Page 61 of Mating Her Dragon

But he agreed.

The past couple of weeks had flown by with traveling and stopping at whatever caught their eye. Sometimes a place was so peaceful they spent a couple of nights just enjoying the ambiance.

So, he knew with all certainty that two days was enough time to get the small handful of people who actually mattered out to California. Enough time for Council containment to stage nearby without turning their quiet, unmarked bluff into a fortress.

Two days.

That night, he sat with his notebook again.

The page didn't feel hostile this time, the way it had back on the road, before Keevandrie, the scar, and the road to Hell had taken on a shape he understood.

His first line was still there, waiting. “I choose you.”

He finally knew what came after it. He wrote a little more: not because the Universe placed you in my path. Then he stopped himself, deliberately, saving the rest for the one place it actually belonged.

Sydney walked past a moment later, slowing just slightly, leaning at an angle that was in no way subtle.

Garrett closed the notebook.

"Absolutely not."

"I wasn't looking."

"You were physically leaning sideways."

"That's not illegal."

Before bed, Sydney tested the theory– carefully, deliberately, on a small Magical model of the threshold rather than anything real. She took the blueprint they'd copied from Keevandrie's control room, added the consent structure copied conceptually from their own Bond, and built a tiny, simulated path between the two.

Then she pushed against it, gently, from the outside.

Nothing passed.

She opened the inner side instead, deliberately, the way the real Mating Bond would open during the Ceremony.

The path flowed outward, clean and easy, exactly as intended.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Proof of concept. Not proof it would hold against something as old and hungry as Leviathan. But it was enough. It was enough to build the rest of the plan on, enough to walk toward the bluff in two days with something more solid than hope.

Garrett looked out at the dark shape beyond the window. Two days. His Mating Ceremony. His Mate. A road to Hell waiting patiently somewhere beneath all of it.

For the first time, none of those things felt like contradictions. They felt like choices.

Leviathan had been waiting for the Mating to open a door. In two days, Garrett and Sydney intended to open one. They simply had no intention of letting him choose which way it swung.

14

Tomorrow.

Sydney woke with the word already sitting in her chest, fully formed, before she'd even opened her eyes.

Tomorrow, I am Mating Garrett Acheson.

She lay there a moment, waiting for the terror to arrive. The nerves. Some appropriately dramatic wave of existential panic to match the size of what tomorrow actually meant.

It didn't come.