12. Behind the Door #2
Garrett stared at the notebook, his tactical mind turning over everything they'd learned. “He wants inside the Guard's protections.”
Carrick's expression hardened. “Wards. Clan locations. Council defenses.”
“Anything my signature can reach,” Garrett said. His gaze shifted to Sydney. A darker thought settled over him.
“But there's something else.” Ginnie looked down at the notebook, her brow furrowing. “Sydney's is different.”
Garrett's attention snapped to her. “Different how?”
“Brighter. Stronger.” Ginnie studied the pattern, then slowly shook her head. “I don't know why.”
Nobody knew why. But the blue flame in the dark was screaming.
"Why me?" Garrett asked aloud, his voice dropping into a tight, strained whisper that barely carried across the quiet room.
He wasn't looking at his family for answers.
He was looking into the empty air, demanding a response from the smooth, shifting malice lingering behind the stone door of his mind.
"Out of all the Guardsmen, all the captured Warriors... why did you spend years breaking me?"
Leviathan's response didn't carry the generic, bloated flattery of a standard villain. It was calculated to cut straight through Garrett's defenses and inflict maximum psychological damage.
“Because you were magnificent, Garrett,” the Demon Lord purred, the elegant cadence of the voice twisting like a blade inside his skull.
“Not because you were the strongest, or the wisest. You were ideal because you were an unmapped junction.
You were a trusted Guardsman of the Golden Fire Clan, of the Acheson bloodline granting structural clearance to your Clan's perimeter network. You were the mortal vessel bonded directly to an ancient Dragon King, providing a pipeline to Primordial Fire. And most beautifully of all...” The entity paused, the emerald fire of its eyes gleaming in the dark of Garrett's thoughts.
“...you were already emotionally bound to the Special One. The Dragon Queen. You were never the experiment, Garrett.”
Another long, agonizing silence stretched through his mind, then Leviathan kept right on going, “You were the entrance.”
The revelation reframed years of agonizing captivity, solitary confinement, and torture into a brutal, terrifying truth.
Garrett’s posture fractured, his shoulders sinking an inch against the wall as a sudden, suffocating wave of guilt crashed over him.
He thought of every step he had taken since his rescue.
Every piece of his life he had reclaimed.
Every connection he had meticulously rebuilt.
The sick conclusion arrived before Garrett could stop it. He hadn't been healing. He'd been feeding the doorway. Every connection he'd rebuilt. Every person he'd allowed himself to love again. Sydney. Grey. Carrick. What if every one of them had simply given Leviathan another way in?
No!
The word didn't arrive as a mental whisper.
It slammed through the Mating Bond with the force of an iron shield, instantly intercepting the toxic spiral of his thoughts.
Garrett hadn't spoken a single word aloud, but Sydney caught the self-inflicted wound the exact microsecond it formed within his consciousness.
"No," Sydney said fiercely aloud, stepping right into his space and locking her hands onto his forearms, forcing him to look down into her blazing blue eyes.
Garrett swallowed hard, his voice raw. "No, what, Syd?"
"You do not get to turn our love into another crime, Garrett," she commanded, her jaw set with absolute, unyielding iron.
"He used it," Garrett whispered, a broken plea bleeding through his tactical defenses. "Every time I reached for you, every time I remembered Grey or helped Carrick, I gave him another permission token. I fed the road."
"He corrupted it," Sydney corrected instantly, her White Dragon Magic thrumming with a quiet, dangerous intensity beneath her skin.
"That is not the same thing. Leviathan takes connections created by pure love and twists them into weapons because he is the Lord of Envy.
It is his SOP. He cannot build anything of his own.
Our answer isn't to isolate ourselves, Garrett.
It's to weaponize the connection right back at him. "
Stepping closer to the bed, Ginnie studied Garrett and Sydney, her gaze moving between them as the energy of their Mating Bond vibrated through the room.
“I think I know where we have to attack it.”
Every eye turned toward her.
“Everything we've seen points back to the separation Leviathan created inside Garrett. The door. The barrier between Garrett and Han. The place where Sydney loses him during the void.”
Carrick frowned. “Break the barrier, break the road?”
“That's my theory.”
Garrett's jaw tightened. “And if you're wrong?”
Ginnie looked at Sydney, then back at him. “Then we find out very quickly.”
Nobody laughed.
Ginnie continued, “But if we can restore the natural connection between you, Han, Sydney, and Kara, your Magical signature should change. The road may lose the protection it's been hiding behind.”
Carrick straightened. “And the wards?”
“They may finally be able to recognize Leviathan's frequency as something foreign.”
“May?” Garrett repeated.
“May,” Ginnie confirmed. “I'm not promising you something I can't prove.”
She took a breath. “The problem is, we can't break the barrier from out here. My Tracking Spell already tried. Han can't breach it from his side. Which means we need another way in.”
Sydney didn't look away from Garrett's face. “We need someone who can cross through Garrett's side of the Mating Bond without touching the stolen anchor architecture.” Turning her head, she looked at Ginnie. “I'm going in.”
"No," Garrett instantly commanded, his Warrior instincts flaring in pure panic.
Sydney offered him a small, tight smile. "Oh, now you understand how annoying that word is?"
"Sydney, be serious," Garrett pressed, his grip tightening on her wrists.
"Leviathan wants access to Kara. He's been targeting your blue flame all morning.
If you step inside that hidden compartment, you might be marching right into a trap.
You could hand him the exact frequency he needs to complete his network breach. "
"She's right, Sydney," Ginnie agreed. "It is an astronomical risk.
But you are the only asset whose connection can reach Garrett's human soul without passing through the corrupted road. Your Mating Bond is stronger than the Demon Lord’s bridge.
It connects one soul to another, completely bypassing the external locks. "
Kara’s voice echoed through Sydney’s lips with a low, dangerous rumble. “The thief has touched our Magic already, my Girl. He has borrowed our resonance to light his stones.”
Sydney nodded, her eyes flashing with a white-hot spark. "Exactly."
“Then we stop allowing him to borrow it,” Kara growled, her Warrior’s pride and strength rising to match the threat.