Page 30 of Mating Her Dragon

"The Council looked at what you described," Carrick said. "They can't place the black thread. No record of that signature anywhere in their archives."

"And the other one," Garrett said. It wasn't a question.

"They recognized it." A pause, heavy enough that Garrett felt his own stomach drop before Carrick finished. "Keevandrie."

Garrett closed his eyes.

"They're not saying she opened that seam herself yesterday," Carrick went on. "But it's her work. Her signature, unmistakable, embedded down at the base of it. However long ago she touched that boundary, the fact is that she touched it."

So, there it was. The black thread was using a Realm seam Keevandrie had worked—whether by design, cooperation, or simple opportunity, Garrett had no way of knowing. Something Abyssal, reaching through a seam Keevandrie had worked on.

Garrett's mind went, immediately, unavoidably, to one name.

Leviathan.

He didn't say it aloud. Didn't need to.

"He is waiting," Han said quietly, from somewhere deep in the Bond.

“For what?” Garrett thought back.

Han didn't answer. Garrett suspected, with a cold certainty settling into his chest, that Han genuinely didn't know.

Neither did he.

But he was aware, with an awareness he couldn't quite silence, that the part of him that cataloged every threat and cross-referenced it against every vulnerability had already landed on the one thing he and Sydney had only just begun to plan. The Mating.

He found Sydney at the little Airstream table when he came back inside. She was hunched over something she pulled half under a dish towel the second she heard the door.

She looked up anyway. "Keevandrie?"

"Council confirmed the Elven signature."

Sydney absorbed that. Her jaw tightened. Garrett watched her run through the same calculations he'd just run through himself– Keevandrie, the Abyss, a seam torn open somewhere between their Realm and Hell. All of it stacked up into something that should, by every ounce of tactical sense he possessed, send them straight back to Valentine.

"We're still going," Sydney said.

It wasn’t a question.

Garrett looked west, toward a horizon he couldn't see in the dark but knew was still out there, patient, waiting.

Then back at her.

"Yes."

Because danger didn't get to choose their road anymore. Not after everything it had already taken from both of them.

"Good," Sydney said, and pushed the dish towel a little further over whatever she'd been writing.

Garrett's eyes tracked the movement anyway. "Are those your vows?"

"No."

"Give them to me."

"Absolutely not."

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