Page 55 of Mating Her Dragon

"You may remember who made you," Sydney said quietly.

Keevandrie smiled.

"You do not answer her."

The command pathway broke. It wasn’t a violent separation. There was no fire or fury, it simply snapped, clean as a plucked wire severed at the root.

Garrett's pain stopped instantly. Han surged forward through the Mating Bond, something fierce and triumphant in it.

Keevandrie's expression changed for the first time since they'd walked into the room. Sydney had just done something Keevandrie had apparently never believed possible.

She had rewritten a Sorceress's ownership out of the thousands-of-years-old architecture, without destroying a single piece of the structure itself.

Garrett stood, slowly. Sydney watched every ounce of him settle back into place, solid and whole.

"My name," he said with authority, "is Garrett Acheson."

That was all. No speech, no further explanation. He didn't need one.

Keevandrie had called him door. Called him asset. Called him architecture for a century. At first as her own creation and then, apparently, still now, standing in the ruins of the room where she'd first built him.

He gave her his name instead, and it landed in the room like something enormous. Keevandrie ran.

Not out of weakness. Sydney understood that immediately, watching the calculation move across the Sorceress's face. No, Keevandrie ran the exact instant she understood the battlefield had changed, that whatever she'd expected to control here no longer answered to her at all.

She triggered something. It appeared to be a fold in the air, a hidden Portal Sydney felt begin unspooling before she consciously registered what it was. The Council team moved to block the physical exits. Garrett was already closing the distance, but Keevandrie's real escape was never going to be physical.

The Portal began to open. Keevandrie smiled. It was the smile of someone certain nothing could stop her in time.

"No," Sydney said.

The Portal stopped.

Keevandrie tried again. She used a different command, a different pathway threading through the old architecture, faster this time.

Sydney read it as it formed. "Closed."

It was gone in an instant. Sealed before it had finished opening.

Keevandrie stood in the middle of her own ruined control room. She was trapped now between Garrett, Sydney, Han, Kara, and a Council containment team that had already begun closing in around her.

Her afternoon, Sydney thought, had deteriorated considerably.

Before the restraints went on, Keevandrie looked at Sydney with something that might almost have been respect, if it hadn't been so cold.

"You think I am the one knocking on your door?"

Sydney went still.

Keevandrie's smile turned thin. "I built the threshold, child. I did not make what calls through it."

Sydney absorbed that slowly, feeling it settle into everything they already suspected. Keevandrie had built the road. She hadn't denied that. Hell, she hadn't tried to. But whatever was actively reaching through it, testing it, turning toward Garrett in a New Mexico desert weeks ago– that belonged to somebody else.

It belonged to someone they already had a very good guess about.

The Council's restraints were nothing like ordinary cuffs. They were layered, dense with suppression Magic, built specifically for offenders of Keevandrie's caliber. Sydney watched them settle into place and found, almost idly, that she could see exactly how they worked. Containment. Suppression. Portal-blocking. It was all woven through three separate layers.

Keevandrie watched her examining the cuffs. "You need me."