Page 48 of Mating Her Dragon

She looked out at the filament only she could see. It was still there, thin and steady, disappearing toward the horizon.

"She invited the Special One."

Pausing, she made sure she said precisely the right words.

"She's getting Sydney Kavanaugh."

Garrett's mouth twitched, just slightly, the ghost of something that wasn't quite a smile but was trying very hard to become one. He knew, better than almost anyone alive, exactly what kind of enormous, stubborn, world-rearranging pain in the ass Keevandrie had just summoned into her life.

Keevandrie had set the trap.

Sydney intended to choose exactly how they walked into it.

11

Sydney was quiet.

Garrett hated Quiet Sydney. Talking Sydney was manageable. Sarcastic Sydney was familiar territory he'd learned to navigate months ago. But Sydney was sitting in the passenger seat on the drive back toward the coast, staring out the window with an expression that meant she was constructing something terrible behind her eyes. That was a threat level he had no adequate tactical response for.

"Say it," Garrett said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you're building in there."

"You make me sound dangerous."

He looked at her.

"Okay, fair," Sydney admitted. Then, after a moment, she added, "I don't want to follow the filament."

Garrett experienced one entire, beautiful second of relief.

"I want to make Keevandrie think I did."

The relief died instantly.

Sydney laid it out for him carefully. Garrett listened the way he listened to any operational briefing– closely, methodically, already cataloging every point where it could go wrong.

Keevandrie had activated that containment marker specifically to see whether Sydney could detect it. Sydney had found it. Severed the beacon. Triggered the stored message. Which meant Keevandrie already knew the Special One had taken the bait far enough to locate the trap.

What she didn't know was what Sydney intended to do next.

Sydney wanted to give her exactly what she expected– movement along the return filament. Not Sydney herself. Not the Mating Bond, not Garrett's Living Threshold, nothing close to either of those. Just enough of her own Magical signature moving down the line to look, from Keevandrie's side of it, like the Special One testing the route.

"You want to knock on Keevandrie's door?" Garrett said.

"More like ring the bell and run."

"That is not better, Sydney."

But it wasn't a bad idea, and Garrett hated that it wasn't.

The Council was already monitoring every known marker connected to Keevandrie's old signature. The instant Keevandrie reacted to Sydney's pulse– strengthened the filament, activated another marker, tried to reroute the connection, pulled on it herself– that reaction would create new Magical activity. Trackable activity.

One line gave them direction. Multiple lines, responding in sequence, gave them something far more valuable: Location.

They didn't have to chase Keevandrie across half the state. They could make her reveal herself. Old Garrett would have said no before Sydney finished the sentence.