24. Chaos
TWENTY-FOUR
CHAOS
The forty-eight hours lasted a couple.
ALANI: Someone on the convention team is feeding our data to competitors.
GISELLE: Hold. Let me pull up the Gryphon Ventures thread.
CRYSTAL: The NovaCraft trail?
ALANI: It’s not isolated anymore. Three leaks. Escalating. Someone has access to our internal systems and is using shared terminals to cover their tracks.
GISELLE: The vendor-liaison office has six people with badge access. I’m pulling their schedules against the export timestamp now.
ALANI: Do it. And cross-reference everyone who had access to the registration database when it leaked two weeks ago.
CRYSTAL: What does Chaos know?
10:07 a.m.: Alani paused.
She sat at the desk in her hotel suite, the morning light catching the edges of her laptop screen.
Her coffee had gone cold. The remnants of last night’s work—lighting specs, seating charts, the villain-lair sequence she’d been proud of eighteen hours ago—spread around her in organized chaos.
On her phone, the group chat waited for her response to Crystal’s question.
What did Chaos know?
She thought about it. The Silverscale security network, which she had been briefed on during onboarding—a monitoring system that flagged any unauthorized use of convention data.
Rowan, who ran security with quiet efficiency that predated the concept of corporate espionage.
The access logs, which Chaos reviewed daily because he reviewed everything daily because the man treated operational oversight the way other people treated breathing.
He knew. He had to know. The security system would have flagged the ConVault listing within minutes.
Rowan would have been on the phone before the notification finished loading.
And Chaos—the dragon whose monitoring of convention logistics bordered on the obsessive, who had tracked NovaCraft’s cancellation through his own security feeds before Alani had reported it—would have seen the leaked schedule before she woke up.
He knew, and he had not told her.
ALANI: I’ll find out.