DUKE POV
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Wren Aldis had been in the compound for eleven days before Duke had a proper conversation with her.
This wasn't avoidance. It was the specific patience of someone who understood that subjects revealed themselves at their own pace, and that approaching them before they were ready to be seen produced a surface rather than a truth.
She'd been doing things in those eleven days. Working with Mitch on the archive cross-referencing that had started with the correspondence and had expanded as Mitch found the network of what the Aldis archive actually contained. Working with Arden on the intelligence classification — she'd learned quickly that Arden and Mitch had compatible but non-identical systems and that the gap between them was where the most interesting things lived. Being pr
