Page 15 of Scorched
My cunt clenches, hard and involuntary, a spasm that rolls through my lower belly and between my thighs and I'm standing beside the throne of the male I'm supposed to kill with his hand around my wrist and my body going wet and I cannot?—
I pull my wrist free. He lets me. He always lets me go and that's the worst part, the part that keeps me awake at night—he could hold me and he doesn't. He opens his hand and I take my blade and step back and he returns his attention to the trade negotiations as if nothing happened.
My wrist burns where he held it. Not from his fire magic. From the absence of his grip.
At dinner that evening,the visiting lord makes his move.
He's Frost Court—tall and pale, with the blue-white colouring of his kind and eyes like frozen lakes. He's been watching me since the afternoon gathering with the particular expression I've learned to identify in Fae males—curiosity cut with contempt, the look they give a human who has the nerve to exist in their space without being entertaining enough to justify it.
"It must be novel for His Majesty," the lord says, loud enough for the table to hear. "Having a little human pet who fancies herself dangerous. Tell me, Lady Moreau—do they let you hold the real knives, or only the pretty ones?"
The table goes still. Not silent—the conversations at the far end continue—but the twelve Fae closest to us stop talking and look at me the way an audience looks at a stage.
My hand is under the table, fingers on the blade at my thigh. I've killed males twice his size for less than this and I could open his throat before he finished his next sentence and every part of me wants to, the anger bright and clean and ready?—
"Silthar."
One word. Ignatius hasn't looked up from his plate, his fork still in his hand, his voice exactly as it was a moment ago when he was discussing the mineral rights beneath the eastern ridge—level, unhurried, the kind of quiet that has nine centuries of weight behind it.
The Frost lord's mouth closes. His pale skin goes a shade paler. He sets his wine goblet down and inclines his head and says, "Your Majesty," and does not speak for the rest of the meal.
I wait for the rest of it—the explanation, the performance, the part where Ignatius turns to me and makes sure I know he did that for me, the way males do when they want you to feel grateful and small and protected and owned.
He picks up his fork and cuts his meat and says nothing. He doesn't look at me or acknowledge what just happened. He simply removed the threat the way he removes all threats—completely, without display, and then returned to what he was doing.
My throat is burning. Not from anger. From the same heat that floods me every time he does something I don't ask for and doesn't make me pay for it. It sits behind my sternum like a coal I swallowed and I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth and breathe through it and it doesn't go away.
I can't sleep.
I lie in my guest chamber in the dark and listen to the mountain breathing—the low, constant vibration of the caldera beneath the court, a sound like a heartbeat that's too big and too old to belong to anything alive. The fire-rose is on the table beside my bed. I've taken it out of my pocket. I told myself I was just going to set it down and forget about it but the metal is still warm, still humming with his fire magic, and the heat of it reaches me even from two feet away.
My hands won't be still.
I get up and take the second fire-iron from the hearth—the poker, long and thin, decent steel—and sit on the stone floor in my nightdress and begin to work.
I don't decide to. My hands decide. They wrap around the metal and begin bending it, shaping it, the same way they did last night, the same way they've done since I was old enough to hold a hammer. My grandmother taught me this before she taught me how to kill. Before the blades, before the poisons, before the cold discipline that turned me into a weapon—there was metal. There was the feeling of it moving under my fingers. There was the only silence I've ever trusted, the silence of making something that didn't exist before.
The poker becomes a knife. Not a killing blade—something smaller, finer, with a curve to the edge that follows a shape I don't consciously choose. A paring blade, maybe—something for cutting fruit or trimming herbs, something domestic, something a woman who wasn't an assassin might keep in her kitchen.
I hold it up in the dark and the metal catches the faint glow from the fire-rose on my bedside table and for a moment both of them are lit the same way—warm and orange and alive with a light that's not mine.
I made this without a forge, without heat, with nothing but my bare hands and a boot knife, and I shouldn't be able todo that. Steel doesn't bend for fingers, not human fingers, not without tools and fire and force. But it bent for mine.
It moved the way it moves in his forge, the way it moved under his hands yesterday, and I'm sitting on the floor of my guest chamber holding a blade I shouldn't have been able to make and the fire-rose is warm beside me and my hands are shaking.
I put the knife under my pillow and the fire-rose back in my pocket. I lie in the dark and listen to the mountain's heartbeat and I don't think about him. I don't think about the way he said my name. I don't think about exceptionally good or the grip on my wrist or the fact that he didn't explain himself after the Frost lord and that the not-explaining felt like a kind of respect I've never been given.
I don't think about any of it. I lie still and count my breaths and press my thighs together against the ache between them and I wait for morning.
The fire-rose pulses warm against my hip. I don't take it out again. But I don't move away from it either.
8
IGNUS
Isummon her to the forge again. Not the audience chamber. Not the diplomatic sitting rooms where the other delegates discuss tariffs and border disputes and whatever polite fictions keep them occupied. The forge.
The messenger I send is one of my personal guard—a female who has served me for three hundred years and knows not to ask questions. I tell her: Invite Lady Moreau to the Royal Forge at midmorning. Tell her I wish to continue our discussion about the eastern border dispute.
