Page 25 of Scorched
It expands fast—dense, fire-hot, pressing her walls outward in a slow, relentless stretch that leaves no room for either of us to argue about what's happening. The feeling is—there isn't a word for it. Nine centuries and I don't have the word. The knot seats itself and her inner walls close around it and I'm so hard it borders on pain, the full length of my cock buried in her, the head pressed against the deepest part of her, and every nerve from the base of the knot to the tip is firing at once. I have to lock my jaw to keep the sound in.
She cries out and her hands go flat on the stone. Her whole body locks rigid around me, thighs and inner walls gripping the knot at once, and I'm sealed inside her and she's sealed around me and she's shaking and I'm not going to move.
Good. She feels extraordinary. Scalding and tight and slick-soaked and the Bloodwork in her blood sings against my cock at a frequency I haven't felt from living skin in six hundred years—a harmony that bypasses thought entirely and lands in the base ofmy spine like a struck bell. Every clench she gives me travels the full length of the shaft. I press my thumbs into the bones of her hips and breathe through it because if I don't, the rut will have me moving again before she's recovered, and I'm not done with her yet. This is only the first lock. We have the rest of the night.
I'm pleased. Deeply, unreservedly pleased in a way that nine centuries of practice at restraint cannot entirely flatten. I've wanted this since the first night she put a blade to my throat and her pulse hammered against my thumb. I've wanted it more with every day she spent in my forge doing impossible things with her hands and looking at me like she hated herself for noticing I was watching. She's here. She's mine in the most fundamental sense the rut understands, and her body is gripping me like it has no interest in ever letting go, and her mind can spend the next three days furious about it. That's her right. But she's not going anywhere.
For the first time in twenty minutes, the rut quiets.
Not answered. Not finished. But no longer a wall of fire behind my eyes.
Her forehead drops to the stone. The curls at the back of her neck are damp and dark with sweat. The fighting goes out of her shoulders. She's breathing hard into the rock and her hands have stopped clawing and she isn't reaching for me and she isn't pulling away. I hold her hips and stay very still. The fire magic pulses through the knot in slow waves and her body answers in rhythm, gripping and releasing, and I let it happen.
She asked for this. She bled for it. She's furious she needed it.
I keep my hands on her hips and don't say a word.
13
SOPHIA
Icannot move.
Not locked by him. Locked with him. His knot is seated so deep there's no gap between us—no space, no margin, nowhere to shift without pressing further into the other. The fire magic pulses through it in waves that match his heartbeat and his heartbeat is inside me, through the knot, his actual heartbeat, a thing that has no right to be this intimate and is.
I cannot?—
My hands are flat on the stone floor. My knees are spread. My face is pressed to the hot flagstone and I'm screaming into rock and the rock is vibrating with the caldera beneath us, the whole mountain humming at a frequency I can feel in my teeth. His hands are on my hips. His grip is iron. He's buried inside me to the hilt—every ridge, the swollen head deep, the knot locked at the base—and movement has stopped.
Not because he chose to stop. Because neither of us can move.
The knot fills every space. I can't shift forward without it pressing one way. I can't shift back without it pressing another. I try—I try to crawl forward, to get an inch of distance, to find aposition where the fire magic isn't pulsing directly into me from six different angles—and the movement grinds the knot against my inner walls and my vision goes white and I come.
I come so hard my arms give out. My chest hits the stone. My cunt locks around him in spasms that have no rhythm, just raw clenching, my body trying to hold the thing it can't escape. The orgasm rolls through me in a wave that starts between my hips and reaches my throat and I'm screaming and I cannot stop screaming and his hands tighten on my hips and he holds me still while my body shakes itself apart around him.
When I come back I'm panting into the stone floor. My mouth is open. I'm drooling. I do not care. The knot is still inside me, still pulsing, still pressing its fire magic into me in waves that aren't stopping, that aren't going to stop, and the pleasure isn't an event—it's a state. I'm inside it. I can't get out of it.
Every breath moves the knot and every movement of the knot sends another pulse of heat through my cunt and into my belly and up through my chest and I'm going to live inside this feeling until he lets me go and he's not letting me go.
"I hate you," I say into the stone. My voice is destroyed. "I hate you, I hate?—"
He releases inside me.
The head deflates first. I feel it—the swollen crown softening, the pressure deep inside me easing for one second, one breath of relief. Then his cum floods the space the head left. Golden-hot. Burning sweet. Fire magic in every drop, pouring into me in a wave that's not liquid and not heat but both.
A bright burning flood that fills me from the inside and I can feel it marking me—not a metaphor, not a feeling, an actual physical heat concentrating at the base of my throat, a sharp bright point of fire magic that sinks through my skin from the inside out.
The brand.
I know what it is. I've read the reports. I know that an Ember alpha's release carries his court magic, that the magic marks the omega from the inside during the claiming, that the brand is permanent. I know all of this.
The knowing does nothing to prepare me for the feeling of it—the heat gathering at the base of my throat, burning in, a sharp moment of pain followed by a deep spreading glow that reaches from my collarbones to my jaw. I press my hand to my throat and feel it—the pattern forming under my skin, forge-work geometry, his mark.
I'm being branded on the floor of his forge with his knot inside me.
His cum flooding me and his hands on my hips and I cannot move and the brand hurts and the brand feels like the forge and the brand feels like his, and I press my face to the stone and sob.
Not from pain. Not from the heat. From the grief of losing a version of myself I'm never getting back.
