Page 81 of Scorched
The shirt falls. The cool air hits my skin for one breath before his fire magic presses against it—not his hands, his heat, the radiant temperature of a male whose fire runs so close to the surface that I can feel it from a foot away. The brands on my throat and my chest glow brighter. The unfinished wings on my shoulder blades ache.
"The wings," he says. His thumb traces the pattern on my left shoulder blade—the half-formed phoenix wing, the lines of fire that he burned into my skin during the heat and that have beenwaiting since for the final claiming to complete them. His fire magic presses into the mark and the ache deepens to a burn that sits on the edge of pain. "They will complete during the knotting. Not before."
"I know."
"It will hurt."
"I know that too."
His hand moves from my shoulder to my throat. Wraps around the brand at the base of my neck—the first mark, the one he burned there on the first night, the one the Frost Court assassin's blade cut across and his fire magic healed. His thumb presses against my pulse. The fire magic reads my heartbeat through the brand and I feel the bond tighten between us—not a tug, a tightening, the way a rope tightens when both ends pull.
"I won't hold back," he says. His golden eyes on mine. The mask gone. The fire king, undone, his control stripped away as deliberately as he stripped my clothes. "The brands require full intensity. My fire magic running through the ridges at its highest sustained temperature. Through the knotting. Through the release."
"If you hold back," I say, "the wings won't complete."
"No. They will not."
I reach for him. My hands on his chest—the bare skin, the fire brands glowing beneath, the heat of him so intense that my palms tingle where they press flat. I can feel his heart beating under my right hand. Fast. Faster than I've felt it. The fire king, whose pulse I've never known to spike, is running hot.
"Then don't hold back."
He lifts me. One arm under my thighs, the other around my back, and the fire magic floods through the contact—liquid heat pouring across my skin, lighting the brands, making the unfinished wings on my back flare with a pain that's not painbut readiness. The phoenix patterns reaching for his fire the way iron reaches for the hammer.
The bed is hot beneath me when he lays me down. His fire magic in the sheets, in the mattress, in the stone frame. The room is a forge. We are in a forge—not the Royal Forge with its anvil and caldera, but this room, this bed, this male whose fire is as much a part of him as the ridges and the horns and the golden eyes looking down at me.
He's still dressed from the waist. I reach for the laces. My fingers are steady. The assassin's hands that never shake, that held blades and mixed poisons and killed twelve targets without tremor, are steady as I unlace him and push the fabric down his hips and he's?—
I've seen him before. Four nights of the heat. But the heat was a haze of need and fire and the body's blind demand, and I wasn't fully present for the seeing. I'm present now. Fully conscious, fully deliberate, choosing every moment of this, and I look at the Ember King's cock and I understand what I'm choosing.
Thick. Obsidian-dark. The spiral ridges running from base to tip like cooled lava—hard-edged, volcanic, each one glowing with the controlled inner heat of his fire magic. The glow is brighter than I remember from the heat nights. Brighter because his fire is running higher. Brighter because he told me he wouldn't hold back and his body is keeping that promise before his hands do.
He radiates heat. I can feel it between my thighs before he touches me—a press of fire-warm air against slick-wet skin, the temperature rising in the space between us. My body answers. Slick floods my cunt in a rush that has nothing to do with the heat I went through weeks ago and everything to do with the male standing over me. My body knows him. My body has beenshaped by four nights of his ridges, his fire, the head-catch that broke me open. It knows what is coming. It wants.
He kneels between my thighs. His hands spread my legs—firm, unhurried, hands that know exactly how to hold what they're working with. His palms are calloused. His fire magic pulses through his fingers and into the soft skin of my inner thighs and the brands on my legs light up in response, lines of fire tracing from his touch to the sigil over my heart.
"Mine," he says. Not a question. The fire king stating a fact.
"Yours." I reach for him—grip the base of his cock, and the heat of it hits my palm. The ridges press against my fingers. Each one a ridge of volcanic stone, burning with controlled fire that transfers into my skin on contact. "And you are mine."
He enters me.
Not slow. Not gentle. The first thrust is a claiming—the full length of him pressing in, the ridges dragging against my inner walls one by one, each ridge hotter than the last as the fire magic runs through them. I gasp.
Not a quiet gasp—a sound pulled from somewhere behind my ribs, somewhere the assassin's training does not reach. The ridges light up inside me. I can feel each one, a ring of heat pressing into the slick-wet walls of my cunt, and the fire magic transfers through each point of contact the way it transfers through the brands on my skin.
He holds still. Buried. The ridges pressing their heat into me from inside and I can't move, can't adjust, can't find a position where the sensation is less. There is no less. The Ember Court cock is built for this—for holding still inside a body and making that body feel every ridge, every degree of heat, every controlled pulse of fire magic. He is not moving and I'm coming apart.
"Breathe," he says.
I breathe. The air tastes like iron and volcanic stone and the specific, sharp smell of my own slick mixed with his heat. Thefire magic pulses through the ridges—not static, alive, a rhythm that matches my heartbeat through the bond.
He begins to move.
The ridges drag on withdrawal. Each one catching on my inner walls, pressing heat into the flesh, a slow, relentless friction that makes me clench around him and the clenching only presses the ridges harder against the places where the fire magic is hottest. He pulls back until the tip catches at the ring of my cunt and then drives forward and the ridges enter me again, one by one, each one a ring of fire.
I grip the sheets. The fabric scorches under my fingers—his fire magic in the bed, burning through the linen where my hands fist. He thrusts again. Again. Each stroke deliberate, deep, the ridges working me from the inside with a precision that has nine centuries of practice behind it.
The head begins to swell.
