Page 7 of Scorched
Two seconds. Maybe three.
The heat between my hips clenches hard enough to hurt and my hand drifts to the blade at my thigh before I know I'm reaching for it. My fingers close on the hilt. His gold eyes drop to the movement. I see them track it. The corner of his mouth shifts by a fraction—not a smile, not amusement.
His eyes move back to my face.
Something has shifted in them. The slight adjustment of a calculation that just got easier.
My stomach drops.
He looks away. Turns back to the Fae lord beside him as though nothing happened.
The moment ends.
I'm standing against the south wall of the Ember Court's great hall with my hand on a poisoned blade and my cunt wet and my cover intact and every nerve in my body screaming that I've just been seen by the one male I cannot afford to be seen by.
I pull my hand off the blade. I pick up my glass. I drink.
The wine burns going down and I let it burn because the burn gives me something to focus on that isn't the gold of his eyes or the heat between my legs or the way my blade is humming against my thigh like it wants to go to him.
I have nine days. One cut. Ninety seconds.
He looked at me like he already knew.
I finish the wine. I find a servant. I ask to be shown to my rooms.
The halls of the Ember Court are long and hot and lit with fire that doesn't flicker. By the time I reach the west wing my hands have stopped shaking.
My thighs are still warm. My blade hasn't stopped humming.
In my rooms, alone, I lock the door. I sit on the edge of the bed and press my hands flat against my knees and breathe until my heart slows.
My discipline is holding. It's holding.
It was the court. The fire magic. Not him. My grandmother warned me the courts would try to get inside my head. She didn't warn me they'd get between my legs.
I have a job. I'll do it the way I always do. I'll kill the King of the Ember Court and I'll walk out and no one will know I was here.
My underwear is still damp. I peel them off and throw them in the basin and wash my face and don't look at myself in the mirror.
I unsheathe the blade and hold it up. The metal catches the firelight and for a moment—just a moment—the steel glows, and the glow is the exact colour of his eyes.
I put the blade down.
I do not sleep well.
4
IGNUS
Ismell her before I see her.
The great hall is full—three hundred guests, the diplomatic contingents from Mist and Thorn, the human trade delegations who've come to beg for market concessions they won't receive, the fire dancers spinning light across the obsidian floor. The air is thick with perfume and spiced wine and the tension that always fills a room where Fae and humans are pretending to trust each other.
I've stood in this room a thousand times. I've smelled a thousand variations of the same night.
This is not that.
It comes through the crowd the way fire finds air—not gradually, not politely, but as though someone has opened a door that's been sealed for six hundred years.
