Page 44 of Scorched
Her forehead against my chest. Her body still locked to mine—barely, the knot reduced to a thick swell that holds us connected but no longer immovable. Her breathing has slowed to the deep, even rhythm of exhaustion. The wing marks on her shoulders are setting. The final patterns burning in while she sleeps. I can feel them completing—each line, each angle, each junction where the forge-work geometry meets flesh.
She is being finished. And I'm the one who started this and I'm the one who can't stop it and the woman sleeping on my cock is going to wake up branded three times with a Bloodwork heritage I haven't told her about and her own blade in my vault—the one she carried here to kill me with, the one she put in my hands an hour ago like it was nothing.
The caldera hums. The fire-thread dims. The forge cools around us. The stone floor beneath my hip is cold now—the caldera's heat retreating, the mountain pulling its fire back after four days of burning too high. My body aches. The rut has cost me in ways I will not admit to anyone, least of all to the woman sleeping against my chest.
I do not sleep. I hold a sleeping assassin on my knot in a dying forge and I listen to the wing brands set and I know—the way a king knows, the way nine centuries of survival has taught me to know—that the thing I'm not telling her is going to be the thing that breaks this.
The Bloodwork harmonic hums in her bones. Even in sleep. Even now.
It sounds nothing like my fire.
19
SOPHIA
The heat breaks at dawn on the fifth day.
I know the exact moment because the world snaps back into focus like a lens clicking into place. One second I'm floating in the amber haze that has blurred the last four days into a continuous loop of need and fire and his cock and the forge. The next second I'm lying on the floor of the Royal Forge, naked, surrounded by weapons I made, and my mind is clear.
Brutally clear.
I sit up. My body protests—every muscle sore, my thighs aching, my pussy tender and swollen, the brands on my throat and chest and shoulders throbbing with a steady heat. I count the damage the way I count spent rounds after a job. Bruises on my hips from his hands. Bite marks on my shoulder. Scratch marks down my own thighs from digging my nails in while he knotted me.
The forge is quiet. Not silent—the caldera hums beneath the floor, a low, constant vibration that I've stopped noticing the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat. The fire-thread in the walls is dimmed to embers, a faint orange glow tracing the seamsof the stone. The anvil is dark. The coals in the central pit have banked to grey.
I'm alive. I'm still here. I'm not the same person who walked into this court two weeks ago.
The weapons are arranged around me in a rough semicircle. Seven of them. I count twice to be sure. The singing blade. The two throwing knives. The short sword. The garrotte wire. A curved dagger I barely remember making. And a piece I have no memory of at all—a long, slender thing that looks less like a weapon and more like a key, and when I pick it up the metal hums against my palm so loudly I set it down again.
Seven weapons. Each one better than anything in my grandmother's collection. Each one humming with a frequency I don't understand. Can't explain. Refuse to ignore.
I stand up. My legs hold. Barely.
He's asleep.
Ignatius—the Ember King, the male whose brands are burned into my throat and chest and shoulders—is asleep on the forge floor with his back against the anvil. His head is tilted, his horns catching the low forge light. His chest rises and falls. The fire brands on his skin are dim, the glow banked the way the forge coals are banked, both of them cooling after four days of burning too hot. He looks, in sleep, like something ancient and immovable. A mountain that happens to breathe.
I could kill him now. The thought arrives with the cold precision of my training and I examine it the way I examine every option I have. My blades are within reach. He's asleep. His throat is exposed. I know the exact angle of a killing cut.
I don't move toward the blades.
I stand naked in his forge with seven impossible weapons at my feet and I watch myself not reaching for a knife and I note this with dry precision: the mission is over. Not abandoned—over. The assassin who accepted this assignment no longerexists. The woman standing in her place made a singing blade and took a fire king's knot and said the cock is adequate and meant it.
I'm not planning to leave.
I'm planning breakfast.
He wakeswhen I'm pulling his shirt over my head.
Those golden eyes open—immediate, alert, nine centuries of survival instinct kicking in before consciousness has fully arrived. He scans the room. Scans me. His gaze lands on the fact that I'm dressed in his shirt and standing upright and my eyes are clear.
"The heat broke," he says.
"Twenty minutes ago."
"And you're still here."
"I'm hungry."
