Dragon Chaos Around (The Matchmaker’s Book Club: Villains #4)

THE BOOK CLUB

The September air carried a bite that had no business being there—summer hanging on by its manicured fingernails while autumn sharpened its teeth beneath the surface. Forty-two stories above Midtown, on a rooftop terrace wrapped in glass and ambition, Gerri Wilder surveyed her empire.

Not the skyline, though the skyline was magnificent.

Not the champagne towers catching the last copper light of a sun that seemed to be showing off for her guests specifically.

Not even the catering spread, which featured miniature villain-themed desserts so exquisite that three women had already photographed them from no fewer than six angles each before taking a single bite.

No. Gerri’s empire was the women in this room.

She adjusted the silver dragon-shaped brooch pinned to the lapel of her midnight blue Dior jacket—custom, because Gerri Wilder did not wear things off the rack, and because the dragon motif served tonight’s purposes beautifully—and counted heads.

Fourteen. The largest gathering the Matchmaker’s Book Club had ever assembled, and not a single one of them had cracked the spine of a book in preparation for this meeting.

Perfection.

The book club label had been Gerri’s stroke of genius seven years ago, when the first desperate mother had approached her at a charity gala and whispered, “My son is thirty-four, brilliant, impossible, and I think he might die alone. Can you help?” Gerri had helped.

Spectacularly. And the word had spread through the upper echelons of society the way all truly valuable information spread: through mothers.

Mothers who lunched. Mothers who sat on boards.

Mothers who ran philanthropic empires and hedge fund households and generational dynasties with one hand while texting their children passive-aggressive encouragements about grandchildren with the other.

Mothers who had exhausted every traditional avenue—blind dates, society introductions, the apps their assistants had set up on their behalf—and arrived at Gerri’s doorstep with the quiet, steel-spined desperation of women who refused to accept failure in any area of their lives.

Gerri loved every single one of them.

“Gerri, darling.” Ozara Stone materialized at her elbow, champagne flute in hand, silk blouse catching the terrace lights.

The woman glowed. Motherhood-by-proxy agreed with her—ever since her son’s mating, Ozara had acquired the radiance of someone whose worst fear had been neutralized.

“The cookies are divine. Are those little fangs on the dragon’s mouth? ”

Gerri plucked a dragon-shaped sugar cookie from a passing server’s tray and held it up.

Silver royal icing. Detailed scales along the body.

Tiny obsidian-black candy claws. She’d had them custom made by a patisserie in the West Village that charged an amount per cookie that most people paid per entrée.

“They have individual toe beans.” She turned the cookie to display the underside of one frosted claw. “The pastry chef thought I was unhinged. I tipped her double.”

Ozara laughed—bright, warm, the laugh of a mother who no longer lay awake at three in the morning wondering if her child would ever find someone who could handle him. “You’re extraordinary.”

“I’m aware.” Gerri bit the dragon’s head off. Delicious. “How’s the pack?”

“Thriving. Lumi’s latest exhibition opens next month.

Zeir pretends he isn’t nervous about the reviews.

He is visibly, obviously nervous about the reviews.

” Ozara’s smile softened into tenderness reserved for alpha males who had been brought to their knees by love and were still adjusting to the altitude.

“He growls at the art critics. She finds it charming.”

“Wolves.” Gerri shook her head with theatrical fondness. “All that growling. No subtlety.”

“And yet it worked.”

“Because I worked, darling. The growling was incidental.”

She patted Ozara’s arm and moved through the crowd. Past the champagne station where Colette Keiser and Suki Saito were debating the merits of a new documentary about bear conservation—“It’s not about ‘those’ bears, Colette, honestly.”

Past the dessert table where Vivienne Coleman was selecting a fourth miniature éclair with focused intent.

She had earned every calorie. Her daughter’s comic empire had tripled in value since the mating, and Vivienne had celebrated by buying a vineyard in Napa and a new wardrobe that made her look like a Bond girl at a PTA meeting.

Past Astrid Sterling, who stood near the glass railing with her phone angled toward the skyline, composing what would inevitably be an immaculate social media post that mentioned nothing about the evening’s true purpose while communicating everything to anyone who knew how to read between the lines.

Astrid’s son had been the most recent match—a lion alpha whose composure had crumbled so beautifully under the weight of love that Gerri had considered framing the wedding invitation.

Three matches. Wolf, bear, lion. Each more spectacular than the last. Each couple thriving in ways that made Gerri’s professional pride burn brighter than any of the city lights stretching beneath them.

And tonight, she intended to light the fourth match.

With fire.

The terrace doors opened at precisely eight-fifteen—not fashionably late, not aggressively early, but with the kind of timing that suggested ages of practice at arriving at the exact moment that would command the most attention without appearing to seek it.

Lady Emberlaine Silverscale entered the rooftop lounge the way a glacier enters a harbor: slowly, inevitably, and with the quiet understanding that everything in her path would rearrange itself accordingly.

The temperature shifted. Not dramatically—not the plunging cold that preceded a dragon’s shift, nothing so theatrical.

A subtle warming, as though the September air had decided to be more accommodating.

More respectful. Gerri registered it the way she registered all things: immediately, completely, and with a cataloguing instinct that had served her matchmaking career for decades.

Emberlaine was twelve hundred years old.

She looked sixty-five—a silver-haired, sharp-featured sixty-five that carried itself with the kind of poise usually reserved for heads of state and women who had outlived every enemy they’d ever made.

Her cheekbones could have been carved by a Renaissance sculptor who’d been given divine instruction to create a face that communicated I have watched your entire civilization develop and I am mildly impressed.

Pale silver eyes—the same unsettling, shifting silver as her son’s—swept the room with an assessment that covered every woman, every exit, every catering arrangement, and the structural integrity of the building itself.

She wore midnight blue. The exact same shade as Gerri’s jacket.

Oh, I like her already.

“Emberlaine.” Gerri crossed the terrace with her champagne raised. “I’m delighted you could make it. I’d say the trip was long, but I suspect your sense of distance is different from mine.”

Emberlaine accepted the greeting with a nod that managed to be both warm and sovereign. “Ms. Wilder. Your invitation was… persuasive.”

“I used the good stationery. Hand-calligraphed. I find that beings who remember the invention of the printing press appreciate analog correspondence.”

A flicker at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile—not yet—but the architectural suggestion that a smile might one day be constructed in that location. “You did your research.”

“Always.” Gerri handed her a champagne flute and gestured toward the terrace’s best vantage point—a curved glass nook overlooking Central Park to the north and the glittering canyon of Midtown to the south.

“I do my research the way your son runs his conventions. Thoroughly. Obsessively. With the understanding that missing a single detail is the difference between triumph and catastrophe.”

The flicker deepened. She raised the champagne to her lips, tasted it with the careful attention of a woman who remembered vineyards that no longer existed, and inclined her head in approval.

“You mentioned my son in your letter.”

“I mentioned that I might be able to help.”

“Help.” She tasted the word the way she’d tasted the champagne—carefully, with twelve centuries of context.

“My son is approaching eight hundred years old. He has survived plagues, wars, the dissolution of monarchies, and the invention of social media. He runs a global entertainment empire with the kind of precision that makes lesser men weep. He has not taken a mate.” A pause. The silver eyes hardened. “Ever.”

Gerri sipped her own champagne. “Eight centuries is a long time to be alone.”

“It is an obscene amount of time to be alone.” The words landed with the weight of maternal frustration refined over more years than most dynasties survived.

“He has convinced himself that attachment is a vulnerability he cannot afford. That every human life is a loss he will eventually be forced to endure. He has armored himself against affection so completely that his own Line members have stopped trying to breach it.” Emberlaine’s jaw tightened—the only break in her composure, and devastating for its rarity.

“I have been patient. Dragon-patient, Ms. Wilder. I have waited centuries for my son to open himself to the possibility that love is not a wound to be avoided but a fire worth tending. My patience has reached its natural conclusion.”

“And that conclusion brought you to me.”

“That conclusion brought me to the only woman in the Western Hemisphere with a perfect record.” Emberlaine’s gaze pinned her.

“Three matches. Three matings. Wolf, bear, lion. All thriving. All with women who were—by every account I have gathered, and I have gathered many—not merely suitable but extraordinary.”