Page 40 of Mating Her Dragon

"But something could turn that scar into a passage," Ginnie went on. "Something with enough force behind it. Enough Magic, concentrated in exactly the right place, at exactly the right moment."

The silence on the line stretched out. Sydney felt every person on that call arrive, individually, at the same conclusion.

The completed Mating.

Still theory. Not certainty. But theory heavy enough that nobody argued with it.

“The Council,” Carrick said, “will need time. Records on Abyssal soul-scarring, on residual possession architecture, on anything resembling a completed Mating Bond interacting with a wound like this one, if they existed, will not be easy to locate. It could take days, maybe longer.”

Which meant, for now, they had somewhere to go that wasn't back to Valentine. Garrett didn't say anything for a long while after the call ended.

Sydney watched it building in him anyway. She watched the particular, familiar shape of a thought he hadn't said out loud yet, one she already knew the exact contours of, because she'd have thought it too, in his position.

"This is because of me," Garrett said finally.

"No."

Not gentle. Not soft. She said it the way she'd think no to a piece of foreign Magic trying to claim territory it had no right to.

"This is because of Leviathan," Sydney said. "Not you. He did this. He's the one who tore something out of you and left the shape of it behind. You didn't choose that. You didn't invite it. You survived it."

She watched him absorb it, watched the guilt try to find purchase and fail.

"And he made a mistake," Sydney said.

Garrett looked at her, wary. "Which mistake?"

Sydney looked back at the Mating Bond– at the place only she could see, at the scar sitting patient and hollow beside the braid, at the entire shape of the path Leviathan believed he was quietly building toward her. And found herself, despite everything, almost smiling.

"He left me a road," she said.

"Sydney."

"If he thinks our Mating opens a door to me…" She let the thought finish itself, cold and clear and entirely her own. "…then maybe we decide where the door goes."

9

Garrett had not stopped hearing her say it.

He left me a road.

Morning had come up gray and gold over the Pacific. Sydney sat across from him at the little Airstream table, drinking her coffee like she hadn't, roughly twelve hours earlier, casually announced her intention to potentially turn a Demon Lord's access route against him.

Garrett was staring at her. He couldn’t look away.

"You're doing it again," Sydney said, not looking up from her mug.

"Doing what?"

"Looking at me like you're trying to decide whether to kiss me or restrain me."

"Those are not mutually exclusive considerations."

She grinned, delighted, entirely too pleased with herself for a woman who had slept– Garrett was fairly certain– considerably better than he had. He'd been awake since well before dawn, running the same loop over and over: scar. Bond. Sydney. Leviathan. Every tactical instinct he possessed had arrived, independently and repeatedly, at the same conclusion.

Destroy the road.

Except Sydney had already proven, with a fraying chapel Charm and a wound that refused every attempt at healing, that some things could not simply be erased because a person wanted them gone.