Page 75 of Mating Her Dragon

"He's home." She crinkled her nose and winked. “Hell. Where he belongs. Where he is going to stay.”

Then the cost hit her all at once, the way she probably should have expected but somehow hadn't. Her knees buckled. Garrett caught her again. Of course he did. He hadn't let go the entire time– and Sydney realized she was exhausted on a level she had genuinely never experienced, not after the black-thread fight in New Mexico, not after editing Keevandrie's Elven lattice, not after any of it.

Her hands were shaking. Her vision had gone soft and unreliable at the edges. When she wiped her nose, her fingers came away red.

Ginnie was there almost instantly, checking her over with quick, steady hands. Garrett looked like he was about four seconds from bodily picking her up, carrying her into the Airstream, and declaring the entire planet canceled until further notice.

"I'm fine," Sydney said.

"No," said Garrett, Ginnie, Carrick, and– muffled, from somewhere near the cake table– Bonnie, all at exactly the same time.

She let it go. Let them fuss. Let Garrett half-carry her to sit down, let Maggie shove a plate of something sugary into her hands whether she wanted it or not. It turned out that sealing a hole between Realms cost something, and it turned out, too, that being taken care of afterward wasn't a failure of anything.

It was just allowed.

Later– minutes, maybe, though time had gone a little soft around the edges– she was sitting with her back against Garrett's chest, his arms around her, the two of them still not quite ready to rejoin the party happening a few feet away. She checked one more time, out of habit, or maybe just because she wanted to.

The Mating Bond was strong and open. Four presences, woven together exactly the way they were always meant to be. And beside it, Garrett's scar.

Still there. Still his.

But something about it had changed. It no longer looked like a door-shaped wound, because no door was attached to it anymore. No road. No architecture straining toward somewhere else.

It was just a scar.

"Garrett," she said.

He went instantly alert. "What?"

"The scar."

He went still, bracing.

"What about it?"

Sydney smiled, and it reached all the way up into her exhausted, aching chest.

"It's just a scar."

Not healed. Not erased. Not Magically wiped clean like the century had never happened, because it had happened, and pretending otherwise would have been its own kind of theft. It simply didn't control anything anymore.

Garrett didn't say anything for a long moment. She felt it land in him through the Mating Bond instead. Something enormous settled, finally, into a shape that fit.

She looked out at the ocean, golden with the last of the afternoon light shining on it, and thought about everyone who had ever called Garrett a door. Keevandrie. Leviathan. Even Sydney herself, once, too many miles to count and a lifetime ago, staring at a scar and seeing only the wound.

A door was something built for passage. Garrett had never been that. Garrett was home.

The road to Hell was gone.

The road ahead was theirs.

17

Sydney still insisted she was fine, which was how Garrett knew, with total certainty, that she wasn't. His Mate was nothing if she wasn’t stubborn.

Ginnie crouched in front of her one more time, checking her eyes, her pulse, the color that still hadn't fully come back into her face. "She's depleted," Ginnie said finally, straightening up. "Not injured. She needs food, fluids, and sleep. In that order."

"Done," Garrett said.