Page 68 of Scorched
I stand at the study window in the dark and I feel my mate's heartbeat three days away and I think: if this is what I think it is, then the courts' arithmetic just changed. A Bloodwork heir carrying an Ember King's child isn't one life. It's a lineage. It's a future. It's the thing I tried to destroy six hundred years ago refusing to die.
The mountain hums around me. The fire-thread pulses with that new, slow rhythm.
I don't sleep. I stand at the window and I feel her heartbeat and I wait.
29
SOPHIA
They come at dawn on the sixth day.
I'm in my grandmother's back room—the locked room, the room she opened for me the morning after I arrived. It's a Bloodwork forge. Small, hidden, built into the basement of the shop with ventilation so clever the smoke exits through the building's main chimney and looks like coal-fire exhaust. The tools are ancient. The anvil is Bloodwork steel, dense and dark and humming the moment I crossed the threshold. The walls are lined with shelves holding blades my grandmother made in secret over sixty years—blades that sing, that hum, that carry the heritage she preserved in silence while the courts believed the Bloodwork Fae were extinct.
I've been working the forge since she opened it. Three days of making. Three days of my hands moving in patterns that feel less like learning and more like coming home—the war-curves and guard-blades and singing steel that my blood remembers even if my mind doesn't. The Bloodwork harmonic is louder here than it was in the Ember Court. Concentrated. The heritage singing in a space built for it, fed by tools that were made for it, myhands on an anvil that's been waiting for Bloodwork fingers for six decades.
I'm holding a half-finished blade when the first ward alarm goes off.
The sound isn't a bell. It's a vibration—a sharp, sudden disruption in the Bloodwork harmonic, like a wrong note struck in the middle of a chord. The blades on the walls rattle. The anvil rings. I freeze. My hands go still on the hot metal and the assassin wakes in me the way she's always woken—fast, cold, the calm of a woman whose body knows what to do before her mind decides.
Three signatures. Fae. Moving fast, approaching from the north, east, and south. Surrounding the forge.
I set the blade down. I reach for the god-killer.
My grandmother is upstairs. I hear her chair scrape—she's felt the disruption too, the Bloodwork harmonic in her blood responding to the ward breach. I need to get her somewhere safe.
I'm halfway up the basement stairs when the kitchen door explodes inward.
The first assassinis Thorn Court.
I know this because of the weapon—a curved blade edged with thorn-venom, the signature tool of Kaelen's kill-squads. The Fae male is tall, lean, fast. He comes through the kitchen door in a shower of splinters and his blade is already swinging.
I duck. The thorn-blade passes over my head—close enough that I feel the venom mist on my hair—and I drive the god-killer upward into the space under his arm. The blade hits his ward-shield.
The shield shatters.
Not cracks. Not degrades. Shatters. The god-killer cuts through the Fae ward like it isn't there and the blade sinks into the assassin's side and the Bloodwork harmonic screams through the contact—metal meeting magic, the heritage tearing through the shield's remains with a sound like cracking glass.
He drops. Not dead—wounded, the thorn-blade falling from his hand as he clutches his ribs. I kick the blade away. I step over him.
The second assassin is in the doorway.
Stone Court. Heavier, slower, a female Fae with a shield-hammer that radiates a dense, crushing magic designed to suppress the Bloodwork harmonic. She swings the hammer and the suppression wave rolls through the kitchen like a wall of pressure—the Bloodwork harmonic in my blood stutters. The blades on my grandmother's walls go silent. The singing stops.
For two seconds, I'm human.
Two seconds of silence in my blood, two seconds of the heritage going dark, and in those two seconds the Stone Court assassin closes the distance and brings the hammer down toward my skull.
I don't need the heritage to fight.
My grandmother trained me before the heritage woke. Twenty years of close combat, twenty years of knives and fists and the specific, brutal efficiency of a human body used as a weapon. I slide sideways. The hammer hits the kitchen table and the wood explodes. I catch the assassin's wrist on the backswing—the same disarm technique I taught the Ember Court guards, the twist and strip that ends with her weapon in my hand.
The hammer is heavy. Dense stone magic, foreign in my grip, wrong. I throw it through the kitchen window. Glass shatters.
The assassin hits me.
A straight punch to the jaw that snaps my head sideways and fills my vision with white sparks. I stumble. She follows—fast fora Stone Court Fae, faster than I expected—and her second punch catches me in the ribs. I feel something crack. Not break—crack, the sharp, specific pain of a rib losing its argument with a Fae fist.
The Bloodwork harmonic surges back. The suppression wave faded when the hammer left her hands and now the heritage roars back into my blood like a furnace reigniting. The blades on the walls scream. The anvil in the basement rings. The god-killer in my hand blazes with the Bloodwork harmonic at full voice.
