Page 72 of Mating Her Dragon

"That belongs to me."

Sydney looked at the threshold. Then at him.

"No. It doesn't."

That was when he got cruel.

Switching tactics, he reached for Garrett– and the asshole actually tried to use a hundred years of her Mate's captivity like a blade.

"Come, vessel," Leviathan seethed, and the word cracked through the space between Realms like a whip.

Nothing.

"Come, door." He whistled, sharp and mocking, like he was calling a dog to heel.

Still nothing.

"Come. Now. You worthless waste of Magic!" The roar of it shook the road itself, black Magic churning and boiling behind him.

When he was still standing there alone, denied, Leviathan bellowed — a sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once, from underneath her feet and inside her skull at the same time — "You fucking Dragon! You only survived because I allowed it! I gave you a gift!"

The ground shook. Real or Magic, Sydney didn't waste a second figuring out which. She didn't care. She was pissing him off, and right now, that was the only weapon that mattered.

"The last hundred years of your life were a gift!" he roared, louder, uglier, spit and fire behind every word. "You ungrateful piece of shit!"

Sydney went ice-still in the center of all of it. Calm, in the eye of a storm built entirely out of someone else's rage. She'd already had this argument once, with someone else who thought ownership could be built out of cruelty– and she'd won that one too.

"He was mine for a century," Leviathan snarled, eyes flaring molten red, his tail lashing behind him hard enough to crack against something she couldn't see.

"No," Sydney said. "You had him for a century."

There was a difference, and she wanted the son of a bitch to choke on it. Possession and captivity weren't the same word, no matter how badly he needed them to be.

"And now," Sydney said, "you don't."

That was when Leviathan made his mistake.

He slammed against Garrett's old scar– a brutal, metaphysical gut-punch, all his weight behind it at once– assuming, the way Keevandrie had assumed, that it was still the weak point, still a door he could kick down from the outside.

It wasn't. Keevandrie's command layer was gone, severed from the architecture by Sydney's own hand when they'd finally confronted the Sorceress. The consent architecture governed the threshold now, and the fully completed Mating Bond ran through the road like steel rebar driven through old, cracked stone.

So, when Leviathan threw himself against it…

Sydney saw everything.

Not his thoughts. Not omniscience. The pathway itself, lit up all at once like a nerve struck by lightning– every anchor, every tendril, every last black filament of Abyssal Magic still fused into Garrett's Living Threshold, blazing bright enough to burn.

Leviathan thought he was forcing the door open.

He was handing her the map to rip it out by the roots.

"Garrett," she said through the Bond, fast, because some of those threads ended in his scar, and she was never, ever doing this without asking first– not even here, not even now, with Hell screaming at the other end of the line.

"Yes," he said back, instantly. No hesitation. She felt exactly what he meant by it. Not "do whatever it takes." Not blanket permission for the rest of forever. Permission for this. This cut, and only this one. Sever what belonged to Leviathan. Leave the rest– the scar, the history, the century of torture– exactly where it was, because that was his, and no one, not even her, got to edit it away.

She looked at the foreign threads crawling through him. The pieces that had never belonged there. The road Leviathan had gorged himself on for a hundred years like it was owed to him.

And she understood, in the space of a single heartbeat, that she didn't need to destroy him. She couldn't rewrite him even if she wanted to– it was the old rule Shavon had drilled into her from the very beginning: the Light cannot survive without the Dark. Each has its purpose, to bring some balance to the world.