Page 52 of Dragon Chaos Around

Chaos tilted his head. The three-degree angle. Interest.

“Derek Solis is a pipeline,” Alani continued. “Right now, information flows one direction: out of our systems and into whoever is running this operation. If we fire him, the pipeline closes. They know we found them. They regroup, adjust, come at us from a different angle—and next time, we might not catch it before the convention opens.” She tapped the timeline on the tablet. “But if we keep him in place and start feeding him bad data—modified schedules, fake vendor contracts, false programming details—the pipeline reverses. Every piece of disinformation he passes along tells us where it ends up and who receives it. We turn their spy into our tracker.”

Rowan uncrossed his arms. The relaxed menace shifted into focused attention.

“The false data needs to be specific enough to be credible but distinct enough to trace,” Alani said. “Different versions for different documents. A fake celebrity guest on the Tuesday schedule. A phony vendor contract with a made-up company name. A programming change that moves the cosplay competition to a hall that doesn’t exist. Each piece unique. Each piece tagged so that when it surfaces—wherever it surfaces—we know exactly which document Solis accessed and who he gave it to.”

She looked at Chaos. He had not spoken. His eyes had gone pale—the deep silver that meant he was running calculations behind a face designed to reveal nothing. His hands rested on the desk, still, fingers laced. No warmth rolling off him. No temperature shift. The dragon was not reacting to threat. The dragon was hunting.

“This traces back to Griffin Media,” he said. Not a question.

“This traces back to wherever the information goes. If that’s Griffin Media, we’ll have the evidence chain to prove it. Every leaked document, every recipient, every handoff point—all documented, all timestamped, all admissible.”

Chaos studied her. The silver eyes moved across her face with the systematic attention he applied to threat assessment—except the threat here was not Alani. The threat was how thoroughly she continued to exceed the boundaries of every mental model he had built for her. She could see it: the recalculation happening in real time, the categories he’d assigned her expanding to accommodate a woman who could replace a vendor in forty-eight hours AND design a counterintelligence operation over morning coffee.

“You think like a dragon,” he said.

The words landed in the quiet office. Rowan’s eyebrows rose—a subtle lift that carried, for a six-hundred-fifty-year-old dragon, the equivalent of a standing ovation.

Alani leaned back in her chair. Crossed her arms. The posture mirrored his, and she watched him notice it, and the noticing produced the faintest break in his composure—a twitch at the left edge of his mouth that she was still withholding the privilege of calling a smile.

“I think like a convention director who has handled entitled vendors, stolen merchandise, and a celebrity who brought a live snake to a panel,” she said. “A corporate spy is Tuesday.”

Rowan made a sound—not a laugh, closer to a bark that he converted to a cough three-quarters of the way through. His hand covered his mouth. His eyes, when they met Alani’s, held four hundred years of friendship with Chaos and the specific delight of a man who had been waiting a very long time for someone to match his alpha point for point.

“The live snake,” Chaos said. His voice was perfectly level. “At a panel.”

“Phoenix, 2022. A-list voice actor brought his emotional support boa constrictor to a villain voice panel and it escaped during the Q&A. I caught it behind the merchandise booth while the security team was still figuring out how to file the incident report.” Alani picked up her coffee. “The boa was a sweetheart, actually. Much easier to manage than a corporate espionage ring. Snakes don’t have parent companies.”

“I need details on the snake incident,” Rowan said. “Later. When there’s time. I want all of them.”

“Focus,” Chaos said, but the temperature in the office rose a degree, and Alani filed the temperature spike under the private heading she’d created during the archive visit: “Things the Dragon King does when he is trying very hard not to let me know I’m winning.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

ALANI

They built the counterintelligence plan in three hours.

Alani ran operations. She drafted four versions of the upcoming week’s programming schedule, each with a unique false detail embedded in a different section: a phantom panel on Wednesday morning, a fabricated celebrity appearance on Thursday evening, a fake venue change for the immersive experience rollout, and a modified security protocol that would never be implemented. Each version was loaded into a separate access point that Derek Solis could reach through the shared terminal. Whichever version surfaced outside Silverscale’s network would identify the exact access point and timestamp of the leak.

Chaos handled logistics. His legal team—which operated with the institutional memory of a firm that had been drafting contracts since the Elizabethan era—prepared the documentation framework for the evidence chain. Every piece of false data was registered, sealed, and timestamped with a precision that would hold in any courtroom. Rowan coordinated with the security team to adjust monitoring on the vendor-liaison office without alerting Solis or his colleagues.

Giselle, operating remotely via a secure channel that she had set up with the focused competence of a woman whose organizational systems could survive a nuclear event, managed the parallel investigation: tracing Convention Talent Solutions’s registration back through corporate filings to the holding company that owned it. The holding company was registered in Delaware. Its board of directors included one name she recognized.

GISELLE: Convention Talent Solutions → registered to Apex Holdings Group → Apex board includes one Victor Marsh. Victor Marsh is CFO of Gryphon Ventures. Gryphon Ventures is the lead investor in NovaCraft’s parent company AND holds a minority stake in Griffin Media.

GISELLE: We have our through-line.

CRYSTAL: So it’s Varina Griffin.

GISELLE: The evidence doesn’t name her directly. Corporate insulation. But the financial trail puts her company at the center of every disruption.

ALANI: Forward everything to Chaos’s legal team.

Alani set down the phone. Looked at Chaos across the desk. Three days ago, he had shut her out of this investigation. Now they sat shoulder to shoulder—not touching, not quite, but close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from his arm through the air between them—and the evidence trail she had demanded access to was leading exactly where she’d suspected.

Varina Griffin. CEO of Griffin Media. The woman who wanted Silverscale’s convention badly enough to plant a spy, sabotage a vendor, and leak proprietary data across three escalating incidents.