Page 20 of Scorched
A fire-rose, like the one he gave me, except this one is mine—my hands, my heat, my metal—and it sits in my palm and it'swarm and I don't understand how it's warm because I'm human and humans don't put heat into steel.
I hold it against my chest and close my eyes and my body is aching in places I've spent my whole life pretending don't exist and I'm one day closer to the heat that's been building between my hips since the first night and I'm not sure I want to stop it and that's the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me, and I have killed twelve people.
Tomorrow I'll go back to the forge. Not because of the mission. Not because of the fiction. Because he asked me to show him what I am and I showed him and he didn't look away.
10
IGNUS
I'm alone in the forge at midnight and my body is a problem I can't solve.
The rut has been building for five days. Five days of her in my forge, her hands on my steel, her scent thickening in the air between us until I can taste it on the back of my tongue when I breathe. Five days of controlled distance, of precise instruction, of watching her kill and forge and weep and leave and come back and every night I return to my quarters and wrap my hand around my cock and try to relieve the pressure and it doesn't work. Not anymore. My hand isn't what my body wants.
The ridges are glowing. I can see them through the fabric of my breeches—a faint orange light pulsing in time with my heartbeat, the fire magic running so high that the stone floor beneath my feet is warm where I stand. I haven't lost control of my fire magic in six hundred years. I'm losing it now. The caldera beneath the court responds to my state—the mountain knows its king is in rut—and the walls of the forge are sweating, the stone too hot, the air shimmering above the pit.
I'm working because working is the only thing that keeps my hands occupied. A sword. Heavy, functional, the kind of blade Imake when I need to think with my body instead of my head. The steel is white-hot under my palms and I fold it and press it and fold it again and the rhythm of the work is supposed to settle me and it isn't settling me?—
Because every time I fold the metal I think of her fingers bending steel with no forge and no tools and the Bloodwork harmony singing from the blade she made and the tears on her face when I said you have been wasted and my cock throbs so hard the ridges ache and the glow brightens and I have to stop and breathe and press my hands flat against the stone bench until the surge passes.
It doesn't pass. It hasn't passed in days. It's only getting worse.
I've been in rut before. Hundreds of times. I know the shape of it, the progression—the initial stirring, the deepening need, the peak that demands release and then subsides. This isn't that shape. This rut has no plateau. It's been climbing since the night I caught her wrist and felt her pulse hammer against my thumb and it hasn't stopped climbing and I'm beginning to understand that it won't stop until I have her or until she is gone and if she is gone I'm not certain the rut will end at all.
She's done something to me. Or her blood has. Or her hands. Or the way she stands in my forge and forgets to pretend she isn't extraordinary and becomes the thing she actually is, which is the most dangerous and beautiful creature I've encountered in nine centuries of looking.
I set down the sword and grip the edge of the workbench—the stone cracks under my fingers for the second time this week. I'll need to replace it.
I smell her before I hear her.
Bloodwork. Iron and old sweetness and that deep, ancient note that makes the locked room inside my chest rattle on its hinges. And underneath the Bloodwork—her slick, which hasbeen growing stronger every day, which tonight is so thick in the air that it hits me like a hand against my face. Rich and hot and urgent, nothing faint about it anymore, nothing subtle. Her body has been building to this for days and tonight the building is nearly done.
And under the slick, under the Bloodwork, something new. A note I've been waiting for without letting myself know I was waiting. The sharp, bright edge of omega heat. Not yet broken. Not yet full. But present—a crackle in her scent like kindling that's caught fire and is deciding whether to blaze.
She's in the doorway of the forge.
She's wearing her nightdress. White, thin, the fabric clinging to her body where sweat's soaked through. Her hair is down—I've never seen it down, she keeps it pinned and weaponized, and loose it falls past her shoulders, black and dense and natural, damp at the temples where the heat has broken through. She's barefoot on the hot stone floor and she's holding a blade.
Not the ceramic. Not the garrotte. The blade she forged in my workshop three days ago—the hooked fighting knife with the weighted pommel and the edge that sings with Bloodwork harmony. Her best blade. Her truest blade.
The one she made to show me what she was capable of, and now she's holding it at her side with a grip so tight her knuckles are white and she's looking at me with an expression that isn't fury and isn't fear and isn't desire but all three at once, crushed together, a face that has run out of room for separate feelings.
"Sophia," I say.
"Don't." Her voice is wrecked. Low and ragged, stripped of every pretense she has ever worn. "Don't say my name. Don't—I am here to kill you. I am still here to kill you."
She crosses the forge floor. Barefoot on stone that would blister any other human. She doesn't flinch. The fire magic in the floor recognizes the Bloodwork in her and gives her passage andshe doesn't know this is happening and I do and my chest cracks open watching her walk through my forge like she was born to it.
She puts the blade to my throat.
The edge is sharp enough to split the air. I can feel the Bloodwork harmony humming through the steel where it presses against my skin—a vibration, a pulse, like placing your hand on the chest of a sleeping animal. Her blade is alive with a power she doesn't know she has and she's pressing it against the throat of the male who destroyed the people that power came from and she's shaking.
Not her hand. Her hand is steady. Seventeen years of training and her hand doesn't waver. Her body is shaking—her shoulders, her knees, her jaw, the muscles of her stomach visible through the sweat-thin nightdress, clenching and unclenching in waves that have nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the heat that's climbing through her body and demanding her attention.
I don't move.
I look at her. I look at her with everything I have—nine centuries of patience, six centuries of guilt, five days of rut that's burned through every wall I built and left me standing in the rubble of my own self-control. I look at her and I let her see what's behind my eyes, which isn't amusement, not the ancient king's game, not the careful performance of power. It's want. It's raw, uncut, absolute want, the kind that remakes a male from the inside, the kind I haven't felt since before I learned what loneliness meant.
"You're not going to use it," I say.
