Page 36 of Mating Her Dragon

She almost laughed, except the thing sitting in her chest was too large and too careful for laughter. "I think I can see it," she said. "The Mating Bond. Our Mating Bond. Not just feel it– actually see how it's put together. Like the Ward. Like the seam."

Garrett went very still.

She could feel that it wasn’t fear, not exactly. It was something more complicated than that. It was the stillness of a man realizing something enormously private had just been offered a door it had never had before.

"I won't look," Sydney said quickly, "unless you want me to."

Because that was the whole lesson, wasn't it? Power wasn't permission. She'd said it out loud once already, standing beside a fraying chapel Charm, and it had settled into her like a bone finally set right. This was no different. This was, if anything, the truest test of it she'd faced yet–because this wasn't a stranger's Ward. This was the single most intimate piece of Magic either of them possessed, and it belonged to both of them equally.

"It's yours too," Garrett said quietly.

"Half of it is. The other half is yours." Sydney felt her throat tighten, unexpectedly, around the rest of the sentence.

"The other half," Garrett said, "belongs to you."

Something in her chest cracked open, warm and unbearably tender. That was the truest thing anyone had ever said to her about anything that was supposedly hers by right. Not I'll allow it. Not fine, go ahead.

“I want to know what you see,” he said. Plainly. Without a shred of hesitation.

Sydney reached for his hand, laced her fingers through his, and opened her sight. No single glowing thread connected their two chests.

She'd half expected that– some romantic, storybook cord of light stretched taut between two hearts. However, the reality was so much stranger, so much more alive, that for a moment she simply forgot to breathe.

It was a braid.

Layers moving through and around each other, distinct and inseparable at once. Garrett. Herself. Han, a deep, steady current running alongside Garrett's presence like bedrock beneath a river. Kara, woven through her own side the same way, ancient and warm and unmistakably… Well, unmistakably Kara.

Not four separate Bonds. Four presences, contributing to one living, breathing whole– souls sharing souls, sharing each other, in a structure so intricate it made the campground Ward look like a child's first attempt at a knot. Sydney understood, looking at it, something that hit her harder than she expected: this Magic had never been built as a chain.

Nothing here owned anything. No leash, no collar, no single dominant thread pulling the others along behind it. It looked, more than anything, like two entire systems that had chosen– freely, deliberately, over and over– to align themselves with each other.

“Not a tether,” Sydney thought, throat tight. “A bridge.”

Fate had built the bridge. But how far it opened, how much crossed it, how deep it ran– that had always, apparently, been a matter of choice. Every single day. Whether either of them had known it or not.

She saw the doors next.

Two of them, one settled quietly on each side of the braid– hers and his. Not flaws. Not damage, not anything wrong with the structure at all. Simply doors, closed but not locked, each one answerable only to the person whose side it occupied.

Sydney understood, looking at them, exactly what Garrett had meant weeks ago, sitting on that rock outside a diner, telling her the Mating Bond had remained half-guarded since the beginning.

The Ceremony didn't knock those doors down. It didn't force anything, didn't override anything, didn't compel a single thread of Magic to do something either of them hadn't chosen.

They would simply open them. Voluntarily. Together.

The blood would seal the physical promise. The vows would define the intention behind it. And the Mating Bond itself– this vast, braided, beautiful thing– would only fully open because both of them, standing in whatever place they chose, said yes.

“Well,” Sydney thought, a little dazed. “That's obnoxiously beautiful.”

"It is," Kara agreed, something unusually soft in her voice.

Sydney let herself sit in that for one more breath, one more heartbeat of pure, uncomplicated wonder. Then she saw the scar.

It was on Garrett's side. Deep. Nearly hidden beneath the steady presence of Han, tucked into a fold of the braid she might never have noticed if she hadn't already been looking for it so closely.

Not a thread. Nothing woven, nothing constructed. A wound. Blackened at the edges, hollow in the middle, shaped exactly like something that had once been attached and had been torn away from it with violence.

Sydney's stomach dropped straight through the floor.