"I'm not most people." He held her gaze. "And your anger is pointed in exactly the right direction. I'm not going to sand it down for my comfort."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Do you ever get angry? Like actually, visibly angry?" She tilted her head. "Or does it just, I don’t know, go somewhere internal and come out as tactical planning?"
He considered the question with the genuine attention it deserved.
"Both," he said finally. "And there's a version of what I felt in that garage just now that most people wouldn't want to be in the room for."
"But you folded it."
"I directed it." He paused. "There's a time and a place. This wasn't it. I learned a long time ago to find a productive outlet for my anger and not let it consume me. It takes a lot to filter your anger into motivation. I haven’t always been able to do this."
She looked at him for a long moment. "That must be exhausting. Knowing how to do that."
"It's just discipline."
"No," she said quietly. "It's more than that." She picked up her pencil. "I think it costs you something. Every time."
He didn't answer that.
She went back to the border pattern.
He stayed at the table with her, drinking another cup of coffee and processing everything that had just happened.
CHAPTER 14
EMILY
The thing about being angry was that it needed somewhere to go.
She'd learned that as a young child. Her mother's method of handling anger was to compress it into a tight, polite silence until it came out in an explosion, and Emily had inherited the instinct without the methodology and had spent years trying to find a different way.
Normally she ran. Earbuds in, pavement under her feet, the physical motion of going somewhere being enough to metabolize whatever the emotion was. She'd built her gym piece by piece partly for this reason, to have a backup for days when the weather was bad or the anxiety lived specifically in the part of her brain that didn't want to be outside alone.
She couldn't run alone right now. She knew Rampage would never allow it.
She came downstairs at seven in the morning and found Rampage already up. He seemed to always be already up, she wasn't sure he actually slept, she'd started to suspect he just stood somewhere in the compound in the dark and recalibrated. And said, "I need to run."
He looked at her over his coffee. At this point, she wondered if she poked him would it be blood or coffee that came out? The man was always awake and always drinking coffee. He looked at her, seeming to read the energy level she was bringing into the kitchen, which was the particular vibrating quality of someone who'd been awake since five thinking about a man spending two months watching her.
"Give me ten minutes," he said.
She blinked. "You're coming with me?"
"You're not going alone."
"I run fast."
"Okay."
She looked at him. At the complete absence of any reaction to that information.
"I'm not going to slow down for you."
"Emily." He set his mug down. "Go get your shoes and meet me at the door in ten minutes."
She got her shoes.
