26. Alani
TWENTY-SIX
ALANI
He stared at her. The gold in his eyes burned—not the territorial flare of their earliest meetings, not the aroused heat of the workshop. This was different. Brighter. The specific shade that surfaced when his dragon registered a truth that his strategic mind had been working to avoid.
No one had spoken to him like this. Eight hundred years, and not a single person had stood in his office and told him that protecting them was not the same as respecting them, and been right, and been furious, and been the most compelling sight in the room while doing it.
She waited. Not satisfied. He saw it in her stance—the arms crossed, the weight forward, the chin lifted at the angle that meant she had more to say and was deciding whether he’d earned the hearing.
“The instinct to contain threats alone is—old.” The words came out without strategy. “I knew it was wrong when I chose it. I chose it anyway because the alternative was allowing a threat to touch you.”
“Then learn,” she said. Not gentle. Not cruel.
Direct. The voice of a woman who loved the version of him that kept stories for seven hundred years and who refused to accept the version that kept people in the dark.
“You’ve had a few years to practice being alone. Start practicing being with someone.”
The words echoed in the office. The convention floor hummed below. The fogged glass cleared as the temperature stabilized—his emotional output evening out, the dragon’s fire settling from surge to steady burn.
“The insider,” he said. “Rowan has narrowed the access window to six individuals in the vendor-liaison department. Three were off-site during the registration leak. Two have been with Silverscale for over a decade. One is a recent hire—brought on three months ago through an agency referral.”
“Which agency?”
“An independent staffing firm called Convention Talent Solutions. Small operation. Registered six months ago.”
She pulled up her phone. Typed. Her thumbs moved with the speed of a woman who researched threats the way she researched vendors—with exhaustive, caffeinated determination.
“Convention Talent Solutions. One client. One placement. No web presence beyond a registration page.” She looked up. “A shell company.”
“That’s our assessment.”
“Your assessment. It’s about to be our assessment.
” She pocketed the phone. “I want full access to the security investigation. Every update. Every lead. I’ll coordinate with my team to manage the operational impact—programming security protocols, vendor communication lockdowns, data-access restrictions.
You handle the intelligence side. I handle the convention side. We share everything.”
He studied her. The woman who had cried in his archive and kissed him in a cape and who now stood in his office reorganizing his threat-response protocol with the confidence of a field commander who had already won the war in her head and was waiting for the battlefield to catch up.
“Agreed,” he said.
“And Chaos.”
“Yes.”
“If you ever keep me in the dark again about a threat to my event, the dragon fight will not be with whoever is sabotaging this convention. It will be with me. And I will win, because I will have the moral high ground and a PowerPoint.” A beat.
The first crack in the severity—a glimmer at the edge of her mouth that was not a smile but was no longer the absence of one.
“Giselle’s PowerPoints are devastating. You’ve seen the evidence. ”
The tension broke. Not shattered—eased. The way a held breath releases into its neighbor.
The gold in his eyes shifted—still bright, still present, but the edge was different. Warmer.
“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.