Page 13 of Scorched
I set it on the workbench in front of her. I say nothing.
She stares at it. Then she picks it up, and the moment her fingers touch the metal her breath catches and her eyes close and she holds the fire-rose in her palm the way you hold something alive and warm and I can see the heat of it sinking into her skin, into her—her shoulders drop again, her spine loosens, her face opens for the second time and this time she doesn't catch it quickly enough.
She's looking at the fire-rose in her hand and there are tears standing in her eyes and she blinks them away before they fall and when she looks up at me her face is furious.
"Thank you," she says. The fury isn't for me. It's for herself. For the tears. For the wanting.
I nod. I don't explain the gift. I don't tell her that the fire-rose will stay warm for as long as she carries it, that my fire magic lives in the metal, that every time she touches it she'll feel me. She'll discover this on her own.
We walk back through the corridor toward the guest wing. The fire-rose is in the pocket of her dress. I can feel my magic in it, a faint warm pulse against her hip, and I know she can feel it too because her hand keeps drifting to the pocket and touching the shape of it through the fabric.
She strikes on the turn between the corridor and the west staircase.
Fast. Faster than any human I've fought in four centuries. The blade comes out of the sheath at her thigh and she spins and the edge is at my throat before I've finished turning the corner and for one bright, perfect second I'm looking at the most beautiful thing I've seen in nine hundred years—a woman with her blade at my throat and murder in her eyes and her body shaking with the effort of holding herself together while her cunt goes wet from the proximity.
I catch her wrist. Not hard. I close my fingers around the bones of her wrist the way I closed them around the metal in theforge—firmly, precisely, with absolute certainty about what I'm holding—and her arm goes still and the blade hovers a quarter inch from my throat and neither of us moves.
Her pulse is hammering under my thumb. Her scent has spiked—Bloodwork and slick and fury, the most intoxicating combination I've encountered in any century. My cock is so hard the ridges ache. I can feel the fire magic in them pressing against the fabric of my breeches, reaching for her through the air between us.
"The blade is extraordinary," I say. My voice is steady. Her wrist is shaking in my grip. "Did you make it?"
Her mouth says she purchased it. Her face says otherwise. Her face says yes, I made it, I made it at three in the morning in a forge that doesn't deserve me, and I'm better than anyone you've ever seen and no one has ever told me so.
"I purchased it from a dealer in the eastern territories," she says.
"Of course you did."
I let go of her wrist. The blade stays at my throat for one more second—long enough for me to feel the edge, the quality of the steel, the poison working its way into the metal's pores. Then she pulls it back and sheathes it and walks away without looking at me and her hands are shaking and she doesn't look back.
I stand in the corridor. I lift my fingers to my nose and breathe in her scent from where I held her wrist—iron and heat and Bloodwork and the unmistakable sharpening of her slick—and my cock throbs and the fire-thread in my coat blazes gold.
The blade was extraordinary. The maker is irreplaceable.
I've waited six hundred years. I can wait a little longer. But my hands aren't steady, and the place where her blade touched my throat is warm, and I'm beginning to understand that patience isn't the same thing as control.
7
SOPHIA
The poisoned wine takes me four hours to prepare and thirty seconds to deploy.
The blade hasn't worked. Not because I've failed the approach—I haven't—but because he catches my wrist every time, certain and unhurried, as though his fire magic reads the moment of decision in my body before my hand moves. He's handled my blade twice now. He knows its balance, its grain, the poison on its edge. He told me so. My grandmother had two rules that covered most situations: if your weapon is known, change your weapon, and distance is harder to catch than contact.
Wine is distance. He can't catch what isn't in my hand.
I work in my guest chamber before dawn, grinding the compound with a mortar I smuggled in my trunk. White oleander extract, concentrated three times, blended with a nerve agent my grandmother developed specifically for ancient Fae—the kind whose metabolisms burn through standard toxins before the toxin can do its work. It's designed to outrun the metabolism. It binds to the throat lining first, cutting off theairway before the body can flush it. I've used it twice. Both targets were dead before they finished swallowing.
I decant it into a glass vial no bigger than my thumbnail and tuck it inside my glove, nestled against the web of skin between my first and second fingers. The seal is beeswax. One press of my thumb and the wax breaks and the compound runs down my fingers and onto whatever I touch next.
At dinner, I'm seated four places from him. Close enough. I wait through the first course—roasted game in a sauce that smells of charcoal and wild herbs, the kind of food that tastes like the mountain itself. I eat it because not eating would draw attention, and because my body is hungry in a way it hasn't been since I arrived. The heat in this court does something to my appetite. Everything burns hotter here, including the hollow feeling in my stomach that I'm choosing to call hunger and nothing else.
The wine is poured by servants who move like shadows. I wait until the one nearest Ignatius sets his goblet down and turns to refill the glass of the Fae female beside him. I reach across the table for the salt dish. My hand passes over his goblet. My thumb presses. The wax breaks. The compound is in his wine before my hand reaches the salt.
Clean. Silent. Twelve years of training in a gesture that takes less than a breath.
He lifts the goblet twenty minutes later, during a conversation with his general about the western border patrols. He drinks and I watch his throat move. I count.
Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. At forty seconds, his metabolism should be losing the race. At sixty, his airway should be closing.
