Page 40 of Scorched
"Halfway," he says. His voice is steady. His hands are steady. Nothing about him shakes. "The right side now."
"Give me—one second?—"
"No. If I stop now the pattern will set asymmetric. I need to do both wings in one session."
His hands shift to my right shoulder blade. The fire magic begins again. The same pattern. The same precise, burning lines. I bite down on my own forearm and scream through my teeth.
The pattern takes shape. I can feel it—not just the pain but the structure, the architecture of what he's putting into my skin. Wing bones. Joint articulation. The specific geometry of flight encoded in fire magic and burned into my back.
Something in my body responds.
Not the omega. Not the heat. Something older. Something in my bones that's been sleeping since before I was born. It rises to meet his fire magic the way iron rises to meet the hammer—not fighting, not yielding, answering. My shoulder blades burn and the thing in my bones sings.
The Bloodwork harmonic. In me. In my body. Not in the metal. In me.
I scream and the scream has a note in it that shakes the forge walls. The tools on the racks rattle. The fire in the forge flares.
His hands press harder. The fire magic pours into me. The wing brands burn in. The thing in my bones sings louder.
I'm being made. I'm being forged. The same way I forge a blade—heated and shaped and cooled and tempered—he's forging me on the floor of his workshop.
When it ends I'm shaking so hard my teeth chatter. His hands lift from my shoulders. The fire magic fades to a low, steady hum—the brands settling in, the patterns cooling, the pain dropping from blinding to deep.
"Done," he says.
I lie on the forge floor. Naked. Branded three times. The wing marks on my shoulder blades throbbing with a heat that hasits own rhythm—not his heartbeat, not mine, but its own. The wings' own pulse.
He lies down beside me. Not touching. Close enough that I can feel his fire magic radiating off his skin in waves, close enough that the fire-thread in the wall above us is blazing from two sources now—his fire and whatever's burning in my back. The stone floor is hot beneath us. The caldera hums.
The heat in my belly is climbing again. The window of clarity is gone. The omega is back and she wants him inside her.
"Fuck me," I say into the stone. My voice is wrecked from screaming. "Before I change my mind about letting you brand me."
"You won't change your mind."
"Fuck me anyway."
His hand closes on the back of my neck. His body covers mine. He enters me from behind—slow this time, the ridges dragging, the fire magic pulsing through each one into my cunt at the same time it pulses through the fresh brands on my back. Pain and pleasure at once. The claiming and the forging happening together.
I come when the head catches. My cunt locks around him. The brands on my shoulders blaze. The sigil over my heart flares. The brand on my throat burns.
I'm lit up from the inside—three marks, his cock, his fire magic flowing through all of it at once.
He kneels behind me and fucks me on the forge floor while the brands cool on my back and I'm being made. I'm being forged into something I don't have a name for yet. Something that hums in the same key as the blade on the anvil.
Something that sings.
18
IGNUS
She kneels before me and offers me her blade.
Not the way an omega kneels for her alpha—not with submission, not with biology driving her down. The way a warrior kneels before a king. Straight-backed. Chin up. Her dark eyes clear for the first time in three days. The heat is still in her—I can smell it, banked low, the sweet sharp scent of omega need—but the woman kneeling in front of me is not the heat. The woman kneeling in front of me is choosing.
The forge is hot. The caldera is running high tonight—the mountain's own fire pushing up through the stone floor in waves that shimmer the air above the workbench. The fire-thread in the walls is pulsing in time with my heartbeat, the way it does when I'm aroused, the way it has done for nine hundred years and never once for anyone else until she walked into this court. The tools on the racks gleam in the fire-light. The air smells like heated iron and her—the omega scent that has been driving my fire magic past its normal register for four days.
She holds the blade across her open palms. I recognize the craftsmanship. Hers. Not the frenzied hum of the forge-heat blades she's made here—this one is older, more settled. Workedover years. She carried it into this court in the hand she meant to put it through my throat.
