[Emma's POV]
The silence in the Blackwood library was a fragile, glass-bubble world. Inside it, I was drowning in the echo of Maddox’s trapped rage, a distant storm felt through the exposed nerve of the psychic tether. Then, the world broke.
It was not a snap, but a rupture. The connection to Maddox, that vile, sympathetic cord, was violently severed—a sensation akin to having a limb wrenched from its socket with a wet, psychic tear. But before the shock of that severance could even register as pain, it was replaced by a brutal, white-hot reforging.
A new, jagged link hammered itself into place, deeper, more invasive, thrumming with a power that was pure, undiluted aggression. It wasn't Maddox’s emotion anymore; it was his essence, his primal Alpha fury, stripped raw and pumped directl
