Page 87 of Dragon Chaos Around

“Alani does not diminish,” Gerri agreed. “She expands.”

Emberlaine accepted a champagne flute. Sipped. The silver eyes found Gerri’s over the rim. “My son told me he said the word.”

Gerri did not need to ask which word. There was only ever one word, and it was the word that every match arrived at eventually—the four-letter destination that the entire journey had been building toward, spoken in a villain’s lair at a comic convention while an orchestra played and a matchmaker ate cookies.

“At the Ball,” Gerri confirmed. “I was present. I was eating a dragon cookie at the time.”

“Appropriate.” The ghost of a smile compressed into the faintest curve of a mouth that rarely permitted the expression. “He is no longer alone. That is the only report that matters.” She paused. “You told me he would find her, at our first meeting. I told you my patience had reached its natural conclusion.”

“And your patience was rewarded.”

“My patience was rendered unnecessary.” Emberlaine looked out the terrace windows. The October evening spread below—Manhattan in its autumn splendor, the Javits Center visible in the mid-distance, the convention dark now but carrying the ghost of its glow like an ember that refused to cool. “She rendered it unnecessary. The girl who builds villains and runs conventions and who told my son—my son, a creature who has survived plagues and empires and the invention of the internet—that dragons are lizards. To his face.”

“To his face,” Gerri confirmed. “Repeatedly.”

The smile broke through. Not the ghost. The real thing—rare, luminous, carrying the weight of twelve centuries and the lightness of a mother’s relief. “I like her very much.”

“Everyone does.” Gerri raised her glass. Emberlaine raised hers. They drank. The city watched. The mothers of four matched couples circulated through a dragon’s penthouse and the champagne flowed and the villain-themed desserts diminished and the October evening held them all in its golden, departing light.

The new mothers arrived at nine.

Gerri had been expecting them. She was always expecting them—the next wave, the women who had heard through the network that Gerri Wilder had orchestrated four impossible matches across four shifter species and who wanted, with the polite, relentless determination of mothers everywhere, to discuss their own brilliant, stubborn, romantically hopeless children.

Three of them tonight. A woman from London whose daughter was a marine biologist with zero interest in dating and a habit of spending six months at sea. A woman from Seoul whose son ran a tech company and communicated exclusively through email, including with family members who lived in the same house. A woman from São Paulo whose twins—twins—had both refused every introduction she had arranged since their twenty-fifth birthdays and who were now, at thirty-two, her most pressing project.

They approached Gerri in a formation that she recognized from seven years of Book Club meetings: casual but deliberate, their paths converging near the champagne station as if by coincidence, their eyes carrying the specific light of women who had heard the stories and believed the stories and wanted the stories for their own children.

“Ms. Wilder.” The woman from London extended her hand. Firm grip. Steady eyes. The composure of a person accustomed to running things and unaccustomed to asking for help. “I understand you have a talent for finding the right people and putting them in the same room.”

“I have a talent,” Gerri said, accepting the handshake, “for recognizing when two stories are trying to become one. The rest is timing.”

The woman from Seoul stepped forward. “My son believes he is too busy for a relationship. He has told me this in four languages.”

“Four languages is impressive.” Gerri sipped her champagne. “It’s also an overreaction to a problem that has a simpler solution than he thinks.”

The woman from São Paulo completed the triangle. “Twins. Both impossible. Both brilliant. Both convinced that their mother’s matchmaking efforts are—how do they put it?—'embarrassing and unnecessary.’”

“Every child I’ve ever matched said the same thing.” Gerri smiled. The smile that four couples owed their happiness to—five, if she counted the match she could already see forming in the space between these three mothers’ descriptions and the vast, untapped reservoir of her instincts. “The embarrassment fades. The unnecessary part turns out to be essential. And the children—” She glanced across the penthouse. Through the crowd of mothers and champagne and villain desserts, through the glass doors that led to the terrace where Marisol Nores and Lady Emberlaine Silverscale stood side by side looking at the skyline, through the living room where Ozara and Colette and Suki and Vivienne and Astrid circulated in the golden evidence of what love, properly facilitated, could build. “—the children end up grateful.”

The three mothers exchanged a glance. The glance carried everything: hope, skepticism, the desperate arithmetic of women who had exhausted every other option and who were standing in a dragon’s penthouse surrounded by proof that the impossible was not only possible but repeatable.

“We have questions,” the woman from London said.

“You have children,” Gerri corrected gently. “The questions come later. First, tell me about them. All of them. Start with the thing that makes them impossible and end with the thing that makes them extraordinary. Those are usually the same thing.”

They told her. The marine biologist who loved the ocean more than people. The tech executive who hid behind emails because vulnerability required a bandwidth his servers couldn’t provide. The twins who were each other’s entire world and who needed someone brave enough to expand the orbit without breaking it.

Gerri listened. The way she always listened—with her whole body, with the instincts she had been sharpening across decades of practice, with the quiet, steel-spined certainty that the stories these mothers told about their children were maps, and the maps led to matches, and the matches led to the kind of love that filled penthouses with villain cookies and cosplay mannequins and champagne towers tall enough to toast a dragon.

Later. The crowd thinned by degrees—mothers departing in twos and threes, exchanging numbers, promising to lunch, carrying leftover Maleficent tarts in boxes that Alani had pre-ordered because Alani thought of everything and Giselle had labeled each box with the guest’s name in calligraphy because Giselle also thought of everything and between the two of them not a single detail in any room they occupied went unmanaged.

Gerri stood on the terrace. The penthouse had emptied to its core inhabitants: Rowan in the kitchen, pouring the last of the champagne into a glass he would nurse for an hour because dragons processed alcohol at a rate that made human tolerance look amateur. And on the couch by the windows—Chaos and Alani. She had kicked off her shoes. Her feet were in his lap. His hand rested on her ankle—absent, possessive, the way you touched something you had stopped thinking of as separate from yourself.

She held a half-eaten dragon cookie in one hand and her phone in the other, Crystal and Giselle already debriefing the evening in the group chat. His other hand rested on the glass where the city pressed against it. They were not looking at each other. They did not need to. The point of contact—his palm on her ankle, his thumb tracing the bone—said everything that seven weeks of arguments and gifts and a dragon fight and a claiming mark and three words spoken at a Ball had been building toward: I am here. You are here. This is enough.

The penthouse held them. The archive hummed beneath their feet. The city glowed beyond the glass. And Gerri Wilder stood on the terrace of a dragon’s home and allowed herself the rarest of indulgences: a moment of uncomplicated pride.

Four matches. Four species. Wolf, bear, lion, dragon.