Page 36 of Saving Her Dragon

Sydney clung to the feeling of his fingers around hers, her mind frantically assembling defensive logic. Reflex. Muscle memory. Some unconscious response to her touch.

There were explanations. There had to be.

Except the terrifying void in her soul hadn't closed. Garrett was physically touching her, but spiritually, he was still completely gone.

Then, the strangest thing happened.

Right before her eyes, Garrett’s face changed. It didn't twist into an evil smirk, and his features didn't turn sinister. It wasn’t some horror movie. It was infinitely worse. The natural relaxation of deep sleep vanished, replaced by an absolute, terrifying blankness.

His jaw wasn't tense, but it wasn't loose either. His features became a smooth, expressionless mask. It didn't look like her Mate was sleeping. It looked like his body was a completely empty house, the lights turned off and the owner gone.

Sydney felt a cold, numbing dread wash over her skin, freezing the blood in her veins.

“That is Garrett's body,” Kara whispered inside her mind. The Dragon Queen’s voice was hollow, stripped of all its usual majesty and sass, sounding entirely unmoored. “But I cannot feel Garrett.”

The physical evidence told her Garrett was right there. Her Bond told her something entirely different. Profound dissociation. Some psychological defense mechanism. An unmapped quirk of a fractured human-Dragon Bond.

Then, the anomaly simply ended.

Less than a minute after it had begun, Garrett suddenly inhaled a sharp, deep pocket of air. His chest heaved violently beneath her hand. His fingers instantly tightened around hers. His grip turned hard and solid.

The Mating Bond didn't just open… it slammed back into place with the force of a localized shockwave. Pure warmth, fierce protection, and the unmistakable, bright resonance of Garrett’s soul flooded back into her consciousness, instantly vaporizing the freezing void.

Sydney gasped aloud, stumbling back a half-step against the edge of the bedside table.

Garrett’s eyes fluttered open. He blinked against the dim moonlight, his expression soft, sleepy, and entirely, beautifully normal. He looked up at her, his brow furrowing as he noticed her standing over him in the dark.

"Syd?" he murmured, his voice thick with sleep.

A hot, emotional tear escaped Sydney's eye, tracking down her cheek. She reached out, her fingers trembling as she pressed them against his jaw.

The soldier bolted upright in the bed, his blanket falling away as his hands locked onto her shoulders. "What's wrong? What happened? Did the bell go off? Did I move?"

Sydney swallowed the lump in her throat, shaking her head. "No. You didn't move a muscle."

Garrett immediately went into tactical investigation mode. He swung his legs out of bed, grabbing his phone from the nightstand to check the live security feed. He flicked his eyes to the mudroom door downstairs… No change. He checked the notebook… Untouched.

"Everything is secure, Sydney," Garrett said, his tactical brain trying to find the baseline. "The camera shows I've been flat on my back since midnight. I never left the bed."

"Garrett, listen to me," Sydney interrupted, her voice tight as she climbed onto the mattress beside him, forcing him to look at her. "Your body didn't move. But you weren't here."

In quiet, terrifying detail, she laid out exactly what she and Kara had experienced. She told him about the sudden, absolute void in the Mating Bond. She described the chilling, empty blankness that had settled over his features while his physical hand gave her the familiar squeeze.

The color drained from Garrett’s face. He set the phone down on the nightstand with a slow, deliberate movement, his fingers locking into tight fists. He didn't look at the camera feed anymore.

He went entirely inward, dropping his consciousness into the dark spaces of his mind– Han.

Inside him, the Dragon King was completely shaken. Han wasn't roaring with fury, and he hadn't witnessed an external threat breaching their sanctuary. The Winged Warrior was vibrating with a deep, systemic shock because he had just experienced the exact same terrifying void from the inside out.

“I remember us drifting off, Lad,” Han admitted, his deep mental voice trembling with a rare, raw vulnerability. “Then... the darkness came. Not a dreamless sleep. A void. A complete absence of existence. And then I woke up the exact second your eyes opened just now.”

Garrett’s chest tightened. A cold trickle of sweat ran down his spine.

This time, his body hadn't physically moved. He hadn't marched a quarter mile to a creek bed, and he hadn't stolen anything. He had stayed perfectly still under the covers.

And that made it infinitely more terrifying. Whatever happened during those thirty seconds had happened entirely inside him. His body had remained exactly where it belonged while both he and Han lost the same piece of time.

"Maybe I'm dissociating," Garrett said quietly, his eyes fixed on the blank notebook page. Shaking his head, he kept going, “I hate that word. It’s a sterile piece of medical vocabulary I picked up from the doctors during rehab. Never made any sense, and here I am using it.”