Page 45 of Scorched
He stands. He moves the way he always moves—unhurried, every motion deliberate—but I catch something underneath it. A fraction of stiffness. A careful quality to the way he puts weight on his left leg. The rut cost him too. Nine centuries old and four days of mating have left a mark.
I decide not to mention it. Assassins know when to leave a weakness unacknowledged.
He sends for food. A guard appears at the forge entrance—young, nervous, his eyes skirting the walls rather than looking at either of us. The Ember King naked and the human assassin in his shirt. The weapons on the floor. The forge that smells like fire and sex and metal.
The food arrives quickly. Cold meat, dark bread, dried fruit, water. No wine. The servants set it on a workbench between a half-finished cage and my singing blade and retreat faster than I've seen Fae move.
I tear a piece of the bread. It's dense and dark, with a grain that catches between my teeth, and the taste of it—flour and salt and something faintly sweet, like honey burned to its edges—lands on my tongue with a force that makes my eyes close. Four days without food. Four days of nothing but his fire magic and his cock and the forge and now bread, simple bread, and my body shakes with the relief of it.
He watches me eat. Sitting across from me on the anvil, his own bread in his hands, his golden eyes tracking the movement of my jaw, the way I tear the bread with my teeth, the way I chew. He eats slowly. I eat like I'm starving. I am.
The meat is venison, sliced thin, faintly smoky. I eat three pieces before I taste them properly. The fourth piece I hold in my mouth and let the flavor sit. Smoke and salt and iron. Iron. The forge is in the food or the food is in the forge or my tongue has been reshaped by four days of heat and fire magic and everything tastes like metal now.
Neither of us speaks. The caldera hums beneath our feet. The fire-thread in the walls brightens slightly—his fire magic is rising, the control coming back now that the rut has broken, the mountain responding to his waking presence the way a hound responds to its master's voice.
The silence isn't empty. It's the specific quiet of two people who have seen each other at the absolute limit of what a body can endure and have nothing left to prove.
"I gave you my blade," I say eventually.
"You did."
"It's irreplaceable."
"I know."
"If you damage it I'll kill you."
He looks at me. Something in his face—not a smile. Not amusement. His eyes are steady and his mouth is straight and he heard every word.
"Understood," he says.
I tear off another piece of bread. Chew. Swallow. The dried fruit is tart and small, like currants but darker, with a sweetness that bites. I eat a handful. Then another. My body is a furnace that has been running on nothing and now everything I put into it burns to fuel immediately.
"I need a bath. And clean clothes. And access to your weapons vault."
"In that order?"
"In that order."
He nods. He finishes his food. He stands and offers me his hand—not to help me up, because I can stand on my own and he knows it. To walk me through his court. The Ember King and his claimed omega, side by side, through the corridors where he carried me knotted four days ago.
I take his hand. Not because I need to. Because the assassin's mind has finished her assessment and the assessment is: this is where I belong. Not in my grandmother's forge. Not on the road between kills. Here. In this mountain. Beside this fire.
The bath isin a chamber carved from obsidian.
Hot springs from the caldera feed it. The water is mineral-dark and steaming and the heat sinks into my wrecked body like a second claiming—gentler, less personal, the mountain itself working the soreness from my muscles. The obsidian walls are smooth and black and they reflect the water in dark, shifting patterns. No fire-thread here. No light except the faint glow rising from the water itself, the minerals catching whatever heat they carry and turning it to a pale, green-gold shimmer.
I sit in the water and I look at my body.
The brand at the base of my throat. Forge-work geometry, precise lines and angles, his mark. The sigil over my heart—more intricate, deeper, the pattern that connects his fire magic to my bloodstream. I press my fingers to it and feel his heartbeat underneath, faint and steady, a thread of fire connecting us even now. He's somewhere above me. In the study, or the corridor, or the forge. The sigil doesn't tell me where. It tells me alive. It tells me close.
The wing brands on my shoulder blades. I can't see them but I can feel them—heavy, warm, the patterns larger and more complex than the others. I roll my shoulders and the brands shift under my skin like something alive. Not painful. Present. The weight of them is new. The weight of them is mine.
Three marks. Permanent. I belong to the Ember Court now. To him.
I sink lower in the water. The steam curls around me. The brands glow faintly through the mineral-dark surface—throat, chest, shoulders—three points of fire in the obsidian pool.
I think about my grandmother.
