The door slammed open with the kind of force only Edward could manage without technically violating palace security protocol.
He already knew.
He'd felt the shift in the ether the moment the array activated—sharp and unnatural, like someone had taken a divine thread and struck it against the very bones of the Empire. The warnings in the control room lit up in sequence: channel overload, core resonance spike, and arcane interference in the Emperor's wing.
Damian had done it.
And Edward had prepared himself to walk into a battlefield.
He expected blood. Collapse. Maybe a body. His chest tightened at the thought of seeing Damian or Gabriel in pain or, worse, dead.
Instead—
He stepped into a room that looked like the end of a battle, not the start.
