Page 19 of Scorched
I don't fight it. The blade curves. The hook forms—a wicked thing, a shape that would catch in flesh and hold, that would make withdrawal as damaging as the entry, and I know this shape. My hands know this shape. I've drawn it in my sleep, in margins, in the frost on my window at my grandmother'shouse when I was twelve years old and didn't know what I was drawing.
"Beautiful," he says.
My hands stop. My whole body stops. The word hits me under the ribs—lands in the place my grandmother's silence carved out, the place that's been empty for twenty-six years—and fills it with heat. Not the forge's heat. His heat. The specific burn of being seen by someone who knows what they're looking at and isn't afraid of what they see.
"Beautiful work," he says again, quieter, and I realise he said it twice because I didn't respond the first time. Because I was standing at the workbench with a blade in my hands and tears pressing against the backs of my eyes and my jaw locked shut against the sound that wanted to come out of my throat, the sound that would have been a name I'm not going to say.
"Thank you," I manage.
He nods. "Now show me the killing technique you're most proud of."
I shouldn't do this.
I know I shouldn't do this. Every fibre of training I have says: do not reveal your methods, do not demonstrate your kills, do not show the male you were sent to assassinate exactly how you would assassinate him. This is the opposite of every rule my grandmother taught me. This is the opposite of the mission. This is the opposite of survival.
I pick up the practice blade and I show him.
The throat cut from behind—the angle, the pressure, the way I use my off-hand to control the target's chin and expose the artery. He watches without blinking. When I finish he says, "The wrist rotation at the end is yours. That isn't taught."
"No," I say. "That's mine."
"Show me another."
I show him the femoral strike. The eye gouge that transitions into a windpipe crush. The poison through a handshake—I demonstrate with a chalk bag standing in for the compound, pressing the powder into the seams of a leather glove, showing him the exact pressure needed to break the seal on contact. He's utterly still when I demonstrate this one. Then he says, "That's how you delivered the oleander at dinner."
"Yes."
"The glove seal is extraordinary. Who designed it?"
"I did."
Something moves behind his eyes. Not surprise—recognition. The same expression he wore when I picked up the steel and started working. As if every time I show him something, he's having the same thought, and the thought is one I'm not allowed to hear.
"Again," he says. "Show me the one you've never shown anyone."
I hesitate. My body is screaming at me—my training, my discipline, my grandmother's voice in the back of my skull saying weapons don't feel, weapons don't want, weapons don't show a target the shape of their edge. And underneath that voice, deeper and older, another voice. One that sounds like metal singing. One that says he asked to see you and you want to be seen.
I show him the kill I invented at fifteen.
The one I've never used because it requires a blade made to a tolerance that commercial smiths can't achieve—a blade I'd have to make myself, with the hook at the tip and the weighted pommel and the precise balance that lets it spin on a single axis and return to my hand after the strike. A kill that's half bladework and half art and that I've practised ten thousand times in private and never once used because using it wouldreveal too much about what I can do and my grandmother said never show them what you are.
He doesn't speak for a long time after I finish.
Then he says, "You have been wasted."
The heat in my chest detonates. It floods my throat and my face and my eyes and I'm blinking and my vision is blurring and I'm standing in the forge of the Ember King with my blade in my hand and tears running down my face because a nine-hundred-year-old Fae male looked at the thing I've hidden my entire life and said you have been wasted and he is right. He is right and no one has ever said it and I'm going to kill him. I'm going to kill him or I'm going to let him put his hands on me again and I can't tell the difference anymore.
"I need to go," I say. My voice is wrecked.
"I know," he says. "Come back tomorrow."
I leave. I walk back through the corridors with tears drying on my face and the blade still in my hand—he didn't ask for it back, I didn't think to leave it—and the fire-rose burning warm against my hip and my thighs slick and my hands shaking and the sound of you have been wasted ringing in my skull like Bloodwork harmony.
I go to my room, lock the door, put the blade on the bed and the fire-rose beside it, and sit on the floor and press my forehead to my knees and breathe.
The mission is still the mission. I'm still here to kill him. I'm still the weapon my grandmother made.
But my hands are reaching for the curtain rod again, and the metal bends under my fingers like it's been waiting for me, and I'm making something in the dark that I don't have a name for yet, and when it's finished it doesn't look like a weapon at all. It looks like a flower.
