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She looked at her palm. Then at him. “It went where I⁠—”

“Where you pointed it. Yes.”

Something crossed her face — the look she got when she’d landed something and didn’t want to make a fuss about it. He caught it anyway.

The technique worked.

The problem was that the technique required him to be close enough for his stabilizing effect to be active, and that proximity was close enough for her to notice things, and she noticed everything. He’d known this since the town square. In this context, it was a problem.

She caught the way he moved when he demonstrated a redirect exercise — the controlled economy of it, nothing wasted — and the fire in her palm spiked. He had not moved any differently than usual. This was not helpful.

He corrected her stance. A brief adjustment to her shoulder angle — two seconds — then he stepped back. Two seconds was enough to demonstrate the position, and he was a professional. The fire spiked harder before it evened out. In his wolf’s opinion, two seconds was an unreasonable amount of restraint. His wolf had a great many opinions about proximity today, and none of them were useful to voice mid-session.

By the third round, she’d noticed he hadn’t looked away from her once. She noticed the noticing. The fire spiked again.

He was the cause of his own training problem, and he knew it. He had the grounding technique down cold — he could redirect, and redirect well. What he couldn’t do, apparently, was apply any of it to standing two feet from her while she tried hard not to notice him and failed, because she was observant, the clearing had no ward lines, and he had no one to blame for this but himself. His wolf offered no sympathy. His wolf was enjoying this enormously.

“You’re aware of me.”

She met his gaze. “I’m aware that you’re standing two feet away, monitoring everything I do. That’s a reasonable thing to be aware of.”

“The magic reads it as suppression.”

“I’m not suppressing anything.”

“You’re managing your awareness of me the same way you manage the retirement account paperwork.” He kept his voice level. His wolf was absolutely thriving. He told it to mind its own business. “You’re putting it in a drawer and shutting it. That’s suppression.”

She went quiet. The kind of quiet that showed up only when she’d been told something true she wasn’t ready to face. The air between them was warm. Not from the fire. No ward line here to blame.

He had brought her to the one place in the territory without a ward line, without ambient noise, with nothing to explain what was happening here except the two of them standing there. He was now questioning his judgment, and his wolf found it extremely amusing.

“So, what do I do?”

“Stop managing it. Acknowledge it and redirect.”

She looked at him like someone taking instructions while also taking stock of how absurd it was. “You want me to acknowledge that I’m aware of you and then redirect that awareness into controlled fire output.”

“In principle.”

“In practice.”

“Yes.”

She took a breath. Let it out. The fire at her palm came up clean and bright, exactly where she directed it. She looked at him, and the fire spiked into the upper range. She redirected it left, and it hit the sleeve of his jacket.

It was not a large fire.

It was a clean, directed burn about six inches above his left cuff, the kind you get when you aim fire and miscalculate the arc. He looked at it. He was going to need to step back.

He didn’t step back.

Her hands moved before his brain had processed that the jacket was on fire — both palms up, a focused burst of intent so precise it was almost alarming, and the fire went out. Not dampened. Not dissipated. Extinguished. Pulled back.

She stared at her hands.

He looked at the sleeve.

He examined the sleeve. “That was imported leather.”