Page 30 of Scorched
Not a human word. Not beauty, not attraction, not whatever soft thing a man says when he doesn't know how to say mine. She fits the space my fire magic carved out six centuries ago when I burned the Bloodwork forges cold and told myself I didn't need what they made. She makes metal sing in a key that's been extinct since I made it extinct. My cock is still inside her and my fire magic is still moving through the ridges and herbody is still answering it in slow, unconscious waves she won't remember come morning.
Good. Let her rest. I'm going to need her for a long time.
I think about the Bloodwork vault beneath the forge. The locked room. The artifacts I kept—not from sentiment. From the practical understanding that destroying evidence doesn't undo the act.
She made a blade tonight. In the forge, before the heat hit. A small thing, compulsive, barely conscious. She picked up a piece of iron and worked it with her bare hands and when she set it down it hummed. A low, metallic note that shivered through the forge walls. She didn't notice—she was too deep in her heat.
I noticed.
The Bloodwork harmonic. The specific frequency at which Bloodwork-forged metal vibrates. Extinct for six hundred years because I made it extinct.
I ordered the forges cold. I ordered the lines ended. It was the right decision. The Bloodwork Fae were too powerful, too volatile, too close to tearing the courts apart from the inside. I would make the same call tomorrow.
But I didn't plan for this.
I didn't plan for the harmonic to come back in the hands of a human assassin with my brand on her throat and my knot inside her. I didn't plan to claim the last Bloodwork heir without knowing—without letting myself know—that the pull I felt toward her from the first day was my fire magic recognizing its complement.
She'll learn what she is. Not from me—I'm not fool enough to hand her that weapon before she's ready to hold it without pointing it at my throat. But she'll learn. The heritage will surface. Her hands will keep making things that sing and eventually she'll ask the right question.
I'll be ready for her when she does. I've had nine centuries to practice patience and she has my brand on her throat and my knot's been inside her twice tonight. She can hate me as long as she wants. She's not going anywhere.
I run my thumb across the brand on her throat and the forge-work geometry glows under my touch. She murmurs in her sleep. Her body shifts against mine and my cock, still half-hard, presses deeper. She makes a low sound—her body responding to its alpha even unconscious.
Mine.
The word isn't tender. It's territorial. It's the word a king uses for the thing he won't relinquish, the asset too valuable to lose, the weapon too dangerous to let anyone else hold. She's Bloodwork. She's mine. I'll manage the fallout when it comes.
Outside the window the caldera glows red against the night sky. The Ember Court sleeps. The fire-thread in the walls pulses low, responding to my mood—controlled, watchful, the color of banked coals.
Somewhere below us, in the forge, the blade she made tonight is still humming.
I can hear it from here. I lie awake and I listen and I plan.
15
SOPHIA
Iwake up alone in his bed and the first thing I do is reach for a weapon that isn't there.
Old habit. Seventeen years of reaching for a blade before I open my eyes. My fingers close on sheets that smell like iron and fire and sex and him. My body aches in places I didn't know could ache. Between my thighs is a mess of slick and his dried cum and a tenderness so deep it pulses when I shift my weight.
I open my eyes.
His chambers. Dark wood, stone walls, the fire-thread pulsing low gold in the cracks. The bed is enormous and I'm in the middle of it, naked, the sheets twisted around my waist. The brand at the base of my throat throbs with a heat that matches my heartbeat.
I press my fingers to it. The skin is raised—forge-work geometry, precise lines and angles that I can feel under my fingertips. His mark. Permanent.
I should be planning. I should be finding my clothes, finding a weapon, finding the exit. I should be running. The assassin's mind knows this. She's been screaming at me from somewhere behind the heat haze for hours.
I don't move.
The heat is still in me. Not the roaring, blinding need of last night—something lower, banked, like coals that haven't gone out. It sits in my belly and between my hips and it makes my skin too sensitive. The sheets are too much. The air is too much.
I need him.
The thought comes without permission and I hate it with every part of me that's still mine. I need his cock inside me. I need the ridges and the fire magic and the way the head catches deep and makes my brain go quiet. I need the thing that wrecked me last night to wreck me again because the absence of it is worse than the having of it.
I sit up. My legs shake. My pussy aches—swollen, tender, still slick. The golden-hot residue of his cum is dried on my inner thighs. I look down at myself and I look like something that has been used. Thoroughly. By someone who knew exactly what he was doing.
