Page 77 of Mating Her Dragon

Now, the woman he loved more than life itself was sitting on aluminum steps, wrapped in a blanket, complaining that somebody had stolen the last piece of cake. That was Sydney. His extraordinary, impossible woman, being wonderfully, gloriously ordinary again the second the world let her.

He sat down beside her.

"How are you?" he asked. Not Magically. Not checking her Magic or her scars or the state of the Mating Bond. Just asking his Mate: how are you?

Sydney considered the question with more care than he expected.

"Tired," she said. She paused, smiling slightly. "Happy."

Another beat, longer, like she was checking the word against something before she handed it to him. "Really, really happy."

Something in his chest loosened at that, all at once, more than he'd braced for.

"And you?" she asked.

He realized, turning the question over, that nobody had asked him that. Not since the scar had stopped being a door and started being just a scar. He searched himself for the answer instead of reaching for the easy one.

The road was gone. Leviathan was gone. Keevandrie had no claim left on him anywhere. His Mating Bond was open, warm, full. Han was quiet in the back of his mind. The Dragon King wasn’t asleep. He was peaceful.

"Free," Garrett said.

Not healed. He wasn't sure healed was even the right word for what a century like that did to a person. Not fixed, because there was nothing broken that needed mending anymore.

Free. He was free.

“You all right?” he asked Han, privately, because it seemed important to check.

Han was quiet for a long moment.

“I can hear myself,” Han said finally.

For a hundred years, Leviathan had always been there. Pressure. Intrusion. Someone else's weight occupying space that should have belonged only to Garrett and his Dragon King. Now there was just the two of them, and the Mating Bond, and Kara and Sydney on the other side of it, warm and undemanding.

“I like the quiet,” Han said.

Garrett felt it settle somewhere very deep and didn't try to say anything back. Some things didn't need an answer. They just needed to be heard.

He told Sydney she needed sleep. She agreed– far too easily, which should have warned him immediately, but he was tired too, and grateful, and not thinking as clearly as he probably should have been. He helped her inside, waited while she sat down on the edge of the bed, and started to step back to give her room.

"Where are you going?" Sydney asked.

"To let you sleep."

"Why?"

"Because you nearly collapsed an hour ago."

Sydney gave him a long, level stare that he was starting to recognize meant trouble in the very best possible sense.

"Garrett."

That tone. He knew that tone. He went instantly, thoroughly nervous.

She reached for his hand. "Still yes?"

He understood immediately what she was actually asking. Not the Mating Ceremony. Not Hell. Not tomorrow, or the road, or anything that had happened today. This. Them. Finishing what they'd started this afternoon, the last piece of the promise still waiting.

"You're exhausted," Garrett said, carefully.