Chapter 15 Sophia
SOPHIA
Iwake up alone in his bed and the first thing I do is reach for a weapon that isn't there.
Old habit. Seventeen years of reaching for a blade before I open my eyes.
My fingers close on sheets that smell like iron and fire and sex and him.
My body aches in places I didn't know could ache.
Between my thighs is a mess of slick and his dried cum and a tenderness so deep it pulses when I shift my weight.
I open my eyes.
His chambers. Dark wood, stone walls, the fire-thread pulsing low gold in the cracks. The bed is enormous and I'm in the middle of it, naked, the sheets twisted around my waist. The brand at the base of my throat throbs with a heat that matches my heartbeat.
I press my fingers to it. The skin is raised—forge-work geometry, precise lines and angles that I can feel under my fingertips. His mark. Permanent.
I should be planning. I should be finding my clothes, finding a weapon, finding the exit. I should be running. The assassin's mind knows this. She's been screaming at me from somewhere behind the heat haze for hours.
I don't move.
The heat is still in me. Not the roaring, blinding need of last night—something lower, banked, like coals that haven't gone out. It sits in my belly and between my hips and it makes my skin too sensitive. The sheets are too much. The air is too much.
I need him.
The thought comes without permission and I hate it with every part of me that's still mine.
I need his cock inside me. I need the ridges and the fire magic and the way the head catches deep and makes my brain go quiet.
I need the thing that wrecked me last night to wreck me again because the absence of it is worse than the having of it.
I sit up. My legs shake. My pussy aches—swollen, tender, still slick. The golden-hot residue of his cum is dried on my inner thighs. I look down at myself and I look like something that has been used. Thoroughly. By someone who knew exactly what he was doing.
I need the forge.
The thought arrives sideways, slipping in between the heat and the need and the shame. Not him. The forge. Metal under my hands. Fire at my back. The specific silence of a workspace where the only voice belongs to the thing you're making.
I don't question it. I can't. My body is already moving.
His shirt is on the floor, massive—it falls to my thighs when I pull it over my head. It smells like him, the fire magic in the fabric faint but present, a low heat that presses against my skin and makes the brand at my throat pulse.
I walk barefoot through the Ember Court.
The stone is warm under my feet. The fire-thread in the walls responds to me in a way it didn't before the claiming—brighter where I pass, dimming behind me, a trail of gold that follows me through the corridors like a living thing. I don't know why. I don't stop to think about why.
The guards see me. They step aside without a word. One of them glances at my throat—the brand—and something shifts in his face. Recognition. Respect. Fear. I note the look and keep walking.
The forge is empty.
It's the largest workspace I've ever seen.
The caldera's heat comes up through the stone floor in waves.
The anvils are ancient—nine hundred years of use worn into their surfaces.
The tools hang in rows along the walls, organized by a system I recognize because my grandmother uses the same one.
Old system. Pre-war system. The kind of organization that was standard in forges before—
I stop.
I don't finish that thought. I don't know enough to finish it and the heat in my belly is rising and my hands are itching and there's iron in a bin by the nearest anvil and I need to touch it.
I pick up a piece.
The iron is raw. Unworked. Cold. It should stay cold in my hands—I'm human, I have no fire magic, I can't heat metal with my skin. This is a fact I've known my entire life.
The iron warms in my grip.
Not much. Not enough to work. But enough that I feel it—a low hum in the metal, a vibration so faint it might be my imagination except it isn't. I've felt this before. Every time I've worked metal in my grandmother's forge. The hum that means the iron is ready to listen.
I set the piece on the anvil, pick up a hammer—too heavy for me, designed for Fae hands—and I don't care. I bring it down.
The iron sings.
I don't know how long I work.
The heat haze makes time soft. Minutes or hours—the distinction stops mattering when the metal is singing under my hands.
I'm not thinking. My hands are thinking.
They know shapes I've never been taught.
Angles I've never practiced. The iron responds to every strike with a note that gets clearer and purer the deeper I go.
I'm making a blade. Not one of my grandmother's blades—clean, efficient, designed to kill quickly. Something different. Something with more curves than a killing tool needs. Something that looks, when I hold it up to the forge light, like it was made to be beautiful first and lethal second.
It's the most dangerous thing I've ever created.
I know this the way I know my own name. The blade in my hand could cut through Fae wards.
I don't know how I know this. The knowledge is in my hands, not my head.
My hands shaped the edge at an angle that shouldn't work against magical shielding but will.
My hands folded the iron in a pattern that creates a frequency—a hum in the blade that I can feel in my teeth.
The fire in the forge walls is doing something strange. The flames are leaning toward me. Toward the blade. The fire-thread in the stone pulses in the same rhythm as the hum coming off the metal in my hands and I don't understand why and I'm too deep in the heat haze to be frightened of it.
I hold the blade up. It catches the forge light and throws it back in a color that's not quite gold. Warmer. Richer. The color of the fire magic in his ridges when he—
I set the blade down on the anvil. My hands are shaking.
Not from the work. From the thing sitting behind my ribs—tight, hot, close to tears. I just made something with my bare hands that is better than anything I've ever made in my life. I don't know how.
"Sophia."
I spin around.
He's in the doorway, leaning against the stone frame with his arms crossed. He's dressed—loose trousers, nothing else, the fire brands on his chest and arms catching the forge light. His golden eyes are on me. Not on me. On the blade.
His face is doing something I've never seen on it.
Not the amused predator who watched me try to kill him.
Not the alpha in rut who pinned me to the stone floor.
Something else. Something closer to the expression my grandmother wore the one time I made a blade that was better than hers—the look of someone seeing a thing they thought was impossible.
"How long have you been standing there," I say. My voice is wrecked. Raw from screaming, raw from the heat, raw from whatever just happened between me and that piece of iron.
"Long enough."
He pushes off the doorframe and crosses the forge. He moves the way he always moves—unhurried, deliberate, every step a decision. He stops in front of me. He doesn't touch me.
He picks up the blade.
His hands are careful with it. Not delicate—careful the way you're careful with a loaded weapon.
He turns it in the forge light. The hum coming off it intensifies at his touch—the fire magic in his skin meeting whatever is in the metal and the note climbing, clarifying, becoming something I can hear in my spine.
He's very still.
"Where did you learn to fold iron like this?" he says.
"My grandmother."
"Your grandmother taught you the Kael-ash fold."
I don't know that name. I've never heard that name. But my hands know the fold—they've known it since I was fourteen and started working metal alone in my grandmother's forge at three in the morning because I couldn't sleep and the iron was the only thing that quieted my mind.
"She didn't call it that," I say.
"No." His voice is strange. Controlled. More controlled than usual, which means something is happening underneath it that he's keeping from me. "She wouldn't have."
He sets the blade down on the anvil and looks at me. I'm standing in his forge in his shirt with his brand on my throat and the heat rising in my belly and a blade on the anvil between us that's humming in a key neither of us is willing to explain.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I'm in heat."
"That's not why you're shaking."
He's right. I'm shaking because the blade scared me. Because my hands made something my brain doesn't understand. Because the fire in the walls leaned toward me and I don't know why and I don't want to know why.
"Come here," he says.
I don't. I stand on the other side of the anvil with my hands gripping the edge and my knuckles white and I look at him and I hate him and I want him and I'm terrified of the blade between us and what it means.
"Come here," he says again. Not louder. Lower. The voice that my body obeys before my brain can stop it.
My feet move.
I come around the anvil and stop in front of him.
He's taller than me by more than a foot.
The heat coming off his skin hits mine and the brand at my throat flares.
The heat in my belly drops between my hips and tightens.
I'm wet. Instantly. The slick soaking through, dripping down my thighs.
His nostrils flare. His golden eyes darken. His hand comes to my face.
His hand closes around my throat. Not squeezing.
Holding. His thumb settles over the brand and his fire magic pulses through it—a low, deep throb that I feel in my cunt.
His other hand cups my breast through the shirt, his thumb finding my nipple and pressing.
Circling. The fire magic in his skin radiates through the thin fabric and the heat hits the sensitive peak and my thighs clamp together.