Page 74 of Scorched
He looks up. Something in his face—not shame. The expression of a male caught doing something he considers both necessary and none of her business.
"You sent guards to watch me."
"Yes."
"Even after I left."
"Especially after you left."
I look down at him. The Ember King, kneeling on his forge floor with his hands on my hips and his forehead against the belly where his child is growing. The fire-thread in the walls is blazing. The caldera is singing. The twenty-seven blades in the vault are humming so loud the stone vibrates.
I put my hand on his head. Between his horns. The bone is hot under my palm—the fire magic, always. The bone hot the way forge-stone is hot—heat that lives in the structure itself, not on the surface.
"Get up," I say.
He stands. He's taller than me. He's always been taller—the Fae king, built for dominance, his body dwarfing mine the way his fire dwarfs everything it touches. He looks down at me and his hands are still on my hips and the fire magic is still pulsing between us.
"I haven't forgiven you," I say. "I may not forgive you. But I came back because the other courts want me dead and you're the only king in the Fae world who will fight for me, and because the forge wakes my heritage and I refuse to let it sleep again. And because?—"
I stop. The word is in my throat. Not a hard word. Not a complicated word. The simplest word and the most dangerous.
"Because you are mine," I say. "The same way the forge is mine and the blades are mine and this heritage is mine. You belong to me. Not the other way around."
The fire-thread blazes. The mountain roars. The forge fills with heat and light and the Bloodwork harmonic surges in my blood and his fire magic answers it—not the old argument, not the ancient push, something new. Something that sounds, for the first time, like harmony.
He kisses me. Hard. His hand on the back of my neck, his mouth hot on mine, the fire magic pouring through the contact and lighting up every brand on my body. I kiss him back. My hand fisted in his hair between his horns, pulling his head down to mine, tasting the forge on his lips—iron dust and smoke and the faint mineral tang of the caldera's breath.
The forge is dark around us. The coals have gone to gray in his absence from the work. The only light is the fire-thread in the walls and the glow of his brands and the faint orange pulse from the caldera vents below. It's enough. I don't need light to find him.
"Mine," I say against his mouth.
He doesn't argue.
32
SOPHIA
We don't speak for the rest of the night.
He heals the worst of the damage—the cracked rib, the throat, a bruise on my hip I didn't mention that his fire magic found on its own—and then he stands in the forge with his hands at his sides and his golden eyes burning and he waits. For me to speak. For me to leave. For whatever comes next, because the fire king who has controlled every piece of this court for nine centuries has surrendered that control to the woman standing in front of him with assassin blood on her shirt and his child in her belly.
I let him wait.
I walk through the forge. Touch the walls. The fire-thread blazes under my fingertips—hot, bright, the mountain's magic rushing to meet my skin the way it rushed when I first arrived. The twenty-seven blades in the vault below are humming louder than I've ever heard them. A chorus. My chorus. The voices of a dead people singing through metal I made with my own hands.
The god-killer sits at my hip. It hasn't stopped humming since I left my grandmother's forge three days ago—a low, insistent vibration that pulses against my thigh like a secondheartbeat. I can feel its voice joining the others through the stone floor. Twenty-seven blades below. One at my hip. Twenty-eight Bloodwork weapons in the Ember Court and every one of them is mine.
I stop at the workbench. The piece he was making when I arrived is still there—rough, unfinished, the metal scorched and beaten. I pick it up. It's hot from his fire magic. It's a mess. No shape, no purpose, no technique. Just a male who needed to hit something.
I set it down.
"The other courts sent assassins," I say.
He's still standing where I left him. The forge light catches his horns, his bare chest, the fire brands glowing on his skin. His hands are fists at his sides. Not rage—restraint. The nine-hundred-year-old discipline holding him in place while I circle his forge like a predator in a room full of weapons.
"Yes. You told me."
"I killed them with abilities I didn't know I had. Bloodwork abilities. The heritage woke fully during the fight—the metal in my hands moved the way it moves in the forge, reshaping, answering my blood. I broke a Frost Court ice-blade with my bare fingers."
