Page 73 of Mating Her Dragon

Leviathan wasn't broken architecture. He wasn't a wound that needed editing.

He was simply, catastrophically, standing somewhere he had no right to be.

And her authority had always been strongest against exactly that.

"You do not belong there," Sydney said– quietly and absolutely.

Meaning Garrett. Meaning never again.

The threads ripped free all at once, violent and total, and Leviathan roared– worse than any sound before it, worse than anything with a right to exist in a Realm meant for the living, a sound that seemed to tear the air itself.

Sydney turned and looked him dead in whatever passed for his eyes.

"You belong here."

Hell. His Realm. His side of a door that had never once been his to walk through.

But that wasn't enough. Banishment wasn't a lock. He was already in Hell– the problem had never been where he stood. It was that he could still reach out of it, again and again, forever, unless she did something about the road itself.

She looked at it now– the whole shape of it, stretched taut between his side and hers, straining. Keevandrie had built it. Garrett carried the scar of it. But the connection– the road, not the wound– had stopped serving any purpose except his.

The scar belonged to Garrett's history.

The road was just foreign architecture, squatting on top of it like a parasite.

It could go.

She had jurisdiction now. Permission. Full understanding of exactly how it had been built. Authority over the boundary itself. Everything this entire road trip had built toward slammed together in this one moment, on a bluff over the Pacific, her feet planted firmly on the bluff and her soul stretched taut across a gap between Realms.

"This road is closed," Sydney said.

Leviathan fought her. Hard. Nothing about tearing a hole shut between Realms was ever going to be gentle. The ancient threshold convulsed against her, resisting with heat that seared and pain that whited out her vision and a disorientation so total the ground beneath her real, physical feet seemed to tilt and drop away. For one terrifying, endless second, she felt the thread pointing home go thin as a hair. "Home," Garrett said, immediately, through the Mating Bond and out loud at once.

She felt him. Ocean. Wind. His hand, real and solid, around hers. The Mating Bond. Kara. Han, rising sharp behind Garrett's eyes. The Earth, and Mother Earth.

Home.

Sydney held firm.

Garrett didn't pour Magic into her. He didn't try to supercharge her, didn't do a single dramatic, heroic thing. Her anchor. Steady. A coordinate she could not lose no matter how hard the Abyss pulled at her.

“I'm here,” he said.

And that, it turned out, was enough, because Sydney didn't need more power. She needed somewhere to stand.

Leviathan tried one last thing when the force stopped working– not strength, but temptation. He offered Sydney knowledge. Power. Answers about the Special One that Shavon, apparently, had never bothered to give her. Something about the Dragons who had disappeared. Something about a Realm beyond the Mortal one she didn't yet have a name for.

"You do not even know what you are," he said, and something in it landed harder than she wanted to admit.

Sydney paused. Not because power tempted her. She'd had more power handed to her over the last few months than she knew what to do with, and none of it had ever once made her want more.

But answers. Answers, she wanted.

She sensed Kara go still, feeling the shift in her. Felt Garrett feel it too, through the Mating Bond, a fraction of a second behind.

She could almost feel Leviathan thinking that he had her right where he wanted her.

"Maybe," Sydney said.