Page 22 of Scorched
"I know," I say. "I know you do."
Her hand comes up. Not to strike me. She grabs the front of my shirt and her fingers are scalding, Bloodwork heat bleeding through her skin, her grip strong—the grip of a woman who's been bending steel with her bare hands all week—and she drags me forward until our faces are inches apart and her breath is on my mouth, fire-warm.
The scent of her heat is so close it's inside me and my cock is so hard the ridges have split the lacing of my breeches and I can feel the fire magic in them reaching for her through the air.
"If you touch me," she says, "I will never forgive you."
"I know."
"If you don't touch me, I will die."
She isn't being dramatic. She's stating a fact. Omega heat, fully activated, isn't metaphor. It isn't desire. It's a body consuming itself with need, and without an alpha's claiming it will burn through her in three days of agony that no training can prepare for. She's never been in heat before. This is her first and it's triggered by a nine-hundred-year-old ancient in full rut and the fire magic of the Ember Court feeding the flames and she won't survive this alone.
"I know," I say again.
Her grip tightens on my shirt. Her knuckles press against my chest and my fire magic answers her touch, surging toward her through my skin, and she gasps—a sound that makes my rut clench like a fist around my spine.
"Then do something," she snarls.
She drags me forward until our foreheads touch and her breath is on my mouth—fire-warm, frantic, the breath of someone being unmade from the inside. The heat between our faces isn't metaphor. It's actual. Bloodwork fire and Ember fire pressing the air between us past what stone can hold.
I reach for her.
11
SOPHIA
My fist connects before I think about it.
Seventeen years of training. He reaches for me and my body answers before my brain has time to object—closed fist, rotating from the shoulder, aimed at the jaw. I've dropped males twice my size with this strike. It connects. His head turns. Golden blood splits at the corner of his mouth.
The forge light catches it. Fire-bright.
My heart does something I refuse to acknowledge.
Not because I hurt him. Because his eyes come back to mine and the gold in them isn't anger.
I scramble backward. Hands and feet on the forge floor—the stone is hot enough to sting and I don't care, I'm going for the workbench, going for the ceramic blade and the garrotte and the three remaining options I have for ending this in the next thirty seconds?—
His hand closes around my ankle.
One hand. I hit the floor full-length as he drags me back across the stone, the nightdress riding to my hips, my palms scraping and finding nothing, the floor burning under my elbows and my knees. Everything hot. The fire-thread blazingoverhead. The mountain roaring beneath us. The heat in my own body indistinguishable from the heat of the stone.
I roll. He anticipated it. I come up and the singing blade is two feet from my hand and I grab it and I have it at his throat for the second time tonight.
My hand is steady. His hand is cupped at the back of my neck. Not squeezing. Just there.
I push the blade harder. A second line of golden blood runs down his throat.
"Go ahead." His voice isn't steady. The rut is in it—that lower register, the one that bypasses language and goes straight to the base of my spine and does things there I don't have protocols for. "If you're going to use it."
I'm not going to use it.
I've known this since I walked through this door in my nightdress with a blade in my hand and slick running down my thighs and the heat eating me alive from the inside. The knife was an anchor. It was always an anchor. Twenty-six years of training and the one mission I can't complete is the one where my blood is on the same side as the target.
He catches my wrist. The blade hand. Pins it to the stone above my head in one motion—smooth, absolute, the kind of strength that doesn't need to declare itself. My fingers tighten. His grip isn't going to open. I've trained against every grip there is. This is the mountain's grip, the volcano's grip, nine centuries of fire magic in one hand. I swing at him with the other fist.
He catches that one too.
