Page 23 of Mating Her Dragon

"Nothing."

She looked at him. "Nothing?"

"The Magic doesn't complete." He said it simply, like a fact of physics rather than anything to be alarmed by. "There's no loophole. No override. Fate doesn't get a vote, and neither does Prophecy, or Kara, or anyone else who might think they know better than the two people standing in the circle. If either of us says no, it simply doesn't happen."

Something in Sydney went very quiet. That meant Garrett hadn't invented some kinder, gentler version of his people's oldest tradition just for her sake. He was simply telling her the truth of it– that consent had been built into Dragon Magic long before either of them existed. It was older and deeper than any Elder's opinion about how things ought to be done.

Nobody could force this. Not Garrett. Not Kara. Not Fate, not the Universe, not thousands of years of Dragon tradition standing behind him with its arms crossed.

For the first time in her entire life, destiny had put something in front of Sydney Kavanaugh and said: only if you want it. And she did.

Not– not ready to schedule it tomorrow, not ready to stand in some circle with a Ceremony's worth of blood and vow just yet. But she knew.

"I want it," Sydney said.

Garrett's eyes flicked toward her.

"I want us," she corrected, quietly.

He didn't say anything dramatic. He simply reached over, found her hand, and held it the rest of the way down the highway. That was enough.

"Valentine," Garrett said, a while later, like he was testing the word. "For the Ceremony. Two Wolves is safe. Bonnie and Maggie would…"

"Not yet," Sydney said, before she'd fully worked out why.

Garrett glanced at her. "Not Valentine at all, or not yet?"

She turned it over, trying to find the actual shape of the objection. "I love Valentine," she said slowly. "But we started this whole trip because we were done going wherever was convenient, wherever somebody else already had a bed made up for us." She shook her head. "I don't want our Mating to happen just because it's easy. I want it to happen somewhere that means something to us. Not somewhere that's already ours because of everybody else."

Garrett was quiet. She could feel him considering what she had said.

"We haven't found it yet," she added. "Whatever it is. Wherever it is. It's out there."

"Then we'll know it when we find it," Garrett said, and that was that. No booked chapel. No Grand Hall at the Lair of the Golden Fire or the Blue Thunder Dragons. No ancestral site with thousands of years of ceremonial precedent baked into the stones. They'd know the place when it was theirs.

Which didn't stop Garrett, five minutes later, from launching directly into logistics anyway. Her man loved his lists and planning.

"Food," he said. "Witness count. Travel considerations, depending on where we land."

"How did this become an operations briefing?"

"You asked me to participate."

Sydney pointed a finger at him. "No armor."

"I wasn't planning armor."

"I believe ceremonial armor has considerable merit," Kara put in.

"Nobody asked you."

"I would like armor," Han rumbled, quiet and entirely serious.

"You," Garrett informed his own Dragon King, "are already armored."

They stopped for gas somewhere past noon, at a truck stop with a little roadside motel attached. It was quaint and well-maintained, and Sydney felt it the moment she stepped out of the truck– the low, familiar hum of an old protective Ward woven into the motel's fence line, harmless and unremarkable.

She looked, out of habit now more than anything, and there it was again. There were threads, knots, and layers, laid bare in front of her like the Ward back in New Mexico. This one was simpler, plainer, clearly the work of somebody without a fraction of the skill of whoever had built the one at the campground. But she could see it, all of it, clean as reading a page.