Page 15 of Mating Her Dragon

Silence.

"See what?" Kara said.

Sydney's heart gave one hard, uneven knock against her ribs. Kara– the First Dragon Queen, ancient beyond counting, sharing Sydney's own soul– could sense the Ward. She could feel its presence the way anyone with a scrap of Magical sensitivity could, but she could not see the threads. Could not see the knots, or the layers, or the purpose woven into each one.

Kara's power wasn’t moving through Sydney. It was Sydney's alone.

She didn't stop to sit with that. Couldn't, because in the same breath she noticed the flaw. One thread didn't belong.

It ran through the Ward's careful pattern like a vein of something sick– dark, slick, wrong in a way she recognized instantly, even though she'd never seen this particular thread before. It wasn’t destroying the Ward. It wasn’t even corrupting it, exactly. It was using it. It was listening through it, like someone tapping a phone line and waiting.

She went very still.

“Sydney,” Kara said, alert now, sharp.

Thirty feet away, at the fire, Garrett went rigid. She heard his chair scrape back before she'd even finished processing what she was looking at. Of course, he'd noticed. Of course, he'd caught the change in her breathing from across the campsite.

That was Garrett. That was always going to be Garrett.

She put up one hand without turning around. "Wait."

He stopped. She felt it rather than turned around and saw it. She could feel the sheer act of will it took for a Dragon Guardsman to hold his ground instead of closing the distance, and the fact that he did it anyway, because he trusted her, meant everything.

Sydney didn't cast.

She didn't reach for an Incantation she didn't have. She didn't raise her hands, didn't call for Dragon Fire, didn't do a single thing that looked like Magic at all.

She simply looked at the foreign thread and thought at it, with complete, unshakable certainty: “You don't belong here.”

The thread moved.

Not because she'd touched it. Because she'd told it the truth, and it had no answer for that. It began working itself loose from the Ward's pattern, slowly and reluctantly, like a splinter being pushed out by skin that no longer wanted it.

"Oh," Sydney breathed.

“Sydney,” Kara said again, and this time there was no amusement in it at all.

The black strand slipped free entirely and hung there in the air for one full second, suspended, unmoving. Sydney had just enough time to think, Okay, that's… before it turned.

Toward Garrett.

Everything happened at once. Garrett had just lifted his foot to move closer, but instead, froze mid-step. Every muscle in his body locked down. Han roared somewhere deep in the Mating Bond, a sound like distant thunder given fury. Kara surged forward inside Sydney's mind, ready to burn the whole campground down if that was what it took.

Sydney didn't think. She spoke.

"No."

The thread stopped. Dead. Midair. Like a hand had closed around it.

No Spell. No fireball. No Incantation. One word, because she hadn't overpowered it– she'd simply refused it permission to exist in the space it was trying to occupy.

"You don't belong there, either," Sydney said quietly, with absolute certainty.

The thread shuddered once, violently, and disintegrated into ash. It drifted down onto the gravel and simply… Well, it simply stopped being anything at all.

Silence dropped over the campsite like a blanket.

"Sydney," Garrett said, very carefully, from exactly where he'd stopped.