Page 70 of Mating Her Dragon

Sydney's whole body settled, anchored, oriented. He was home, exactly where she needed him to be.

She studied the road a moment longer. The consent architecture held steady beneath her attention, calm and certain. Leviathan could not cross.

She could.

Garrett felt Han rise behind his own eyes, sharp and ready. He felt Kara rise inside Sydney to match the Dragon King. Around them, the small gathering had gone quiet, some of the joy of the last hour shifting into something else, something watchful. Sydney and Garrett stayed at the center of it, hands locked together, facing the same direction.

Sydney turned her head and looked at him.

"Still yes?" she asked.

Garrett understood immediately that she wasn't asking about the Mating. That was done. Sealed. Finished, and permanent, and his.

She was asking about the next thing. The road. Whatever waited at the other end of it, hungry and furious and certain it had already won.

Garrett looked at his Mate. Then he looked past her, toward the place on the horizon only she could fully see– the road to Hell, quiet now, waiting.

"Still yes," he said.

Sydney smiled– not recklessly. There was no bravado.

She was simply certain, all the way down. She turned toward the threshold.

Leviathan had waited a century for Garrett's Mating to finally open the road. It had.

He simply hadn't understood until this exact moment which direction Sydney Kavanaugh intended to travel first.

16

Sydney stared down the road. Hell waited patiently and terribly on the other side of it. Garrett's hand was warm and solid in hers, and one thought was quite clear: step through.

She stood perfectly still. Then, no longer just staring at it, she read the architecture, and the architecture told her something her instincts hadn't caught up to yet.

The road didn't connect places. Not the way a Portal did. It did not go from point to point, door to door, one Realm's floor lining up with another's. Keevandrie hadn't built a Portal at all. She'd built something that connected souls. Something that anchored one specific soul on one side to whatever waited on the other, so that a Demon Lord who should never have been able to remain in the Mortal Realm could stay tethered to Garrett across the gap between everything. Which meant Sydney didn't need to go anywhere.

"Oh," she said.

Garrett went instantly, visibly tense. "No."

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You said oh."

"That's not a sentence, or a question."

"It's never just an oh with you."

Fair, honestly. But this time it worked in his favor. "I don't have to go anywhere," Sydney told him.

Garrett's whole body seemed to unclench half an inch. "That is the first good sentence you've said in several minutes."

She almost laughed. Instead, she explained it– quickly, because she could feel the pressure on the other side of the threshold, patiently waiting, and she didn't want to give it time to get curious about what she was doing. Her body would stay right there, feet planted on California dirt, wind moving her soiled ceremony dress. She only needed to extend her awareness down the road– her Magical authority, her self, the part of her that could see architecture and edit it. The completed Mating Bond gave her more than enough stability to reach that far without losing her grip on the way back.

Garrett gave her the coordinates. He always did.

"Rules," she said, because this entire road trip had never once been about throwing caution away at the finish line. "I stay here, physically. I keep hold of you the whole time. I send my Magic through, not myself, and I don't open the inbound side no matter what he offers me. The second you say home, I come back."

Garrett's jaw tightened. "And if you cannot come back?"