Page 6 of Scorched
"Thank you, no."
Her gaze sweeps me—quick, cool, looking for what doesn't fit. I give her the cover smile. Mild. A little overwhelmed. The kind of woman who doesn't merit a second look.
Lyra nods and moves on. Twelve targets and not one of them has ever looked twice.
I take a glass of something that looks like wine and tastes like heat and smoke and I stand near the south wall where I can see the full room and I wait.
He is not hard to find.
My body finds him before my eyes do.
A wave of heat rolls across the room and hits me in the chest. My nipples tighten. My mouth goes dry. And then I look—because my body is already looking—and there he is.
Ignatius Pyrion. In the centre of the hall, not because he placed himself there but because everything else arranged itself around him.
Tall—taller than the guards, taller than any male I've ever seen, broad across the shoulders in a way that nine centuries built and nothing is going to undo. Dark skin catching the firelight with a sheen that isn't sweat. That's his magic. Fire running just beneath the surface, the way blood runs under mine.
Horns curve back from his temples, black and ridged, the tips catching light like polished obsidian.
Gold eyes. Not golden. Gold, the colour of molten metal at the moment it's ready to move.
My hands are steady. They're always steady.
The rest of me is not.
His heat hits me from thirty feet away—heat pressing against my bare arms, my throat, the skin above my neckline. My thighs clench. My cunt clenches. I'm wet, I'm already wet, standing in a crowded hall with a wine glass in my hand and the blade humming against my leg and slick starting to dampen my underclothes.
This has never happened to me before. I've killed Fae males in human territory and felt nothing. Not a flicker. My grandmother always said the courts were different—do not let the court get inside your head—and I thought she meant the politics, the intimidation, the spectacle.
I didn't think she meant this.
My cunt aching for a male I haven't spoken to. My slick dampening my underclothes from thirty feet away.
I'm disciplined. I've held myself together through worse.
I have not held myself together through anything like this.
The blade against my thigh is humming louder. A vibration I can feel in the bone.
My nipples ache against the fabric of my dress. Heat pools between my hips and sits there, heavy and wet.
None of this was in the plan.
I've killed twelve people and not one of them made my hands shake. My hands aren't shaking now. But my thighs are warm and my cunt is slick and the King of the Ember Court is standing thirty feet away and he hasn't looked at me yet and I'm already this gone.
I set the glass down. I press my palms flat against the stone wall behind me—the stone is cooler than the air, and I need something cool against my skin right now. I breathe. I count. I push it down, all of it, the way my grandmother spent twenty-six years teaching me to do.
Lock the body. Slow the breath. Kill the feeling before it takes root.
He turns his head.
Across the room, across thirty feet of crowded hall and firelight and crystal and the hum of a hundred conversations, Ignatius Pyrion turns his head and looks directly at me.
Not a glance. Not a sweep of the room that happens to catch me in its path.
He turns and finds me the way you find a sound that's been pulling at you. His gold eyes settle on mine and hold.
I don't breathe.
