Page 54 of Mating Her Dragon

Then she found it… The one pattern, near the center of it all, that Sydney recognized on sight.

It was Garrett's scar.

Not him, personally, rendered on some ancient wall. It was the architecture itself– the Living Threshold's original framework, the very first draft of the thing that lived, still, beside the braid of their Mating Bond.

Sydney's stomach dropped straight through the floor.

Keevandrie hadn't improvised what she'd done to him.

She had designed it here.

"You were supposed to go to the sanctuary."

The voice came from deeper in the room, unhurried, almost bored. No dramatic entrance. No explosion of Magic announcing itself.

Sydney turned, and there she was.

Keevandrie. Alive. Physical. Looking incredibly worn out and exhausted. Plainly furious at the situation she'd found herself in… And, underneath the fury, she was genuinely surprised. She hadn't expected them here. Not really. Not this soon, not this precisely.

That, Sydney understood instantly, was their first real advantage.

"Yeah," she said. "I've never been great at following directions."

Garrett moved without a word, weapon ready, placing himself between Sydney and Keevandrie without fully blocking her. He was close enough to protect, careful enough not to cage. He'd learned that lesson thoroughly by now.

Keevandrie's gaze slid over him with the flat, assessing interest of someone examining a tool they'd once built and half-forgotten about.

"And you brought the door with you."

Sydney's fury went ice-cold, instant and total. "His name is Garrett."

Keevandrie dismissed that with barely a flicker of attention, like someone dismissing something irrelevant to the actual conversation. To the Sorceress, Garrett was still architecture. Still the Living Threshold. Still a structure she'd built for a purpose, and purposes didn't have names.

"Names are sentimental things," Keevandrie said. "Function is what endures."

"My function today," Garrett said, calm as death, "is going to disappoint you."

Keevandrie's hand moved, small and precise, and spoke something in old Elven that hit the air like a struck bell. The lattice around Garrett's scar lit.

Pain hit him hard enough to drop him to one knee. Han roared, deep and furious within the Mating Bond, somewhere behind Sydney's own awareness.

But Garrett stayed himself. No possession, no flicker of anything but him, teeth gritted, fighting the pain with the same stubborn will he brought to everything.

Keevandrie watched, satisfied. "You see? The door remembers who built it."

Sydney felt something in her go very, very still. The pain she had caused Garrett proved nothing except that Keevandrie still believed ownership was permanent. That a thing built once stayed built, stayed owned, stayed answerable forever to whoever had shaped it first.

Sydney knelt beside Garrett anyway, even with Keevandrie's Magic actively working against him… Some things mattered more than tactical distance.

"Garrett. Can I?"

He looked at her through the pain. His jaw was locked, but he managed one word. "Yes."

Sydney opened her sight fully. Ignoring Keevandrie entirely, she focused only on the lattice lighting up beside Garrett's scar.

She didn't reach for the scar itself. Didn't touch the Living Threshold's foundational architecture at all. They still needed that road, still needed whatever it might eventually let them do to the thing knocking from the other side of it.

She isolated one function. Just one. Creator recognition. Control. Recall. Obedience. The whole command layer Keevandrie had built into the lattice, the leash she still believed ran all the way back to her own hand.