Page 17 of Scorched
But it isn't the precision that stops me. It's the sound.
When she sets the finished blade on the workbench and lifts her hands, the steel sings. A low, clear note, barely audible, like a bell struck very far away. A harmony I've not heard in six hundred years. A harmony I last heard in the forges of the Bloodwork Fae, in the days before I burned those forges to ash and killed the people who worked them.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat against the workbench and I am nine hundred years old and my hands areshaking because this woman—this human woman who shouldn't exist, who shouldn't be possible—has just made a blade that sings with Bloodwork harmony in my forge and she doesn't know what she has done.
The guilt hits me the way it always does. Not slow, not gradual. A door opening onto a room I keep locked.
The forges burning. The screams. The Bloodwork Fae—the only people in any court who ever made things that moved me, the only crafters whose work sang the way metal is supposed to sing—and I gave the order and they died and their forges went cold and the harmony went silent.
Six hundred years of silence. And now this woman's blade is singing on my workbench and my hands are shaking and my cock is hard and the rut is climbing my spine like a living thing and the guilt and the wanting are hitting me at the same time and I can't separate them. I've never been able to separate them. That's the punishment I built for myself—that the thing I destroyed is the thing I need most, and it has come back wearing the face of a woman I want to claim and she doesn't know, she doesn't know?—
"Where did you learn to do that?" My voice is steady. I'm grateful for the centuries of practice that make it steady.
She's staring at the blade. Her fingers are hovering over it, not touching, as if she's afraid to pick it back up. As if she heard the harmony too and doesn't know what to do with it. There's a fine tremor in her hands. Sweat on her temples that isn't from the forge heat. Her scent is so thick now I can taste it—Bloodwork and slick and the sharp note of adrenaline, her body running hot on three different fuels at once.
"My grandmother," she says.
"What is your grandmother's name?"
A pause. One second. Two. "Marguerite Moreau."
It isn't her real answer. I know this the way I know the blade on the workbench is Bloodwork craft—in my chest, in my marrow, in the part of me that's been carrying the weight of what I did for six centuries and recognises the shape of it in everything. The name she just gave me is the name on her papers, the name on her trade credentials. Not the name of the woman who taught her to bend steel with her bare hands.
I don't press. Not yet. Not because I'm being patient—because I'm not sure I can hold this conversation and hold myself together at the same time. My rut is a physical thing now, a pressure in my groin that's graduated from ache to demand. The ridges of my cock are hot against my breeches, the fire magic in them responding to her proximity, to her scent, to the Bloodwork harmony still ringing faintly from the blade she made. My body wants to close the distance and take her face in my hands and press my mouth to the place where her pulse is hammering in her throat and breathe her in until there's nothing else.
I grip the edge of the workbench. The stone cracks under my fingers.
"It's extraordinary work," I say. I mean it with everything I have. "The edge geometry alone would take most smiths a year to achieve. You did it in twenty minutes without heat, without tools, with raw Ember steel that should have resisted every attempt to shape it. You are the most gifted metalworker I've seen in—" I stop. The truth is six hundred years. The truth is since the people I killed. "In a very long time," I finish.
She's looking at me now. Not with fury—or not only with fury. With something underneath it, something that looks like the expression she wore when she first stepped into the forge and her shoulders dropped and her face opened. Hunger. Not for my body, not yet, though I can smell that want on her too.Hunger to be seen. Hunger to have someone look at what her hands can do and say yes, this is what you are, this is real.
Her grandmother trained her to kill. Someone should have trained her to make.
"Thank you," she says. Quiet. Stripped. The Lady Moreau voice is gone entirely and what is left is low and rough and young and I feel it in every ridge of my cock and in the cracked stone under my fingers and in the locked room inside my chest where I keep the things I cannot afford to feel.
I pick up the blade. I hold it to the light. The Bloodwork harmony pulses against my palm—warm, alive, impossible. A ghost I deserve.
"Come back tomorrow," I say. "Bring nothing except your hands."
She doesn't answer—she picks up the ceramic blade she never drew and the garrotte she never used and walks out of the forge without looking back. But I see her hand drift to her pocket on the way out. The fire-rose. She touches it through the fabric and her fingers curl around its shape and she doesn't pull away.
I stand in the forge. I hold the blade she made and listen to it sing and I am shaking and I don't stop shaking for a long time.
My rut is no longer waking. It's awake. It's here. And the woman it's chosen is the last descendant of the people I murdered, and she doesn't know, and I'm going to have to decide what I am—a king who protects his secrets or a male who deserves the blade at his throat.
The forge fire burns. The blade sings. I press it against my chest and close my eyes and the heat of it feels like her hands.
9
SOPHIA
Igo back to the forge.
I tell myself it's because refusing would raise questions. The Ember King has personally invited the human trade delegate to observe his metalwork—declining would be a diplomatic insult, a break in the fiction I'm maintaining, an unnecessary risk to the mission. I tell myself this while I dress in the dark, while I strap the new blade—the one I made three nights ago from a curtain rod, the one that shouldn't exist—to my thigh, while I twist my hair up and thread the garrotte wire through the pins.
I tell myself this all the way down the corridor and through the stone archway that opens onto the forge level, and by the time I step through the door and the heat hits me like a wall—thick, alive, pressing against my skin through the fabric of my dress—I've stopped pretending.
I'm here because I want to be. I'm here because yesterday he watched me make a blade and said extraordinary and meant it, and the place inside my chest where that word landed is still warm, and I need it to stop being warm or I need more of it and I don't know which is worse.
