Page 38 of Mating Her Dragon

Then she saw exactly where the scar was sitting, and her blood went cold. Not inside the Mating Bond. Beside it. Close enough– close enough that when Garrett's door finally opened, fully, during the Ceremony, the scar would sit directly in the path of everything that came pouring through.

"I need you to open the Mating Bond a little farther," Sydney said carefully.

"How much?"

"Not all the way."

"That was not a measurement, Sydney."

"A crack," she said. "Just a crack."

Garrett hesitated only a moment before he did it. She felt it happen, felt his side of the braid ease open by the smallest possible increment, a door cracked an inch on its hinges.

And the scar reacted.

It wasn’t an enormous reaction. No Demon clawing its way out, nothing bursting through in a rush of fire and teeth. Just the blackened edge deepened and pulled, very slightly, toward the widening gap.

And somewhere impossibly far away, Sydney felt it again. The same recognition from the desert campground. The same sense of something turning its head.

Garrett slammed the Mating Bond shut so fast Sydney felt the snap of it in her own chest. Then there was only silence.

They stared at each other in the pale morning light. Sydney felt the whole shape of it arrange itself, cold and clear, in front of her.

That night, Garrett slept badly.

Not screaming, not thrashing, just restless in a way she was learning to recognize, his jaw tight even in sleep, one hand curled against his own chest like he was holding something in. Through the Mating Bond, she could feel the scar sitting there, quiet and raw, and she knew– with the same certainty she knew almost everything about Magic now– that she could reach in and smooth it over. Not heal it. Just quiet it. Let him rest.

She almost did it. Her hand actually lifted, halfway to his chest, before she stopped.

He didn't ask me to.

That was the whole of it, really. Not whether she could. She could do a great many things now that she'd never asked anyone's permission to test. But this wasn't hers to fix just because she had the power to, and he happened to be asleep and wouldn't know until it was already done. That was exactly the kind of decision made for someone that she'd spent this entire trip promising she'd never make again.

So instead, she just lay there, her hand flat against his chest where the scar sat quiet beneath his skin. She let him work through the night the hard way, the way he'd chosen to survive every other night before this one.

In the morning, she'd ask if he wanted help. If he said yes, she'd give it gladly.

He didn't wake until dawn, and when he did, he found her already watching him and didn't ask what she'd been doing all night. He just reached for her hand, still resting over his heart, and held it there.

“Well,” she thought. “There's our answer.”

Leviathan wasn't waiting to get back into Garrett.

She understood it before she said it, and she made herself say it anyway. Garrett needed to hear it before his own mind arrived at the wrong conclusion and dug its claws in.

"He's not waiting for you," Sydney said.

Garrett looked at her, something cracking open behind his eyes. It was the beginning, she could already tell, of exactly the wrong thought.

"You're not the destination," Sydney said, before he could get there.

He went very still. She touched her own chest, lightly, over the place where her half of the braid lived.

"I am."

The words hung there between them. Sydney watched the full, terrible shape of it land on Garrett in the same way it had landed on her.

Leviathan didn’t want Garrett because he had already had Garrett. For a hundred years, he'd had everything Garrett was– his body, his name, his face worn like a mask. Garrett had been useful to him, once, in exactly the ways a Dragon Guardsman was useful to something that wanted to use war as a weapon.