Chapter 9 Sophia
SOPHIA
Igo back to the forge.
I tell myself it's because refusing would raise questions.
The Ember King has personally invited the human trade delegate to observe his metalwork—declining would be a diplomatic insult, a break in the fiction I'm maintaining, an unnecessary risk to the mission.
I tell myself this while I dress in the dark, while I strap the new blade—the one I made three nights ago from a curtain rod, the one that shouldn't exist—to my thigh, while I twist my hair up and thread the garrotte wire through the pins.
I tell myself this all the way down the corridor and through the stone archway that opens onto the forge level, and by the time I step through the door and the heat hits me like a wall—thick, alive, pressing against my skin through the fabric of my dress—I've stopped pretending.
I'm here because I want to be. I'm here because yesterday he watched me make a blade and said extraordinary and meant it, and the place inside my chest where that word landed is still warm, and I need it to stop being warm or I need more of it and I don't know which is worse.
He's already working when I arrive. Stripped to the waist. I've seen him dressed for court—the fire-thread coat, the formal attire that makes him look like what he is, an ancient king with nine centuries of power behind his eyes. This is different.
His skin is dark and sheened with sweat and the muscles of his back move under it like something forged, the tendons in his forearms standing out as he works a length of steel between his palms. The heat coming off him isn't the forge's heat.
It's his heat, radiating from his skin in waves I can feel from twelve feet away, and my body responds before my mind can stop it.
My nipples tighten. A flush climbs my throat. Between my thighs, that slick ache I've been fighting for days pulses once—hard, sudden, like a fist clenching—and I press my thighs together and breathe through my nose and lock it down.
He looks up. Those golden eyes move over me once—not slow, not obvious, but thorough in the way a male who's been alive for nearly a millennium is thorough—and then he sets the steel down and wipes his hands on a cloth and says, "Good morning."
As if this is normal. As if the king of the Ember Court and the assassin sent to kill him meeting in his private forge for the second day is something that happens.
As if my body isn't running hot from the inside out and my hands aren't shaking and the air between us isn't thick with something I refuse to name.
"I thought we might work together today," he says.
He teaches me combat first.
Not the kind I know. My grandmother's training was cold and efficient—the fastest route between a blade and a throat, the angle that opens the artery in the thigh, the weight you need to put a body on the ground in under two seconds.
I've been drilled in seventeen killing techniques since I was nine years old.
I can disarm a Fae male twice my size. I can put a blade through plate armour at the join between shoulder and chest from fifteen feet.
Ignatius doesn't teach me to kill. He teaches me to fight.
"Your footwork is narrow," he says, circling me on the training floor he's cleared beside the forge pit.
He's given me a practice blade—unsharpened, heavy, the weight of it pulling at my shoulder in a way my balanced throwing knives never do.
"You've been trained to close distance and strike.
One target, one movement, done. That works against a mark who doesn't know you're coming.
It doesn't work against an opponent who's facing you. "
"I don't fight opponents who are facing me," I say. "I kill them before they turn around."
He laughs. Not mocking—a sound that comes from deep in his chest and lands somewhere in my stomach like a dropped stone. "I know. That's why you're still alive. But someday you will face someone you cannot kill from behind, and on that day your grandmother's training will get you killed."
He steps behind me. His hands come to my hips.
The heat of his palms through the fabric of my training clothes is—I don't have a word for it.
Not burning. Not painful. The edge of too much, the exact line between pleasure and something that will leave a mark, and my hips jerk forward involuntarily and then lock still and he doesn't comment on the jerk or the stillness.
He simply adjusts my stance—widens it, drops my weight.
"Here," he says, against my ear. His breath is fire-warm. "Your power comes from here. Not your arms. Not your wrists. Here."
His hands press against the bones of my hips and something deep in my pelvis answers—a pull, a tightening, a heat that blooms from the exact place his palms are pressing and spreads down through my thighs and up through my belly and I'm wet.
I'm wet—undeniably, the slick soaking through in a rush that I can't control and can't hide and the smell of it hits the air between us and I know he can smell it because his hands tighten on my hips for one fraction of a second before he releases me and steps back.
"Again," he says. His voice hasn't changed. "Wider. Drop your weight."
I want to kill him. I want to put my blade through his throat and watch the fire go out of his golden eyes and I want him to put his hands back on my hips and I want both of these things at the same time and neither one more than the other and that's the problem.
That's been the problem since the first night.
We drill for an hour. His hands correct my grip, my stance, the angle of my shoulders when I swing.
Every touch is precise and brief and leaves a burn mark on my skin that's not visible but that I feel for minutes afterward—a ghost-heat, a memory in the nerves, the way the fire-rose in my pocket is warm hours after he set it down.
By the end of the hour I'm drenched in sweat and my arms are shaking and I've learned more about fighting in sixty minutes than my grandmother taught me in seventeen years.
He doesn't tell me this. He doesn't need to. I can feel it in my body—the new width in my stance, the way my weight sits differently, the shift from assassin's precision to something broader, more grounded, more alive.
My grandmother made me a blade. He's making me a forge.
I hate that metaphor. I hate that I thought it. I push it down and pick up the practice sword and say, "Again."
He smiles. Not wide, not warm—a small, private thing that moves through one corner of his mouth and reaches his eyes and I feel it in my cunt like a finger pressing down. I swing at him. He blocks it without moving his feet.
After combat, we forge.
He gives me the good steel again—Ember alloy, dense with fire magic, the kind my hands understand without being taught.
I don't question this understanding anymore.
I questioned it the first time and it kept me up all night and I still don't have an answer and I've decided that the answer doesn't matter as much as the feeling of metal moving under my fingers like water.
"Show me the blade you would make if no one told you what to make," he says.
I think about it for less than a second. My hands already know.
I make a fighting knife. Not an assassination blade—those are thin and precise and designed for a single purpose.
This is broader, heavier, with a curve to the edge that follows my natural wrist rotation and a guard that fits my grip as if I carved it from a mould of my own hand.
The metal sings as I work it—that same low, clear note from yesterday, the one that made him go still, the one I don't understand but that feels like my own heartbeat translated into sound.
He stands close enough that I can feel his heat but not close enough to touch, watching my hands the way I watched his in the forge two days ago—with hunger that has nothing to do with the body and everything to do with craft.
Or maybe both. Maybe those are the same thing in this court, in this forge, for a male whose hands shape steel the way other people shape words.
"The edge wants to curve more," he says. Not correcting. Just watching my hands. "Your instinct is pulling it toward a hook shape at the tip. Don't fight it."
I don't fight it. The blade curves. The hook forms—a wicked thing, a shape that would catch in flesh and hold, that would make withdrawal as damaging as the entry, and I know this shape.
My hands know this shape. I've drawn it in my sleep, in margins, in the frost on my window at my grandmother's house when I was twelve years old and didn't know what I was drawing.
"Beautiful," he says.
My hands stop. My whole body stops. The word hits me under the ribs—lands in the place my grandmother's silence carved out, the place that's been empty for twenty-six years—and fills it with heat.
Not the forge's heat. His heat. The specific burn of being seen by someone who knows what they're looking at and isn't afraid of what they see.
"Beautiful work," he says again, quieter, and I realise he said it twice because I didn't respond the first time.
Because I was standing at the workbench with a blade in my hands and tears pressing against the backs of my eyes and my jaw locked shut against the sound that wanted to come out of my throat, the sound that would have been a name I'm not going to say.
"Thank you," I manage.
He nods. "Now show me the killing technique you're most proud of."
I shouldn't do this.
I know I shouldn't do this. Every fibre of training I have says: do not reveal your methods, do not demonstrate your kills, do not show the male you were sent to assassinate exactly how you would assassinate him.
This is the opposite of every rule my grandmother taught me.
This is the opposite of the mission. This is the opposite of survival.
I pick up the practice blade and I show him.
The throat cut from behind—the angle, the pressure, the way I use my off-hand to control the target's chin and expose the artery. He watches without blinking. When I finish he says, "The wrist rotation at the end is yours. That isn't taught."
"No," I say. "That's mine."
"Show me another."
I show him the femoral strike. The eye gouge that transitions into a windpipe crush.
The poison through a handshake—I demonstrate with a chalk bag standing in for the compound, pressing the powder into the seams of a leather glove, showing him the exact pressure needed to break the seal on contact.
He's utterly still when I demonstrate this one.
Then he says, "That's how you delivered the oleander at dinner. "
"Yes."
"The glove seal is extraordinary. Who designed it?"
"I did."
Something moves behind his eyes. Not surprise—recognition. The same expression he wore when I picked up the steel and started working. As if every time I show him something, he's having the same thought, and the thought is one I'm not allowed to hear.
"Again," he says. "Show me the one you've never shown anyone."
I hesitate. My body is screaming at me—my training, my discipline, my grandmother's voice in the back of my skull saying weapons don't feel, weapons don't want, weapons don't show a target the shape of their edge.
And underneath that voice, deeper and older, another voice.
One that sounds like metal singing. One that says he asked to see you and you want to be seen.
I show him the kill I invented at fifteen.
The one I've never used because it requires a blade made to a tolerance that commercial smiths can't achieve—a blade I'd have to make myself, with the hook at the tip and the weighted pommel and the precise balance that lets it spin on a single axis and return to my hand after the strike.
A kill that's half bladework and half art and that I've practised ten thousand times in private and never once used because using it would reveal too much about what I can do and my grandmother said never show them what you are.
He doesn't speak for a long time after I finish.
Then he says, "You have been wasted."
The heat in my chest detonates. It floods my throat and my face and my eyes and I'm blinking and my vision is blurring and I'm standing in the forge of the Ember King with my blade in my hand and tears running down my face because a nine-hundred-year-old Fae male looked at the thing I've hidden my entire life and said you have been wasted and he is right.
He is right and no one has ever said it and I'm going to kill him.
I'm going to kill him or I'm going to let him put his hands on me again and I can't tell the difference anymore.
"I need to go," I say. My voice is wrecked.
"I know," he says. "Come back tomorrow."
I leave. I walk back through the corridors with tears drying on my face and the blade still in my hand—he didn't ask for it back, I didn't think to leave it—and the fire-rose burning warm against my hip and my thighs slick and my hands shaking and the sound of you have been wasted ringing in my skull like Bloodwork harmony.
I go to my room, lock the door, put the blade on the bed and the fire-rose beside it, and sit on the floor and press my forehead to my knees and breathe.
The mission is still the mission. I'm still here to kill him. I'm still the weapon my grandmother made.
But my hands are reaching for the curtain rod again, and the metal bends under my fingers like it's been waiting for me, and I'm making something in the dark that I don't have a name for yet, and when it's finished it doesn't look like a weapon at all. It looks like a flower.
A fire-rose, like the one he gave me, except this one is mine—my hands, my heat, my metal—and it sits in my palm and it's warm and I don't understand how it's warm because I'm human and humans don't put heat into steel.
I hold it against my chest and close my eyes and my body is aching in places I've spent my whole life pretending don't exist and I'm one day closer to the heat that's been building between my hips since the first night and I'm not sure I want to stop it and that's the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me, and I have killed twelve people.
Tomorrow I'll go back to the forge. Not because of the mission. Not because of the fiction. Because he asked me to show him what I am and I showed him and he didn't look away.