Page 79 of Mating Her Dragon

“Kara?”

Nothing.

“Kara,” Sydney tried again, more amused than annoyed.

From very far away, distracted, “Busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Anything else?”

Garrett heard enough of that exchange bleed through his own connection to Han to catch the shape of it. Then he felt Han's response land dry and immediate. “Do not involve me.”

Garrett laughed– actually laughed, helplessly, right there with his Mate on his chest. He felt her shaking, too, with the same laughter. The two of them caught in one perfect, ridiculous moment of pure release before everything went warm and serious again.

Then, the mark came afterward. Quietly. Warmth first, spreading slowly and deliberately across his skin, over his heart, right where he somehow already knew it belonged before he'd ever seen it. He felt Sydney go still against him at the exact same instant.

"Uh," Sydney said. "Garrett?"

He looked.

“Is my shoulder catching fire?”

“No, Mo chridhe, it is the Mating Mark.”

There it was. The outward mark of their Mating, the Blessing given to every Guardsman and his Mate by the Universe, and theirs was spectacular. Settled into his skin as if it had always been meant to be there was the oldest Celtic sigil known to all, the Serch Bythol. It was two intertwined Celtic knots forming a central circle, representing two souls joined forever in body, mind, and spirit– and it was absolutely perfect.

For a century, his body and soul had carried marks other people put on him. Scars. Torture. Keevandrie's architecture, carved into him without his consent, without his knowledge, without a single choice offered to him at any point.

This one he had chosen. This one meant something he couldn’t completely describe in words but felt with every fiber of his being.

It didn't erase anything that had come before it. It existed right alongside all of it– his body carrying, now, both the evidence of pain he had survived and the mark of love he had chosen, and somehow that felt like the truest thing that had ever happened to him.

Sydney examined it almost immediately, because of course she did.

“Does mine look exactly the same?”

“It does.” Then he immediately added, “Please stop poking it."

"I'm not poking."

"You are absolutely poking."

"I'm conducting research."

"With your finger."

"Very scientific finger," Sydney said, entirely unrepentant.

He looked at her Mating Mark again– small, warm, settled just over her jugular, unmistakably real– and something in him he hadn't braced for came undone all over again. That Mating Mark, the one on her soft, porcelain skin, meant she'd chosen this. Chosen him. And whatever the Universe wanted to stamp on either of them afterward, it was only ever confirming a decision she'd already made freely, with her whole self, twice over now.

Afterward, quiet settled over the Airstream like something physical. Sydney was tucked against his chest, the Pacific dark and steady outside the window, the little trailer creaking gently around them. Their Mating Bond sat warm and open between them, and Garrett felt utterly wrung out and completely at peace in a way he had no memory of ever feeling before, in any century.

"So, we're really Mated now," Sydney said into his chest.

"We were really Mated this afternoon."

"I know." She tilted her head, looking at the Mating Mark. "Now we have accessories."