[Emma's POV]
The sealed mansion, once a sepulcher of helpless dread, had been reborn as a forge. The air, thick with the psychic dampening of the Lazarus Seal, now thrummed with a new, more volatile energy: the sound of a weapon being honed. The elegant, dust-sheeted ballroom was stripped bare, its parquet floor scarred by boot heels and scuffed by frantic footwork. The silence was no longer passive; it was the taut, listening quiet between the hammer strikes of transformation.
The brothers, united by a purpose more desperate and more terrible than mere protection, approached their task with the grim focus of master smiths. They were not coddling a secret. They were constructing a queen, and a queen, in their brutal world, needed to be both unbreakable shield and unsheathed sword.
Cain’
