Page 31 of Mating Her Dragon

Garrett was absolutely pretending he was fine. It was glaringly obvious.

Sydney had learned to recognize its specific shape– Threat Processing Garrett, she'd started calling it privately. He wasn't brooding. He wasn't snapping at her, wasn't short-tempered, wasn't doing anything a person could point to and say There, that's the problem. He was just... very Garrett. Mirrors checked at least eleven percent more often than the day before. His jaw set a fraction tighter than usual. He placed his phone within instant reach on the console instead of tucking it into the door pocket where it usually lived.

She was also fairly certain there was a second knife somewhere on his person that had not been there the day before.

"You're doing it," she said.

"Doing what?"

"Preparing for an invasion without technically admitting you're preparing for an invasion."

"I am simply being aware of our surroundings."

"You checked the mirrors four times in the last ninety seconds."

He didn't argue that one, mostly because he couldn't, and Sydney didn't need him to confirm what she already knew. Keevandrie. The Abyss. Leviathan, unnamed, sat in the front seat with them all the same. The Mating Ceremony, and everything Carrick's Council Call had just laid across the middle of it.

She knew, because she was thinking about all of it too. But she also knew something else, something that was more important in that moment than any of it: they were close to the Pacific.

And she was not going to let Leviathan steal this from Garrett before he even got to have it.

"We should probably discuss what Carrick said…" Garrett started.

"No."

He glanced over at her.

"Not until you see the ocean," Sydney said.

Not never. Not avoidance. She'd have the whole conversation with him. They’d hash out every ugly, careful piece of it, the second it was time. But right that very second, right there, got to exist first, uninterrupted, before the next war meeting swallowed it whole.

"Sydney…"

"Keevandrie has waited centuries to be an asshole. She can wait another three hours."

"I support this tactical assessment," Kara said immediately.

"That is not a tactical assessment," Han rumbled.

"It is now."

Garrett gave up. She watched him give up, watched the tension in his shoulders lose the argument to something quieter underneath it, and he didn't bring Carrick's name up again.

She knew that he knew before he said anything.

First, the air changed. It was sharper, cleaner, carrying salt on it that hadn't been there an hour before. Then there were the gulls, faint and distant, wheeling somewhere ahead of the road as it started to climb and bend along the coastline.

Garrett went quiet.

Not tense-quiet. Not Threat Processing quiet. Something else entirely. It was a stillness Sydney hadn't seen on him before. He was like a man listening to something only his own body could hear.

He'd grown up on an island. She'd known that, in the abstract, the way she knew most facts about his life before her. It was a piece of history. It had been filed and understood. But watching him now, she realized his body remembered the sea in a way that had nothing to do with facts at all.

He rolled his window down, just a few inches. Breathed. Said nothing.

Sydney felt something rise up in her chest, unexpected and enormous. Somewhere along the way, their trip had ceased to be a tourist stop. She thought it had been about five or ten miles back. Something ancient met something entirely new, and she had the sudden, overwhelming sense that she was watching the exact moment it happened.

They came around a long bend, and there it was.