DUKE POV
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The thing about Duke Fen is that he notices everything.
This is not a skill he developed. He was not trained in observation or taught to catalog detail. He simply came into the world with eyes that wouldn't stop working — that took in color and line and proportion and motion and filed it all, constantly, in the particular quiet archive of a mind that thinks in images rather than words.
It has been, over the years, both his greatest asset and his most persistent inconvenience.
Right now, watching Neva Aris stand in a back doorway holding a cast iron coffee pot while five hostile wolves recalibrated their entire strategy around her presence, Duke noticed the following:
Her knuckles were not white on the handle. Her jaw was set but not clenched. Her feet were positioned sli
