Page 55 of Saving Her Dragon

"How did he move the physical objects if he wasn't possessing my limbs?" Garrett asked, his voice raw as he looked at the empty space on the dresser.

“Maybe the escalation explains it,” Ginnie said slowly, her fingers tightening around the edge of the notebook. “When the road was weak, Leviathan may have needed your physical body to establish the correspondence. That would explain the sleepwalking—the creek bed, the vanity, the things you remember physically touching.”

Garrett looked toward the empty space on the dresser. “And Grey's knife?”

“By then, four anchors were in place.” Ginnie shook her head. “I can't prove it yet, but the pathway may have become strong enough to move the object without moving you.”

"And the timing," Sydney picked up, her eyes wide as she looked at the digital clock on the nightstand. "3:42 AM. Why is the connection always keyed to that exact minute?"

Dr. Darcy Thorntree snapped her tablet open, her fingers rapidly scrolling through Garrett's neurological readings.

“The consistency bothers me,” she said.

Garrett frowned. “Meaning?”

“Neurological events don't usually care what time is on the clock. Something else does.” Darcy looked up from the screen. “I don't know why yet, but 3:42 isn't behaving like a symptom. It's behaving like a trigger.”

Garrett went entirely still.

FLASH.

A cold, white ceiling grid.

The bitter scent of burning chemicals.

The metal restraint table digging into his spine.

And directly above him, mounted on the laboratory wall, a digital clock.

03:42 AM.

Garrett sucked in a sharp breath as the rest of the memory slammed into place. He had been staring directly at those glowing green numbers when the stone door clicked shut inside his head. “It happened at 3:42.”

Darcy's eyes snapped to his. “What did?”

Garrett swallowed. “The door. That's when he put it inside me.”

Ginnie went still. “Then the time may be part of the Spell itself. Like a ritual scar reopening at the same energetic point every night.”

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.”