Page 21 of Scorched
Not a question. Not gloating. A fact, offered the same way I've offered her every truth—without apology, without performance, without giving her anywhere to hide from what it means.
Her jaw tightens. Her eyes burn. The blade presses harder and I feel the edge part the first layer of skin and a thin line ofheat runs down my throat—golden blood, fire-bright, the same blood that runs through the veins of every Ember Fae who's ever lived. She's drawn blood. No one has drawn my blood in four hundred years.
"I could," she says. Through her teeth. "I could end you right now."
"You could," I agree. "You won't."
"You don't know what I am."
"I know exactly what you are."
The blade is still at my throat. Her pulse is hammering in the vein beneath her jaw—I can see it, I can smell the blood racing through her, Bloodwork and slick and that sharp bright edge of heat that's growing by the second. Her body is at war.
Her training says kill him. Her blood says claim him. Her omega biology, dormant for twenty-six years and woken by the fire magic of this court, is screaming at a pitch that must be drowning out every other voice in her head and she's still standing and she's still holding the blade and I've never been more impressed by any creature in any century.
"Thirty seconds," I say, quietly. "You have about thirty seconds before the heat takes you. You can use the blade, or you can put it down. But you should choose now."
Her eyes widen. She knows I'm right. She can feel it—I can see it in her face, the rising wave, the heat climbing through her belly and her chest and her throat.
Her scent is shifting in real time, the slick note deepening from present to flooded, her body producing for me in quantities that soak through her nightdress and run down her thighs and the smell of it is so thick and so perfect that my cock surges against my breeches and the ridges flare hot enough to glow through the fabric and the fire-thread in the walls of the forge blazes gold in response.
She holds the blade at my throat for ten more seconds.
Her hand is steady. Her body is shaking apart. Her thighs are wet and her pupils have blown wide and her lips are parted and her breath is coming in short, hard bursts that aren't quite sobs and aren't quite moans and the heat is climbing, climbing?—
Fifteen seconds.
Her grip on the blade shifts. Not loosening. Tightening. She's holding on to the weapon the way a drowning person holds on to the last solid thing they can reach and I understand—the blade isn't a threat anymore. It's an anchor. It's the last piece of the woman she was before she walked into my court and began to burn.
Twenty seconds.
A sound comes out of her throat. Low, broken, a sound that bypasses language entirely and goes straight to the base of my spine and wraps around my cock and pulls. My rut answers. My fire magic answers. The forge answers—every flame in the pit flares white and the caldera beneath us rumbles and the stone walls go hot and the air thickens and the whole mountain knows what is about to happen.
Twenty-five seconds.
Her eyes are locked on mine. Through the heat, through the shaking, through the slick running down her legs and the flush darkening her brown skin, she's still looking at me. Still herself. Still the woman who's killed twelve people and forged a singing blade and walked barefoot across fire-hot stone to put a knife to my throat. She isn't gone. She's right here. And the heat is taking her anyway.
Thirty seconds.
The blade drops.
It hits the stone floor with a sound like a bell struck in the dark—the Bloodwork harmony ringing out through the forge, singing through the stone, through the metal on the benches,through the fire in the pit, through my bones. And she follows it down.
Her knees hit the stone. Not a collapse—a surrender. The last of her training breaking apart under the weight of something older than her grandmother's discipline, older than her mission, older than everything she's ever built herself into. She's on her knees on the floor of my forge and her head drops forward and her black hair falls around her face and she's shaking so hard I can hear her teeth and her scent fills the room like a flood—heat, full heat, broken and blazing and demanding and mine.
My rut detonates.
Six centuries of control. Six hundred years of solitary cycles, of managed need, of choosing discipline over surrender every single time. It breaks in a heartbeat. One breath I'm standing. The next I'm on my knees in front of her and my hands are reaching for her face and my fire magic is pouring off me in waves that make the air between us ripple like heat above a forge and I've never, in nine hundred years, wanted anything the way I want this woman on her knees with her blade still singing on the floor beside her.
I catch myself. My hands stop an inch from her face. She's shaking. She's in heat and she's terrified and she's still here and I won't take what isn't offered, not even now, not even with my rut roaring through me like the caldera itself demanding claim her, claim her, she is yours?—
"Sophia." My voice isn't steady. For the first time in centuries, my voice isn't steady. "Look at me."
She lifts her head. Her eyes are dark, blown, the brown of her irises almost swallowed by her pupils. Tears are running down her face. Not from sadness—from the sheer force of what is happening to her body, the heat rewriting her from the inside out, tearing down walls she's spent twenty-six years building. She looks at me through the tears and the heat and the shakingand her mouth opens and what comes out isn't surrender. It's fury.
"I hate you," she says. Her voice breaks on it. "I hate you for this."
My chest splits open. Not because she's wrong. Because she's right. Because I watched it happen and I let it happen and I could have sent her away before the heat took root and I didn't because I'm selfish and because I'm a male in rut who's found the only woman in any century whose blood sings to his and I chose her over every principled thing I've ever told myself I was.
