Page 16 of Scorched
There's no eastern border dispute. There's never been an eastern border dispute. The woman I'm summoning is an assassin who has tried to kill me four times in three days and I'm inviting her back to the room where I am most myself because I want to see her hands move.
My cock has been half-hard since I woke. It's been half-hard for two days now—a low, persistent ache behind the ridges that has nothing to do with the caldera's heat and everything to do with the scent she left in the forge corridor the last time I held her wrist. I pressed my nose to the inside of my own fingers likea boy, like a rut-drunk fool, and the smell of her was still there hours later.
Iron and heat and that old, old sweetness underneath that I've not encountered in six hundred years and hoped I never would again.
My rut is waking. I can feel it in the base of my spine—a gathering pressure, a heat that's mine but doesn't answer to my will the way my fire magic does. For eight centuries I've cycled through ruts the way a blacksmith cycles through seasons: predictable, manageable, resolved alone in the privacy of my quarters with nothing but my hand and the memory of pleasure old enough to have lost its edges. I haven't needed anyone.
I've not wanted anyone with this particular urgency, this dragging pull behind the navel that says her, her, bring her closer, put your hands on her.
I am nine hundred years old. I am not going to lose my composure over a human girl with a talent for poisoning wine.
I tell myself this while I prepare the forge. I lay out the materials on the long workbench—raw steel, a selection of Ember alloys, tongs and hammers and the fine-work tools I use for detail. Then I remove the tongs and hammers. Then I put them back. Then I stand with my hands flat on the stone bench and breathe and my cock throbs and I ignore it and wait.
She arrives armed. Of course she does.
Today it is a garrotte wire braided into her hair and a ceramic blade strapped to the inside of her forearm—the kind that doesn't set off the fire-ward alarms in the corridors. Clever. The garrotte is new since yesterday. The ceramic isn't standard assassination work—it's custom, hand-shaped, and unless I'm mistaken it was made by the same hands that made the steel blade I caught at my throat two days ago.
She's been busy.
"Lady Moreau." I gesture to the workbench. "Thank you for coming."
"Your Majesty." Her voice is Lady Moreau's voice—measured, pleasant, the voice of a merchant's representative who is grateful for the court's hospitality. But her eyes go to the metal on the workbench and her pupils widen. A fraction. Less than a human would notice. I am not human, and I've been watching her eyes since the first night.
"I thought we might try something different today," I say. "Instead of discussing your border situation, I'd like you to make something."
Silence.
Her body goes very still. Not the stillness of surprise—the stillness of a predator who has been seen. Every muscle locks. Her weight shifts to the balls of her feet and her right hand drifts a half inch toward the ceramic blade on her forearm and then stops, because I am watching her hand and she knows I am watching.
"I'm afraid I don't understand," she says. "I'm a trade representative, not a smith."
"Sophia." I use her name deliberately. I watch it land—the flinch she almost hides, the way her jaw tightens, the micro-dilation of her pupils that tells me her body heard it even if her face didn't react. "I know you aren't a trade representative. I've known since the harvest festival. I know you're here to kill me. I know you've tried four times and I know you'll try again and I know the blade you used two days ago was forged by your hands and not purchased from any dealer in any territory."
Her hand is on the ceramic blade now. Not drawing it. Holding the shape of it through the fabric of her sleeve, the way she holds the fire-rose through the fabric of her pocket. She touches her weapons the way some people touch prayer beads—for comfort, for certainty, for the reminder that she's dangerous and therefore safe.
"You could run," I say. "I won't stop you. My guards won't follow. You'd be out of the Ember Court in two hours and back in human territory by nightfall."
She doesn't move. Her pulse is visible in her throat—fast, hard, the vein jumping beneath skin that's flushed pink from the forge heat. Or from something else. Her scent has changed in the last thirty seconds. The Bloodwork note—iron and old sweetness—has sharpened, risen, the way a perfume changes when the skin beneath it warms. And under it, threading through the Bloodwork like gold through dark stone, her slick. Faint. Present. Growing.
Her body knows what her mind hasn't admitted yet. She's standing in a forge full of fire magic beside the alpha her bloodline was made to answer and her omega biology is waking faster than her discipline can hold it down and she doesn't understand what is happening and I do and I'm going to let it happen.
"Or you could pick up the metal," I say, "and show me what you can do."
She looks at me. Those dark eyes, furious and calculating and afraid—not of me but of herself, of what she might reveal, of what it will mean if she picks up the steel and lets me see what she is. An assassin can be explained. An assassin can be managed. What she is underneath the assassin—what her hands can do, what her blood remembers—that's something else entirely.
She picks up the steel.
I've watchedmaster smiths work. I've watched Ember Fae who've spent three centuries at the anvil. I've watched my ownhands shape metal for nearly a millennium and I know what mastery looks like from the inside.
What she does isn't mastery. It's instinct.
She takes the bar of raw Ember steel—the good steel, the dense black alloy I keep for my own work—and turns it in her hands once, feeling the weight, the grain, the way the fire magic sits in the metal. Then she begins.
No hesitation. No planning. Her hands move the way a river moves—following a path that already exists, that was always there, that she isn't choosing but discovering. She bends the steel with her fingers. With her fingers. Human fingers don't bend Ember steel. Human hands don't have the strength or the heat tolerance to shape metal that's been woven with fire magic at the molecular level. But hers do. The metal yields to her grip the way it yields to mine, the way it yields to fire, and she doesn't notice that this is impossible because she's been doing it her whole life and no one has ever told her it shouldn't work.
Twenty minutes. She works for twenty minutes and I don't breathe for most of them.
What she makes is a blade. Eight inches, slightly curved, the edge so fine it would split a hair lengthwise. The fuller runs true down the middle of the blade, a channel for blood that follows the curve with a precision I've not seen in human work. Ever. In nine centuries.
