THE BOOK CLUB #3
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.
The wolf had been intense—a match forged in instinct and creative fire, two people who burned so bright they had nearly consumed each other before they learned to burn together.
The bear had been surprising—quiet, deep, the kind of love that built itself in a recording studio and emerged blinking into the light fully formed.
The lion had been theatrical—political, passionate, a courtship played out on a stage that the entire pride was watching. And the dragon—
The dragon had been legendary.
Not because the scale was larger—though it was, mythologically so.
Not because the obstacles were greater—though a corporate sabotage campaign, a rival dragon, and an aerial abduction over Manhattan certainly qualified.
The dragon match had been legendary because it proved the thing Gerri had believed since the first mother walked into her life and asked for help: that love was not diminished by difficulty.
It was refined by it. Sharpened. Made specific.
The love between a seven-hundred-and-ninety-year-old dragon king who collected villain stories and a thirty-year-old convention director who built them was not a generality.
It was a precision instrument—forged in arguments about panel formats, tested by dragon fire, sealed in an archive beneath Manhattan, and confirmed at a Villains’ Ball while an orchestra played and a matchmaker ate a cookie.
Alani looked up from the couch. Caught Gerri’s eye through the glass doors. Smiled. The unfiltered one. The smile at maximum wattage that no one had ever asked her to turn down because the dragon beside her considered maximum the only acceptable setting.
Gerri smiled back.
She raised her champagne glass. The October night received the gesture—the terrace, the skyline, the city that had held a dragon and a convention and a love story without blinking.
She raised the glass and spoke to no one and everyone and the accumulated work of seven years and four species and the unshakeable conviction that had carried her through every match:
“To villains.”
She drank. The champagne was excellent. Alani had chosen it.
“The heroes were never this interesting.”
The city hummed. The penthouse held. The archive breathed beneath them.
And on the terrace of a dragon’s home in late October, a matchmaker finished her champagne and her cookie and her work.
A woman who believed in love, a room full of mothers, and the absolute, irreducible truth that the best stories—the ones worth keeping, worth fighting for, worth preserving in vaults beneath cities and in the stubborn, magnificent hearts of people who refused to settle for less—were always, always about the villains.
The End