Page 32 of Scorched
"How long have you been standing there," I say. My voice is wrecked. Raw from screaming, raw from the heat, raw from whatever just happened between me and that piece of iron.
"Long enough."
He pushes off the doorframe and crosses the forge. He moves the way he always moves—unhurried, deliberate, every step a decision. He stops in front of me. He doesn't touch me.
He picks up the blade.
His hands are careful with it. Not delicate—careful the way you're careful with a loaded weapon. He turns it in the forge light. The hum coming off it intensifies at his touch—the fire magic in his skin meeting whatever is in the metal and the note climbing, clarifying, becoming something I can hear in my spine.
He's very still.
"Where did you learn to fold iron like this?" he says.
"My grandmother."
"Your grandmother taught you the Kael-ash fold."
I don't know that name. I've never heard that name. But my hands know the fold—they've known it since I was fourteen and started working metal alone in my grandmother's forge at threein the morning because I couldn't sleep and the iron was the only thing that quieted my mind.
"She didn't call it that," I say.
"No." His voice is strange. Controlled. More controlled than usual, which means something is happening underneath it that he's keeping from me. "She wouldn't have."
He sets the blade down on the anvil and looks at me. I'm standing in his forge in his shirt with his brand on my throat and the heat rising in my belly and a blade on the anvil between us that's humming in a key neither of us is willing to explain.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I'm in heat."
"That's not why you're shaking."
He's right. I'm shaking because the blade scared me. Because my hands made something my brain doesn't understand. Because the fire in the walls leaned toward me and I don't know why and I don't want to know why.
"Come here," he says.
I don't. I stand on the other side of the anvil with my hands gripping the edge and my knuckles white and I look at him and I hate him and I want him and I'm terrified of the blade between us and what it means.
"Come here," he says again. Not louder. Lower. The voice that my body obeys before my brain can stop it.
My feet move.
I come around the anvil and stop in front of him. He's taller than me by more than a foot. The heat coming off his skin hits mine and the brand at my throat flares. The heat in my belly drops between my hips and tightens. I'm wet. Instantly. The slick soaking through, dripping down my thighs. His nostrils flare. His golden eyes darken. His hand comes to my face.
His hand closes around my throat. Not squeezing. Holding. His thumb settles over the brand and his fire magic pulsesthrough it—a low, deep throb that I feel in my cunt. His other hand cups my breast through the shirt, his thumb finding my nipple and pressing. Circling. The fire magic in his skin radiates through the thin fabric and the heat hits the sensitive peak and my thighs clamp together.
"You made that blade," he says. His mouth is close to my ear. His breath is hot. "In my forge. With your bare hands. Do you know what that looked like?"
I shake my head. My thighs are pressed together so hard they're trembling. His hand on my throat is the only thing keeping me upright.
"It looked like you were born to be in this forge." His thumb circles my nipple. Slower. "Like your hands were made for my metal. Like every blade you've ever made before was practice for this."
The words land somewhere below my ribs. Somewhere that's been empty for twenty-six years. My thighs clamp tighter and the slick runs down between them.
"I watched you work for twenty minutes." His voice drops lower. His hand tightens on my throat—just enough that I feel my pulse against his palm. "I watched your hands shape iron the way no human should be able to shape iron. I watched the fire lean toward you. I watched you make the most lethal thing I've seen in nine hundred years and you didn't even know you were doing it."
My knees are shaking. My cunt is clenching on nothing. His thumb rolls my nipple and the fire magic sparks through it and my hips jerk forward.
"Good girl," he says. Quiet. Like a fact. Like something that has always been true and he is only now saying it aloud. "My good, deadly girl."
