[Ava's POV]
The taut, humming silence that followed Jaxon’s return to the Den was a presence in itself, a fourth entity in the room woven from dread and adrenaline.
Lucien had absorbed the spectral-tracker report with a grim nod and vanished into the soundproofed comms nook adjacent to the kitchen, his voice a low, relentless counterpoint to the rising panic, a stream of coded instructions and repositioning orders flooding out through secure channels.
Rhett moved like a specter of practical anxiety, a scanner in one hand and a soldering iron in the other, reinforcing the polymer seals on the windows, each soft *hiss* and beep a punctuation in the suspense. In the nerve-center of this controlled chaos, Jaxon remained a fixed point of icy tension by the granite island, his gaze—sharp, a
