Page 59 of Mating Her Dragon

"Why? You could simply take it."

"I could," Sydney agreed. "I'm not going to."

Keevandrie didn't answer right away. When she finally spoke, some of the venom had gone out of her voice. It wasn’t gone, just banked. "You're a strange kind of dangerous."

"I get that a lot," Sydney said, and waited. “Now, answer my question.”

"She's being profoundly unhelpful," Carrick said, in the tone of a man who'd expected nothing else.

“Yeah, I got that, too,” Sydney sighed.

“You what?” Garrett and Carrick snapped in unison.

“I said, I got that, too.”

“When did you talk to Keevandrie? When did you…?”

Tapping her temple, she smiled. Garrett had seen that smile before and knew he wasn’t going to like her explanation.

He was right.

“Well, y’all were busy talkin’ so I let my mind do the walkin’ and asked Keevandrie what she built the Living Threshold to survive.”

Garrett was pissed. More than that, he was worried for his Mate, but he had to give her credit for using the best form of communication to get the answers they needed.

“And?” He pressed at the same time that Carrick said, “Out with it, Sydney.”

“Okay,” She drew out the word, spearing him with a look that said she was not pleased, but she went on to explain. “Like I said, she wouldn’t give me any answers, so I left.”

“And she can’t follow you back, right?”

“Duh!” Syd huffed. “She is locked down tight in the Council’s Prison. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

Exhaling slowly, Garrett nodded. Running his hand through his hair, he sighed, “I know you did what you thought was right. I just…”

“You were just worried.” She smiled. “I get that. Next time we’ll do it together.”

*****

“Deal.” Turning back to his call with Carrick, Garrett coaxed, “What were you saying, Carrick?”

"But the Council pulled one useful fact out of her records regardless. The Living Threshold can't achieve full bidirectional stability without a reciprocal Magical structure of comparable strength. A normal possession doesn't provide that. Garrett alone never provided that."

"But the Mating Bond does," Garrett said.

"That's the theory."

Which meant Leviathan hadn't simply been waiting for Sydney to grow powerful enough on her own. He'd been waiting for the two of them to voluntarily build the bridge that could finally carry him.

"Which means your theory appears to be right," Carrick said.

"You sound unhappy about that," Sydney said.

"Everyone is unhappy when your theories are right," Garrett said.

“Well, that is rude,” Sydney sniffed. “But I guess I get it.”

Somewhere in the conversation that followed, Garrett caught himself doing exactly what he'd promised himself back on a beach with wet jeans, that he'd stop doing. He was planning a Dragon Guard attack.