[Emma's POV]
The war room was the Blackwood heartstone, a windowless, circular vault deep beneath the manor. Its walls were lined with sheets of cold-forged iron and intricate silver inlays that emitted a constant, low-frequency hum—a sound designed to disrupt mystical frequencies and dispel psychic whispers. Here, in this sterile, shadowless bubble, I sat wrapped in a thick woolen blanket, the tremors in my hands only partly from the lingering chill of Damon’s visitation. I was the unstable element in a room built for stability.
The brothers stood around the massive, scarred oak table that dominated the space, not as a united command, but as three separate factions circling a disaster. Maps of forgotten territories were unfurled, dotted with pins marking Damon’s suspected influences, bu
