Page 18 of Scorched
He's already working when I arrive. Stripped to the waist. I've seen him dressed for court—the fire-thread coat, the formal attire that makes him look like what he is, an ancient king with nine centuries of power behind his eyes. This is different.
His skin is dark and sheened with sweat and the muscles of his back move under it like something forged, the tendons in his forearms standing out as he works a length of steel between his palms. The heat coming off him isn't the forge's heat. It's his heat, radiating from his skin in waves I can feel from twelve feet away, and my body responds before my mind can stop it.
My nipples tighten. A flush climbs my throat. Between my thighs, that slick ache I've been fighting for days pulses once—hard, sudden, like a fist clenching—and I press my thighs together and breathe through my nose and lock it down.
He looks up. Those golden eyes move over me once—not slow, not obvious, but thorough in the way a male who's been alive for nearly a millennium is thorough—and then he sets the steel down and wipes his hands on a cloth and says, "Good morning."
As if this is normal. As if the king of the Ember Court and the assassin sent to kill him meeting in his private forge for the second day is something that happens. As if my body isn't running hot from the inside out and my hands aren't shaking and the air between us isn't thick with something I refuse to name.
"I thought we might work together today," he says.
He teaches me combat first.
Not the kind I know. My grandmother's training was cold and efficient—the fastest route between a blade and a throat, the angle that opens the artery in the thigh, the weight you need to put a body on the ground in under two seconds. I've been drilledin seventeen killing techniques since I was nine years old. I can disarm a Fae male twice my size. I can put a blade through plate armour at the join between shoulder and chest from fifteen feet.
Ignatius doesn't teach me to kill. He teaches me to fight.
"Your footwork is narrow," he says, circling me on the training floor he's cleared beside the forge pit. He's given me a practice blade—unsharpened, heavy, the weight of it pulling at my shoulder in a way my balanced throwing knives never do. "You've been trained to close distance and strike. One target, one movement, done. That works against a mark who doesn't know you're coming. It doesn't work against an opponent who's facing you."
"I don't fight opponents who are facing me," I say. "I kill them before they turn around."
He laughs. Not mocking—a sound that comes from deep in his chest and lands somewhere in my stomach like a dropped stone. "I know. That's why you're still alive. But someday you will face someone you cannot kill from behind, and on that day your grandmother's training will get you killed."
He steps behind me. His hands come to my hips.
The heat of his palms through the fabric of my training clothes is—I don't have a word for it. Not burning. Not painful. The edge of too much, the exact line between pleasure and something that will leave a mark, and my hips jerk forward involuntarily and then lock still and he doesn't comment on the jerk or the stillness. He simply adjusts my stance—widens it, drops my weight.
"Here," he says, against my ear. His breath is fire-warm. "Your power comes from here. Not your arms. Not your wrists. Here."
His hands press against the bones of my hips and something deep in my pelvis answers—a pull, a tightening, a heat that blooms from the exact place his palms are pressing and spreadsdown through my thighs and up through my belly and I'm wet. I'm wet—undeniably, the slick soaking through in a rush that I can't control and can't hide and the smell of it hits the air between us and I know he can smell it because his hands tighten on my hips for one fraction of a second before he releases me and steps back.
"Again," he says. His voice hasn't changed. "Wider. Drop your weight."
I want to kill him. I want to put my blade through his throat and watch the fire go out of his golden eyes and I want him to put his hands back on my hips and I want both of these things at the same time and neither one more than the other and that's the problem. That's been the problem since the first night.
We drill for an hour. His hands correct my grip, my stance, the angle of my shoulders when I swing. Every touch is precise and brief and leaves a burn mark on my skin that's not visible but that I feel for minutes afterward—a ghost-heat, a memory in the nerves, the way the fire-rose in my pocket is warm hours after he set it down. By the end of the hour I'm drenched in sweat and my arms are shaking and I've learned more about fighting in sixty minutes than my grandmother taught me in seventeen years.
He doesn't tell me this. He doesn't need to. I can feel it in my body—the new width in my stance, the way my weight sits differently, the shift from assassin's precision to something broader, more grounded, more alive.
My grandmother made me a blade. He's making me a forge.
I hate that metaphor. I hate that I thought it. I push it down and pick up the practice sword and say, "Again."
He smiles. Not wide, not warm—a small, private thing that moves through one corner of his mouth and reaches his eyes and I feel it in my cunt like a finger pressing down. I swing at him. He blocks it without moving his feet.
After combat,we forge.
He gives me the good steel again—Ember alloy, dense with fire magic, the kind my hands understand without being taught. I don't question this understanding anymore. I questioned it the first time and it kept me up all night and I still don't have an answer and I've decided that the answer doesn't matter as much as the feeling of metal moving under my fingers like water.
"Show me the blade you would make if no one told you what to make," he says.
I think about it for less than a second. My hands already know.
I make a fighting knife. Not an assassination blade—those are thin and precise and designed for a single purpose. This is broader, heavier, with a curve to the edge that follows my natural wrist rotation and a guard that fits my grip as if I carved it from a mould of my own hand. The metal sings as I work it—that same low, clear note from yesterday, the one that made him go still, the one I don't understand but that feels like my own heartbeat translated into sound.
He stands close enough that I can feel his heat but not close enough to touch, watching my hands the way I watched his in the forge two days ago—with hunger that has nothing to do with the body and everything to do with craft. Or maybe both. Maybe those are the same thing in this court, in this forge, for a male whose hands shape steel the way other people shape words.
"The edge wants to curve more," he says. Not correcting. Just watching my hands. "Your instinct is pulling it toward a hook shape at the tip. Don't fight it."
