Page 74 of Mating Her Dragon

Then she paused and exuded as much quiet confidence as she could.

"I'll figure it out."

She didn't need a Demon Lord to explain her to herself. Whatever the answer was, it could wait– and some distant, curious part of her filed the question away instead of throwing it out entirely, because a mystery that big didn't have to be solved today to matter.

Then she turned back to the actual work.

Not be gone. Not die. Something that matched exactly what she was– not a weapon, an authority.

"You do not belong in him," she said, and felt the last of Garrett's remaining Abyssal connections sever cleanly.

"You do not belong in my Realm," she said, and every black filament still reaching toward Earth recoiled like it had been burned.

"Stay where you belong," she commanded, and sealed the boundary shut behind the words.

The road collapsed– not toward her, but from the Hell side inward. The whole structure folded in on itself like a building coming down floor by floor. Leviathan realized, one half-second too late, that she'd never been standing on the road at all.

She'd been dismantling it out from under herself the entire time.

Sydney’s awareness got yanked sideways. Direction disappeared entirely. For one endless, terrifying second there was no Hell and no Earth, no up, no down, no Sydney at all.

Just between.

Then, Garrett– not his Magic– his presence, his hand, his voice, cut through the Nothingness like it was the only fixed point left in any Realm.

"Home."

She followed it.

Ocean. Sunlight. Salt on the wind. A ridiculous silver Airstream parked exactly where she'd left it. Coffee, somewhere, going cold but still smelling wonderful. A Dragon Guardsman who loomed over her instead of hovering, because he'd apparently decided a long time ago that looming was more efficient.

Sydney opened her eyes on the bluff. Garrett caught her, even though she'd technically never moved an inch.

"Okay," she said, because she had to say something and that was what came out.

"Okay?" Garrett repeated, like the word might mean something terrible.

"Hell sucks."

Somewhere behind them, Bonnie made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob. Nobody else moved at all. Carrick, Ginnie, Kellan, and Raven were frozen, watching, clearly having no idea what they'd just witnessed except that it had ended. Bonnie and Maggie looked like they'd missed the entire event and were simply relieved everyone was still standing.

Sydney looked inward, checking. The Living Threshold scar was still there, beside the Mating Bond, exactly where it had always been.

But the road attached to it was gone.

Garrett's history remained. The damage remained part of him. She hadn't touched that, hadn't wanted to, hadn't been able to, even if she had. But Leviathan's access was severed completely. The seam between Realms had closed. The Black Magic that had haunted every mile of their road trip was simply, finally, gone.

“He cannot reach us,” Kara said.

“He cannot reach me,” Han said, and there was a note in his tone that Sydney had never heard from him before. It was something that sounded, for a Dragon King who'd spent a century as a prisoner in his own soul, remarkably close to relief.

"Leviathan?" Garrett asked.

Sydney thought about the other shore. Reached for it, out of habit, and found nothing there to see anymore.

"Home," she said.

Garrett's face shifted to fear, quickly and sharply, as if he thought she meant she needed grounding again. Sydney shook her head and smiled instead.