Page 21 of Waking Her Dragon

Whatever was squatting, seething beyond that weeping pile of rocks desperately wanted Garrett to die. It wanted his heart to stop. It wanted the barrier to fail so it could break through.

Yet, Leviathan’s forces kept intercepting his death, poisoning him just enough to cripple him, but always stepping in to keep his heart beating.

Why? Garrett thought, his mind spinning as the black sigil pulsed against his blurred vision. Why would a Demon Lord build a cage to hold back a monster, while using a tortured Dragon King and the Guardsman with whom he shared his soul to pin the door shut? What kind of game was Leviathan playing with the universe?

The temperature in the chamber instantly plummeted. The weeping condensation on the walls turned into a razor-sharp glaze of frost.

The cracking stone ceased its groaning. The frantic, churning rhythm of the dark waters smoothed out, flattening into a dead, suffocating silence.

Leviathan had returned.

The Demon Lord didn't arrive with a grand explosion of Dark Magic or a violent display of rage. He merely manifested from the shadows near the weeping doorway, his presence eerily controlled. The severe wounds Aodhan had inflicted upon him during their last confrontation appeared completely healed, but beneath his pristine, terrifying facade, a chaotic, archaic fury rolled like lava under ice.

Leviathan didn't reach for his weapons. He didn't fuel the phantom fire burning in Garrett's lungs.

Instead, he casually walked to the center of the room, his dark gaze locking onto the iron spike lying next to Garrett on the floor. His expression wasn't one of sadism. It was one of pure, calculating curiosity.

And that was infinitely scarier than any physical violence.

“Who is she?” Leviathan asked. His voice was smooth, carrying the deep, resonant echo of a creature that had watched empires crumble.

Garrett stared back through a glaze of sweat and agony, his jaw locked. But the terrifying truth was, even if he wanted to scream an answer to protect himself, he genuinely couldn't. Aodhan’s vault was perfectly sealed. The name Sydney was a ghost, a baseline vibration without a face or a history attached to it.

Leviathan tracked the empty, fractured patterns of Garrett’s pupils and smiled faintly. It was obvious that he knew the memory banks were looted. He knew the amnesia was all-encompassing.

Shifting his trajectory, he inquired, “What is she?”

Garrett remained quiet, his breathing a shallow rasp against the frost-covered stone.

“She reached into The Abyss,” Leviathan murmured, tilting his head as he stepped closer, his heavy shadow falling completely over Garrett’s face. “My Abyss. No normal light should have pierced these waters. No standard Magic should have been able to trace the path of your pathetic cry.”

Garrett’s tactical mind, even half-destroyed by silver poisoning, caught the sharp weight of the phrasing. My Abyss were the words the Demon Lord had used.

The question ignited like a flare in the dark corners of Garrett's consciousness. Did Leviathan, the personification of Envy, truly own this primordial rot? Did he command the crushing weight of these elemental, folding bolts of Time and Space? Or was he merely a squatter– a powerful parasite hiding in the dark, using a captured Dragon King to anchor a door he didn't fully understand?

Leviathan’s smile widened, turning razor-sharp as he looked down at the bleeding Guardsman. “She will come,” the Demon Lord whispered.

Garrett’s entire body went ice-cold. A wave of profound dread bypassed his physical pain and struck his very core. She will come.

That was the nightmare. That was the singular, catastrophic outcome he had manually destroyed his own mind to prevent. He had sacrificed his memories, his Magic, and his sanity to build a wall of silence around her. He had screamed into the Void with the last shred of his strength, commanding her to flee the blast radius.

He had told her to run.

But as Leviathan’s quiet, confident chuckle echoed off the weeping black walls, Garrett stared into the shadows, a horrifying question settling into his chest.

Was she running, or was she already on her way?

Leaning down, Leviathan’s eyes turned to pools of inky, mocking ebony as he savored the cold terror radiating off Garrett.

“You sacrificed so much to build your little fortress of silence,” the Demon Lord murmured, his voice a smooth, toxic purr. “Yet it matters not. Mates are so terribly predictable. Give them a suffering beloved, and they will walk willingly into any cage you construct for them. She is already tracking you. She will march straight into my Abyss, and she will hand herself over simply to touch your face one last time.”

A violent spike of panic erupted in Garrett’s chest. The mental image of a cage snapping shut around the woman with the blond curls and the light blue Converse sneakers made his breath freeze in his throat. He tried to move, to get up and beat the Demon Lord to a bloody pulp as his soul screamed in denial.

But suddenly, something changed. Deep within the recesses of his looted mind, the panic was unceremoniously cut short.

A sound resonated through the dark chambers of his soul. It wasn't a growl, and it wasn't a snarl.

Han was laughing.