Page 59 of Saving Her Dragon

Kara’s wizened voice narrowed into a dangerous rumble. “The bastard likes our Magic far too much.”

Sydney clenched her jaw. Her White Dragon Magic thrummed beneath her skin, ready to tear the ceiling down. It was now or never. “Then let's make him choke on it,” she hissed.

Stepping up to the obsidian structure, she raised her palms and pressed them flat against the freezing, smooth surface of the stone.

“Welcome, Special One.”

The voice didn't echo from the cavern walls. Rather, it drifted through the stone itself, smooth and perfectly fluid, dripping with an elegant, triumphant amusement.

Sydney didn't flinch. Leviathan wasn't attacking. That bothered her more than if he'd thrown everything he had straight at her.

He wanted her here.

She didn't know why. She didn't know what the brighter blue anchor meant or what Leviathan intended to do with her once she crossed the threshold.

But she'd had some damn good teachers over the years, and every instinct she possessed screamed the same warning: It was a trap.

Fine. She hadn't come all this way expecting an invitation to tea.

The monolithic stone door swung wide open, sliding into the earth with a heavy, grinding roar.

Behind the seal lay no ordinary room. It was a warped, claustrophobic nightmare. A shifting reconstruction of Garrett’s years in captivity designed for pure shock value. The walls were a jagged mix of subterranean stone and rusted sheet metal, thick with the oily, green smoke of chemical sedatives. Overlapping each other in a sickening, non-Euclidean geometry were fragments of the torture chambers, the broken chains, and the harsh fluorescent lights of the Leviathan laboratory.

Then, resting in the absolute center of the horror was Garrett.

Sydney's heart completely stopped in her chest.

It wasn't the present-day Garrett who had thrown pinecones at his brother on the porch or analyzed patrol maps with Carrick. It was the version Leviathan wanted her to see. He was starved, his ribcage prominent beneath his torn, blood-stained clothes. Deep, jagged lacerations marred his skin, and heavy silver and iron chains bound his wrists and ankles to a cold, rusted metal restraint table. His head hung low, his dark hair matted with blood. He looked entirely broken, exactly as the Demon Lord had held him in the dark.

"Garrett," Sydney whispered, a devastating ache tearing through her soul.

Slowly, painfully, his head rose. His eyes opened, the iris a weak, flickering lavender, but they were entirely hollow. He looked right at her, but there was no recognition. No warmth. Only an endless, bottomless abyss of pure, suffocating shame.

Realization hit Sydney like a physical blow. It wasn't simply another reconstruction of Garrett's captivity. Leviathan wanted her to see him this way.

Starved. Chained. Bleeding. Powerless.

The version of himself Garrett still feared lived somewhere beneath all the healing. Leviathan hadn't created her Mate's fear or guilt, but he knew exactly where those wounds were. He'd spent years carving them deeper.

And he was putting every one of them on display.

Waiting. Watching her.

Sydney didn't know exactly what Leviathan expected her reaction to accomplish. But she knew what he wanted to see.

Horror. Pity. Doubt.

He wasn't getting a damned one of them.

A shadow coalesced in the green smoke beside the table. A tall, elegant figure with eyes like burning emerald fire and a sickening, triumphant smile that gave an aura of narcissism and rotting flesh.

"You wanted your Dragon back, Special One," Leviathan purred, his long, black-glass nails tapping rhythmically against the rusted iron of the table. "Here he is. This is the man beneath all that borrowed courage. This is the hollow shell you choose to anchor your soul to."

Sydney looked at the chained, bleeding form of her Mate. She looked at the emerald fire of the Demon Lord.

And… She laughed.

The clear, sharp sound echoed off the rusted metal and stone. It sliced through the room's heavy, oppressive malice like a silver blade. It was the perfect ‘slap to the face’ Sydney had hoped it would be.