled from the master schedule. He had accessed the registration database through a colleague’s login—a colleague who left her station unlocked during lunch, a habit he had clearly noted and exploited. The NovaCraft connection was the cleverest piece: he had routed the competing offer through two intermediary companies before it landed on NovaCraft’s desk, but Giselle had traced the financial chain back to its origin in under forty-eight hours because Giselle treated corporate paper trails the way bloodhounds treated scent.

“So we fire him,” Rowan said. He leaned against the office wall with his arms crossed, his posture projecting the particular brand of relaxed menace that dragons apparently developed after six hundred years. “Terminate, escort out, legal action, press charges if applicable.”

“No.”

Both dragons looked at her.

Alani pulled up a chair. She had arrived at the Javits Center at 6:30 that morning—earlier than Chaos, which she considered a personal victory—and she had spent ninety minutes staring at Giselle’s financial trace before the answer crystallized. The right answer. The one that turned a defensive position into an offensive strike.

“We don’t fire him,” she said. “We use him.”