Chapter 11 Sophia
SOPHIA
My fist connects before I think about it.
Seventeen years of training. He reaches for me and my body answers before my brain has time to object—closed fist, rotating from the shoulder, aimed at the jaw. I've dropped males twice my size with this strike. It connects. His head turns. Golden blood splits at the corner of his mouth.
The forge light catches it. Fire-bright.
My heart does something I refuse to acknowledge.
Not because I hurt him. Because his eyes come back to mine and the gold in them isn't anger.
I scramble backward. Hands and feet on the forge floor—the stone is hot enough to sting and I don't care, I'm going for the workbench, going for the ceramic blade and the garrotte and the three remaining options I have for ending this in the next thirty seconds—
His hand closes around my ankle.
One hand. I hit the floor full-length as he drags me back across the stone, the nightdress riding to my hips, my palms scraping and finding nothing, the floor burning under my elbows and my knees.
Everything hot. The fire-thread blazing overhead.
The mountain roaring beneath us. The heat in my own body indistinguishable from the heat of the stone.
I roll. He anticipated it. I come up and the singing blade is two feet from my hand and I grab it and I have it at his throat for the second time tonight.
My hand is steady. His hand is cupped at the back of my neck. Not squeezing. Just there.
I push the blade harder. A second line of golden blood runs down his throat.
"Go ahead." His voice isn't steady. The rut is in it—that lower register, the one that bypasses language and goes straight to the base of my spine and does things there I don't have protocols for. "If you're going to use it."
I'm not going to use it.
I've known this since I walked through this door in my nightdress with a blade in my hand and slick running down my thighs and the heat eating me alive from the inside.
The knife was an anchor. It was always an anchor.
Twenty-six years of training and the one mission I can't complete is the one where my blood is on the same side as the target.
He catches my wrist. The blade hand. Pins it to the stone above my head in one motion—smooth, absolute, the kind of strength that doesn't need to declare itself.
My fingers tighten. His grip isn't going to open.
I've trained against every grip there is.
This is the mountain's grip, the volcano's grip, nine centuries of fire magic in one hand. I swing at him with the other fist.
He catches that one too.
Both wrists above my head. I'm on my back on the forge floor and my wrists are immobile and he's looking at me with golden eyes and a bloody lip and an expression that has nothing amused in it anymore.
I drive my knees up. He lets me—sits back enough to give me the room and I go for leverage and he rides it, shifts his weight forward, my hips cant up from the movement and his thighs press between mine.
Through the soaked ruin of my nightdress I feel him.
The heat of him. The ridges of his cock, each one distinct, each one radiating fire magic in slow pulses against my cunt.
My entire body locks.
Fourteen drills for wrist-pin escapes. I'm running through them in sequence and my hips are rolling without my permission—slow, helpless circles that drag the soaked fabric against the ridges and every pass sends fire magic through the cloth and the heat inside me surges and breaks and surges again and the drills aren't helping.
"Let go of my wrists."
He releases them.
I hit him. Open palm, full force, across the face. The sound cracks through the forge. My palm stings. His head turns.
Then I grab the back of his neck and drag his mouth to mine.
It isn't a kiss. My teeth find his lower lip and bite until I taste his blood—fire-bright, hot—and his whole body shudders.
His hands fist in my nightdress. He tears it.
Not from the hem. Across the chest, one pull, and the fabric falls away and I'm bare on the hot stone and his hands are on my shoulders and I'm rolling, getting my knee up, trying to get on top.
He lets me get to my hands and knees.
His hand closes on the back of my neck.
Fingers spreading from the nape downward, pressing forward—not to the floor, just enough that my arms buckle. My chest drops. My arse rises. I'm on the forge floor in the dark and I'm exposed and the tip of his thumb is against the top of my spine and I can't think past it.
I throw an elbow back. He catches it.
I dig my knees into the stone and shove backward and he doesn't move. Eighteen drills for getting out of a rear hold. None of them account for the alpha in rut behind me with fire magic pouring off him in waves that hit my bare skin like standing too close to a furnace—like standing inside one.
"Let go—"
"No."
I hear him strip behind me. One-handed.
I should be afraid. The operative assessment is: you are pinned, prone, unarmed, compromised.
The operative assessment has been irrelevant since I walked through this door.
What I am is furious and wet and shaking and some part of me—older than the operative, older than my grandmother's training, older than the mission—is pushing back against his hand instead of away from it.
He pushes two fingers inside me from behind.
The scream I make goes to the vaulted ceiling and comes back.
His fingers are fire-magic-hot inside me—not body heat, not friction, actual fire magic pulsing through them and hitting the Bloodwork frequency in my blood, two things that should not exist in the same body colliding at full force.
My arms give out. Forehead on the stone. Hips pushing back.
He pulls his fingers out.
The sound I make isn't from training.
I hear his hand on his cock. I grip the stone in front of me.
He presses against me from behind. The head of it.
Hot. Fire magic in the contact radiating inward from the first point of pressure and I'm not prepared.
I wasn't prepared for any of this and I was especially not prepared for this—my cunt, the first ridge, the fire magic pulsing through it into my inner walls.
My whole body locks.
"Breathe," he says.
"Go to hell," I say.
He pushes forward. Just the head. Just past the first ridge.
The fire magic hits me from the inside.
I don't have a word for it. Not pain. Not pleasure.
A category of sensation that neither of those words reaches—the ridge pressing heat into my inner walls and the heat spreading outward through tissue I've never thought about, radiating to my belly and my thighs and the base of my spine.
The brands on my skin answer it. The sigil over my heart blazes. All of it one fact: more.
I try to crawl forward. The movement drags my cunt along the ridge and the sound I make has no language in it.
He thrusts.
Second ridge. Third. My fists slam into the stone. Spine arches. Each ridge carries its own pulse of fire magic and the pulses layer on top of each other and I'm sobbing—face pressed to the stone, tears running into the grit, my body breaking apart around something I can't stop wanting.
"I hate you." Into the stone. Broken. I say it again: "I hate you I hate you I—"
The fourth ridge.
My cunt locks around it and the orgasm hits so hard my vision whites. He doesn't stop. Fifth. Sixth. The full length of him buried inside me and his hands on my hips holding me still for the rhythm he chooses, which is relentless and deliberate and has nothing to do with mercy.
My hands go flat on the stone. I start pushing back.
The forge fire roars. The mountain shakes.
The sounds I'm making have nothing left of the operative in them—I stopped being an operative somewhere between the third orgasm and the fourth, left her back there on the stone with the blade and the nightdress and the fiction that any part of my training was built for this.
The head of his cock begins to change.
Not the base. The head—thickening, catching on the withdrawal, pressing against a place deep inside me on every pull-back that makes coherent thought impossible.
I'm down to fragments. Sensation. The fire magic building on itself.
The slick pooled on the stone beneath my knees.
Short strokes now, the swollen head dragging deep, and I come again into the stone without warning—screaming, hands clawing—and when it passes I'm still pushing back, still wanting more, and I hate my body so thoroughly I almost laugh.
Almost.
"Please." The word rips out before I can stop it. I hear the horror in my own throat. "Please—"
"Please what." He isn't steady. The nine centuries are gone from his voice—stripped, fractured, something underneath it that has never addressed an Assembly. "Say it."
I press my forehead to the stone.
I'm not going to say it.
He thrusts. Short. Deep. The swollen head grinds against that place. I scream into the floor and come and when the orgasm passes I'm still wanting and I'm still furious and I'm going to say it.
"Your knot." Through my teeth. Through the tears. Through the fury that's the last thing of mine left on this stone floor. "Give me your knot or I swear to every dead god I will find a way to kill you that works."
The base of his cock begins to swell.