Page 37 of Scorched
"Show me again," she says. "The part about the transition temperature."
"You're lying on your back with my knot inside you."
"I'm aware." Her jaw tightens. Another clench. Another hitched breath. "Show me anyway."
I show her. She listens. Between the waves of pleasure she can't stop and the slow pulse of the fire magic through the knot, she learns the first three stages of the fire technique for Ember Court brands.
No one has learned that technique in six hundred years.
Between the secondand third knotting, she teaches me a poison formula.
We're on the bed. The knot has eased. My cock has softened. She's sitting cross-legged on the sheets, naked, the brands glowing at her throat and over her heart. She's eating dried meat from a plate the servants brought and describing, in precise assassin's shorthand, how to create a compound that'll paralyze Fae vocal cords for six hours.
"The key is the ratio of nightbloom to ash-root." She tears off a piece of meat with her teeth. "Your court alchemists get it wrong because they measure by weight. You measure by volume. The sap density changes with the season."
I watch her mouth move, her hands gesture—the same hands that shaped a singing blade in my forge this morning. The same hands that clawed my back while I knotted her an hour ago.
"Why are you telling me this?"
She looks at me. Dark eyes. The specific steady gaze of a woman who has killed twelve people and regrets none of them.
"Because you taught me the fire technique. Fair trade." She chews. Swallows. "Also because if anyone is going to poison you,it should be me. I want you properly prepared to die when the time comes."
I laugh. Not a sound I make often. Not a sound I've made in a very long time. It comes out rough. Disused.
She stares at me. Her eyes narrow. Her mouth opens. Closes. Her brow furrows like she's trying to place a sound she's never heard. No one has heard me laugh in a long time.
"Your laugh is horrible," she says.
"I'm aware."
"Do it again."
I don't. But I take the poison formula and commit it to memory and watch her sit on my bed eating my food with my brands on her skin and I think: she is the most dangerous thing in this court. More dangerous than any weapon in my vault. More dangerous than the singing blade on the anvil.
She's dangerous because she's choosing to be here. Not the heat—the heat is building again, I can smell it banking in her—but the woman between the waves of heat. The assassin who sits cross-legged and teaches a king how to resist his own assassination. She's choosing this.
I didn't plan for that either.
The weapons she's made me are lined up on the far table. Five of them now. The singing blade from the forge. Two throwing knives she shaped during the first knotting break. A short sword she hammered out in the heat haze. A garrotte wire she braided from scrap metal while my knot was still inside her. Each one is better than anything in my vault. Each one hums with the Bloodwork harmonic. Each one is a gift she doesn't consciously intend as a gift.
I keep every one.
"The heat is coming back," she says. Her voice changes. The precise assassin's tone softening at the edges, blurring. Herpupils dilate. The slick starts—I can smell it, hot and sweet, the omega biology overriding the rational mind.
She looks at me. Her jaw sets. Her chin lifts.
"Don't be gentle this time," she says. "I can take whatever you held back."
I didn't hold anything back tonight. But I look at the set of her jaw and the fire in her eyes and the brands glowing on her skin and I think: I can run hotter.
I pull her to me by her ankle. She comes across the sheets with her legs falling open and her hands bracing on my chest and her mouth already shaping a curse. I don't let her finish it. I flip her onto her hands and knees. She shoves back against me and I grab her hips. She reaches back and takes my cock in her hand—the first time she's touched it voluntarily—and guides me to her pussy.
"Hard," she says.
I give her hard.
Her scream echoes off the stone and the forge fires flare in the walls and I bury myself in the woman who makes blades that sing and I do not hold back.
