[Emma's POV]
The silence that fell over Blackwood Manor was a distinct and terrible entity. It was not the quiet of peace, nor the hush of night, but a profound, listening stillness that had settled in the wake of a scream. It was the sound of trust, once a vast and echoing hall, now collapsed into a sinkhole of absolute zero.
The grand foyer, still littered with the splinters of the shattered door and the sizzling, black scars of Damon’s blood, felt like a staged crime scene, preserved in the amber of betrayal.
In the Aegis, the bunker’s sanctum sanctorum, the silence was a pressurized thing. Jaxon stood before the central crystal plinth, a commander on the deck of a ship that had just been torpedoed below the waterline. His posture was rigid, but it was the rigidity of a bridge cable
