Chapter 3
SOPHIA
I'm still in the gateway when the heat of the Ember Court finds me.
Not the sight of it—not yet. The heat comes first, like walking into a wall of living air.
It's not forge heat or summer-crowd heat.
It's alive. It pushes through the gaps in my clothing and finds my collarbones, my wrists, the backs of my knees.
It presses against my bare skin and doesn't stop pressing.
My pulse kicks up.
My face flushes.
Between my hips, a low clench that has nothing to do with nerves. I know what it has to do with. I'm not going to name it while I'm standing in a gateway with a poisoned blade strapped to my thigh.
I breathe. I push it down. I'm good at this. Twenty-six years of practice.
The sight of the court hits me after the heat.
The great hall is enormous. I take it in piece by piece.
Vaulted ceilings of dark stone, veins of something glowing like banked coals.
Crystal chandeliers—but they don't hold candles.
They hold fire. Actual fire, suspended in glass without burning, casting light that moves and breathes and makes the shadows dance in ways that human light doesn't.
The floor is polished obsidian, dark as a blade. The firelight ripples across it.
Hundreds of guests fill the space—Fae and human. The Fae are obvious: the height, the stillness, the way the humans orbit them the way moths orbit flame.
I walk in as Lady Sophie Moreau. Minor landowner. Eastern territories. Seeking the Ember Court's protection from a border dispute that doesn't exist and never has.
My dress is the colour of dark wine. It cost more than my grandmother wanted to spend and it fits the way a cover fits—close enough to pass, loose enough to hide what's underneath.
The blade sits against my inner thigh. The two vials of poison are tucked into the whalebone at my ribs, disguised as scent bottles.
I smile the smile I built for this cover. Mild. Grateful. Forgettable.
I count the exits. Four. The main entrance behind me, a servants' passage to the left partially hidden by a tapestry, a corridor to the right that leads deeper into the court, and a set of glass doors at the far end that open onto a terrace.
The guards are Fae—two at each entrance, blades glowing faintly at the hilts.
Fighters, not decoration. Weight forward, hands loose.
I match their stance without thinking about it, the way you mirror someone who speaks your language.
The blade against my thigh hums.
I stop walking.
That's not possible. I forged this blade myself. It's steel and leather and the poison I wiped along its edge.
It doesn't hum.
And yet the metal is warm against my skin in a way it wasn't an hour ago, and there's a faint vibration running through it that I can feel against the inside of my leg like a pulse.
The fire magic in the air. That's all it is. The court runs on fire and the metal's responding to it the way iron responds to a lodestone.
That's all.
I'm not going to think about my grandmother's anvil. The pull in my chest. The metal singing under my hands.
I'm on a job.
I keep walking.
A Fae female in red silk reaches me within three minutes.
Tall, sharp-featured, a smile that says she's been told to be welcoming and resents it.
Castellan Lyra, guest services. She takes my cover documents and her eyes move over them with the careful attention of someone confirming what she's already been told.
"Lady Moreau. Welcome to the Ember Court. Your rooms are in the west wing. The festival proper begins tomorrow evening, but tonight's reception is open to all guests. Do you require an escort?"
"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.
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.