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The clearing was quiet around them.
No background noise. No ward lines. Nothing here to take the blame for what happened except the two of them.
As far as his wolf was concerned, this was a fantastic setup.
Drayce kept his face carefully blank.
The technique was simple.
“The fire doesn’t respond to containment.” He walked the perimeter as he spoke, giving her room. “Containing it is what’s been producing the surges. You suppress, the pressure builds, and it finds an exit. The goal isn’t to hold it. It’s to redirect. Acknowledge what you’re feeling and steer the energy outward deliberately — where you want it, at the level you choose — before it builds to the point of choosing for itself.”
“Acknowledge what I’m feeling,” she repeated. She looked down at the scorched earth beneath her feet. “I’ve been very publicly told that this is my central failure mode.”
“You know what the problem is. This is how you fix it.”
“The correction is to have feelings on purpose.”
“The correction is to stop treating what you feel as a problem to file away and start treating it as fuel.” He stopped walking. “You can’t manage this like a to-do list. You manage it by using it.”
She looked at him with the focused attention she brought to new information—not defensive, not dismissive, genuinely processing it. She listened to what she didn’t want to hear without reshaping it into something more comfortable.
“Fine.” Not the suppression word. The real one.
“Stand in the center.”
She stepped onto the worn earth at the clearing’s heart and turned to face him. The morning light filtered through the pine canopy the way it did on the coast — moving, the shadows never quite still. She stood in it with her hands loose at her sides, looking like a woman waiting to be useful.
He was going to need to be more careful about the morning light.
He walked toward her.
His wolf, which had been fully on board with this entire session since Drayce chose the clearing, went quiet and watchful.
Drayce ignored this and kept walking until he reached the distance at which his stabilizing effect would be active — close enough that proximity mattered, not so close as to make the exercise purely theoretical.
He stopped. She knew it before she looked.
The air around her warmed fractionally.
He clocked it. He set it aside. He kept his face neutral. “Think of the retirement account. Or the attorneys. Or the signature page.” He waited. “Pick one and hold on to it.”
“You want me to have feelings right now?”
“I want you to practice redirecting them. Yes.”
She exhaled. “The retirement account documentation was re-sent because I missed a signature page. I’ve now been contacted three times about that page.”
“Hold that.”
“I am holding it.”
“I can see that. You’re holding it back.” He stepped closer. The air warmed another degree. “Stop holding it back. Let it move.”
She made a face that communicated several things about the retirement account, the attorneys involved, the concept of signature pages in general, and her fundamental objection to this entire process — and a small tongue of fire appeared on her left palm, facing outward, burning cleanly and directed rather than erupting in all directions at once.
It lasted a few seconds, then went out.
“That” — he let her look at it for a second — “is redirection.”
