Page 57 of Mating Her Dragon

"I am not hovering."

"You're six-foot-four. You don't hover. You loom."

He didn't argue that one. Instead, he stood there a moment longer, quietly checking something inside himself that he hadn't dared check too closely until now.

The lattice around his scar was quiet.

Keevandrie's command layer was gone. It was still severed clean, exactly as Sydney had left it. He could feel the scar itself. The wound was still there, the Living Threshold still exactly what it had always been. But for the first time in a hundred years, nothing in that architecture answered to anyone but him.

"She cannot command us again," Han said, simple and certain.

Garrett stood with that for a long moment. It wasn't a large feeling, not dramatic, nothing that demanded an audience. Just relief, quiet and unfamiliar, settling into a place in his chest that had held tension for so long he'd nearly forgotten what the absence of it felt like.

"What exactly are you doing?" he finally asked, crossing to sit across from her.

Sydney turned one of the sketches toward him. Then a second, overlaid slightly against the first.

"This one's Keevandrie's Living Threshold," she said. "This one's ours."

She meant the Mating Bond. Garrett studied the two side by side. Even without her ‘Special One’ sight, he could see enough of the shapes to understand what she meant. They were not identical, not remotely, but certain pieces fit together with an unsettling precision that told him this wasn't coincidence at all.

He hated that immediately.

"They're not the same," Sydney said. "But Keevandrie built the Living Threshold to create a stable road between two beings, two Realms. It's missing something ours already has."

"What?"

"Permission."

She reminded him of the two doors she'd shown him, inside their braided Bond, sitting quietly on either side. There was his and hers, each answerable only to the person whose side it occupied.

When the Ceremony was completed, those doors wouldn't disappear. They'd simply open, and only because both of them chose it.

The deepest law of the Mating Bond, Sydney explained, wasn't power, or Fate, or even love. It was consent. That was why part of the official Mating Ceremony had each person answer the question ‘Do you take this person…’ Nothing crossed unless the person whose boundary was being crossed allowed it. That was why coercion couldn't complete a Mating. Why Fate itself couldn't override a no.

Keevandrie's threshold had no such rule.

She'd built it around domination. Access. Function. It assumed that sufficient power, that brute force alone opened the road, with no regard whatsoever for who stood on either side of it.

Their Bond assumed the opposite. Power did not equal permission.

There it was again, the thing Sydney had learned standing beside a fraying chapel Charm, now sitting at the center of everything.

"I think I can make the Living Threshold inherit our rule," Sydney said.

Garrett stared at her.

"Not destroy the scar," she added quickly. "Not close the road. Not stop the Mating Ceremony. Just… Well, rewrite the threshold so it obeys the same law our Mating Bond does."

She stopped, pushed some runaway curls back into the bun atop her head, and went on, "Think of it like changing the locks."

"That phrase sounded considerably less alarming yesterday."

She explained the rest of it methodically, the way she explained everything now. It didn't take long for Garrett to feel the shape of the plan assembling itself, piece by careful piece.

Leviathan expected the completed Mating to flood the Living Threshold with enough Magic to make the old road traversable again. He was probably right about that much. But if Sydney integrated the Mating Bond's consent architecture into Keevandrie's threshold before it activated, or in the same instant it did, the outcome changed completely.

Leviathan could knock. He simply could not enter. Not unless Sydney invited him in, and she had precisely zero intention of ever doing that.