[Emma's POV]
The dawn did not arrive. It was usurped. I swam up from the depths of a troubled sleep not into consciousness, but into a rhythm—a deep, dissonant percussion that bypassed my ears and thrummed directly in the hollow of my sternum, in the marrow of my long bones. Thu-thump. Thu-thump.
It was the frantic, rabbit-quick cadence of my own terror. But underpinning it, a fraction behind, was another. Slower. Deliberate. A bass note of such immense, steady power it felt less like a biological function and more like the heartbeat of the earth itself, if the earth were cold and waiting.
Damon’s.
The understanding was a visceral punch, stealing the air from my lungs. I jackknifed upright, the fine linen sheets pooling at my waist, my hands splaying over my chest as if I could physic
