From a strictly structural standpoint, sitting across from Ivey was equivalent to monitoring an unstable fault line.
I kept my gaze fixed on the leather-bound ledger on my desk, but my secondary senses were entirely locked onto her. Because my Nøkken lineage tied me to the deep, silent currents of stone and earth, I was acutely sensitive to atmospheric pressure. Right now, Ivey was causing the air in my sanctuary to crackle.
She was pacing. Her boots struck the polished floor in an erratic, high-frequency rhythm. But it was her magic that drew the real data points. The succubus heritage—the latent, alluring frequency that usually forced everyone in a room to either submit or obsess—was completely inert against me. Our species frequencies canceled each other out to a precise zero percent
