Work Text:
& Oh,
I want to kiss your eyes!
I want to never have to see you again
- Melissa Lozada-Olivia, There Is An Intimacy
Inej had not been expecting the bomb.
It was a fruitless thought, in the aftermath. More an excuse than any concrete explanation, but it’s what she clung to, because to consider otherwise would mean to shift the blame onto herself, and to accept that perhaps her past was not as firmly put behind her as she’d previously believed.
It had all happened fast. She had been distracted, from a day learning rigging at the docks with Specht. Her hands were red and raw, and a blister was forming in the curve of her thumb, from a rope that had moved too far too soon. One more month, Specht had said, and she’d be ready to set sail. One more month.
One more month. Inej found herself consumed by the quick arrival of her departure as she made her way from Fifth Harbor down the canal to the East Stave. One more month. Something pulled at her from inside her chest -- an excruciating bliss at the prospect she might actually be able to leave all of her demons behind in Ketterdam.
Of course, she would be leaving much more, too. But that much more had legs and arms and hands. It could find her, if it wanted to. Send letters, even, if it dared. She very much doubted it would, but that was the point of all of this in the first place wasn’t it? She wanted to work towards her own goals for once, and she wanted to discover who would put in the effort to tag along, as she had done for so many others for so many years.
Inej had just reached the fork in the canals and turned left towards the Slat when she heard a faint hissing noise behind her. She brought one hand to her knife and ducked into the shadow of a nearby building, making her way along the side of the wall as quickly as she could.
Then she heard the voices. Loud. Angry. An argument. It drowned out the hissing so quickly Inej had to wonder if she’d imagined it in the first place. A group of people came into view. Seven or so men she recognized as former Dime Lions were standing outside the Crow Club, pistols drawn, facing off against half of the Dregs. What was going on?
In the center of it all was Kaz, observing the argument with bored disinterest, the Dregs at his back, as if he was just waiting for the right moment to send his pack of snarling animals on the rogue Dime Lions. Inej tried to meet his gaze, hoping for an explanation, but when Kaz’s eyes met hers she saw nothing.
A click sounded from somewhere near her feet. Kaz’s eyes widened, just a fraction. “GET DOWN!” he yelled, and the Dregs obeyed. Inej slammed onto the concrete, obeying his instruction without question. She winced as her wrists hit the ground, and barely had time to catch her breath before a wall of force slammed into her from her left and sent her tumbling across the street. All she could see was ground and sky and black cloth as an explosion decimated the building she’d been standing under a moment earlier.
The world fell away, leaving nothing but a terrible booming noise. Then silence.
Inej opened her eyes and saw Kaz on top of her, sheltering her body with his, arms and legs pinning her to the ground, worry furrowing his features.
Or, she would’ve seen Kaz. Instead what she saw was a wriling grotesque, a mass of limbs and faces. Green eyes and blue eyes and dark eyes and tawny beards that scratched at her skin and protruding guts she could not escape from and the sweet soft sounds of the lyre being played from within the depths of The Menagerie.
She wanted to writhe, wanted to scream. She wanted to do a lot of things. But she was paralyzed, soul having long left her body, and floated up into the rafters of the purple lynx room Tante Heleen had crafted so carefully just for her. She couldn’t hear anything either, just a vague ringing in her ears and the chanting of her heart. Survive. Survive. Survive.
And then the man scrambled off of her. Funny, she thought. They never did that. He stood, looking away from her, staring out at the wrecked, burning streets. Inej had the faintest feeling that his coat was on fire.
She came to in the street, blinking furiously at the tiny licks of flame consuming the black fabric. “Kaz,” she managed, and he whipped around to look at her. “Your coat is on fire.”
In a second, he pulled it off and threw it on the ground. Inej listened to the stomping of his boots and wondered what terrible thing had just happened to her. She hadn’t had flashbacks that strong in a long time. Not since her first year with the Dregs.
When Kaz had stomped the fire out, he turned to her, but did not look at her. She tried not to feel the ice in her gut. “Can you walk?” he asked.
“Yes,” she breathed out, although she still felt as if she had been punched in the gut.
Inej knew better than to ask him why he’d hurled the both of them out of the way of the bomb. She knew better than to ask why he’d put his body between her and danger without a second thought. She should’ve felt grateful for it, that she was alive, that he had let his actions speak for himself, as his words weren’t always a vehicle for feeling. Instead, all she felt was bitter.
“Why did you do that?” she bit out, climbing to her feet.
Kaz’s brow furrowed. “You were supposed to be at the harbor.” Old ways. Old patterns. Old venoms.
“You set the bomb?” she asked, realization flooding her.
“Wylan did.”
“You should’ve warned me.”
“You were supposed to be at the harbor.”
This was an awful conversation. Inej hated every moment of it. She wondered what she had looked like, lost in flashback beneath him, far beyond his help or anyone else’s. She wondered what she’d done.
“I thought you had it under control,” Kaz said, finally. Inej wished he could muster up any bit of false concern for her. Instead he sounded like he was giving orders, like he was ordering her to go to her room after her first kill instead of offering a shoulder to cry on.
“I did,” Inej bit out.
“You’ve taken far worse.”
“I am aware of that.”
“So why,” Kaz started, and this time he did meet her gaze, but only for a second. Perhaps there was worry in there, somewhere, buried under the disinterest. “Was this time different?”
Because it’s you, Kaz.
But Inej did not say that. She did not know how to begin to explain to him that the concepts of love and sex and pain and power were themselves a shifting, rippling grotesque inside of her. She did not know how to tell him that the ache in her gut every time she saw him these days lived side by side with the knowledge that she never wanted to be pinned beneath him like that again.
Because Inej had tried. She truly had. She had sat there, on long hot lonely nights, and tried to get herself to be alright with it. Power. Pleasure. Pain. She knew that when men looked at her -- even men like Kaz -- that was what they wanted. To pin the Wraith to a bed like a butterfly on display. To tear away her wings and know that they were in control of her. But how to explain that to Kaz, of all people? How to say it without opening his own wounds?
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she growled.
She turned to march towards the Slat, but Kaz kept pace with her. “Well I do, Inej,” he said, and that was exactly why she couldn’t bring this up with him. He would never want to let go of that perfect, precise control to her. Hence the ultimatum on the boat.
I will have you without armor, or I will not have you at all.
Somewhere, deep down, Inej knew it would always be the latter. Although for a while, on the docks, with her bare hands in his, she’d had a flickering, foolish bit of hope for the former.
Her feet moved without her knowledge, and before she knew it, she was making her way through the Slat, Kaz on her heels.
“Inej,” he pressed.
“Kaz,” she shot back.
When she reached the door to her room, he paused in the hallway. “It can’t become a liability,” he told her.
Inej wanted to throttle him. She wanted to pin him to the earth as he had done with her and make him feel how helpless and trapped she had felt. See how Kaz liked it when someone else was in control. A heat began to pool in her belly at the thought. She shoved it away.
“Just warn me next time you’re going to have Wylan blow up a city block,” she muttered, before closing the door behind her and leaving him alone in the hall.
Inej slumped down against the doorframe and put her head in her hands, trying to unravel the absolute mess of her own mind to no avail.
◆◇◆
Kaz had hoped the boat would be a send off.
It turned out that to become a pirate captain, Inej needed a lot more than a boat and a dream. She needed lessons on the harbor, days spent rigging ropes with Specht. She needed a crew, hand-picked to her liking from the best of the Barrel. Most importantly, she needed time.
Kaz did not know quite what to do with time. It was one of his least favorite currencies. Worse than kruge, and certainly worse than information. Time meant more moments when things could go wrong. It meant more occasions for him to fail her.
It meant days like this one, where Inej had crawled inside herself and he had felt utterly helpless to stop it. It meant sitting at his sink, staring at the gloves on his hands, and wondering what terrible thing he had done wrong this time.
She had not been willing to talk to him about it. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. Inej did not owe him anything, he had made that abundantly clear to her. Still, it stung to know that he could not help her in the way that she had so often helped him.
Was it the bomb? Had it reminded her of the slavers? The pirates? But Inej had lived through thousands of firefights in her time at the Dregs.
He did not want to consider the most likely possibility -- that it had been his presence that had triggered her. It was the closest they’d gotten in eons, since that night in the bathroom, and while Kaz hadn’t even been considering that factor when he’d dove for her, thinking only of Inej and the pain of burns from bombs, it was the truth of the matter.
As Kaz took off his gloves, his gaze shifted to his window. She would come to visit, sometimes, even with the sailing and the training and the assembling of a crew. He wanted her to come tonight, but he knew she wouldn’t. This was not one of his dark days, when the water swirled at his feet and he needed Inej to pull him back out of the darkness. No, this was one of her dark days. And Kaz did not know what he was supposed to do about that.
He considered, briefly, going to visit her rooms, but she’d made it pretty clear she did not want company in her pain. This was how they worked, him and her. He would lash out and then want to be bandaged up. She would bleed out and want to be alone.
Kaz ran his bare hands through his hair. He did not know what he wanted to do.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. The wanting of it all was very present in him, because, try as he must, he could not rid himself of the brief moments of contact between them, as they rolled out of the way of the bomb, tumbling over cobblestone, leather and air and skin. The moments before Inej had flown away. He wanted it, all of it and more, and he hated himself for it.
Fine, Kaz decided, as he stripped off his burnt clothes and washed out the ash. He would go visit her. He would wait outside. He would go if she asked him to. He would not let his own selfish wanting get the best of him. He would give Inej space. He’d even buy her a boat to sail away on.
◆◇◆
Inej grounded herself in her room with the cold metal of her knives.
She had not had them in the Menagerie. These were a product of her aftermath. Her time as the Wraith. She ran a fingertip across the smooth flat metal, dipping around the engravings of her saints’ names.
A knock at her door made her look up. People did not often visit her rooms at the Slat. Usually it was the reverse. She would slip into open windows at the Van Eck house or the Crow Club or Kaz’s rooms at the Slat.
“Inej--” From the door. Kaz. Some part of her ached at the sound. He sounded sorry, and that was such a rare thing in him. For all the terrible things he’d done and said, she was rarely given the apology she wanted, and now for this -- for this terrible thing that had nothing to do with him, the thing that was still eating her from the inside like a termite, even after all these years -- he was trying to apologize.
Inej hardened her face, trying not to let the frustration of it all overwhelm her into tears.
“Come in,” she managed, and did not look up even as the door creaked open.
She knew Kaz remained in the doorframe, though, by the sight of his polished black shoes, not daring to cross the threshold to her room. “Are you alright?” he asked.
Saints, she wanted to punch him. Why here? Why now? Why this time?
“I’ll manage,” she bit out.
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Then what are you asking me, Kaz?”
Inej looked up from her spot on the floor to meet his dark eyes. Her room seemed impossibly small, all of a sudden. She’d never minded before. Of course, she’d never really had Kaz inside of it before either. He stared at her for a long time, eyes tracing her body, she assumed to check if she’d been wounded at all during the explosion. She hadn’t. Not that way.
“What happened today?”
Her eyes darted to the ground. She couldn’t look him in the eyes when she said this. She did not want to watch the futility of their situation hit him. That might just be too much for her.
“How long have you spent in a pleasure house?” she asked.
His foot tapped, anxious, in the doorway. “I try not to make it a habit of spending too long in one of those places.”
“Then you wouldn’t know,” she murmured. “You wouldn’t understand. How every day bleeds into the other. How there is no distinction, no separation, no safety. Just the smell of incense and some hazy part of your brain reminding you that you must survive.”
“You’re safe now,” Kaz said, but he didn’t sound sure.
“I spent two years there, Kaz. I will never be safe.”
Kaz considered this for a long time. Inej watched as the gears turned in his brain, behind his dark eyes. She ran a finger along the tip of her blade, trying to remind herself that he was just as dangerous in this fight as any man, despite the fluttering in her chest at his presence.
Finally, he sat down across from her.
“So it’s not just me, then?” he asked.
“It was never just you.”
“That’s not what I meant.” His gloved hands opened, closed. “Were you triggered by me, or just the action of it?”
The action of it. What a way to describe that. What a way to describe things Inej knew Kaz could barely begin to understand. She supposed the idea of sex for him was much like the hazy thing it had been in her mind before she was taken. Flashes of skin and heat and pressure, kept in the mind and the veins. Controlled. Somehow pure. A pang of envy shot through her at the idea.
“Part of it is you,” she admitted, and she didn’t miss the flash of guilt in his eyes. “The context of the situation.”
What a terribly delicate way to put it, but Inej hoped it would be enough. When Kaz was silent, she could feel her anxiety spike, the rush of her breathing returning. She thought of her knives, trying to keep herself grounded.
“You are not an enemy,” Inej continued. “But more than an ally. And as long as that is the case, Kaz--”
He looked up, sharply, at the sound of his name, as if he’d been waiting for it. Her breath caught in her chest.
“I’m never going to be able to do that for you. Not like that.”
“Oh,” he said. His voice was gruff. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. This was all unbearable. He could barely touch her hand, let alone do any of the things her mind was racing to conjure in the silence, but she knew it needed to be said. A ground rule. A dealbreaker. An ultimatum.
Inej did love her ultimatums.
“How then?” Kaz asked, after a moment.
She didn’t understand what he was asking at first, but the realization of it hit her like a punch in the gut. Kaz, being Kaz, was never one to stop when he hit a dead end. Instead he’d find a way around it, under it. The way he was looking at her now was as if she was a puzzle he would very much like to solve one day, and the idea of that one day almost destroyed her.
“How?” Inej asked, trying to make sure she had heard him correctly.
“How would you be able to…” he trailed off.
Inej put her head in her hands. She did not want to be here, doing this. “I would need to be the one… in control,” she managed. “But Kaz--”
There it was again, that hitch in his breath, as if merely saying his name did something to him.
“Yes?”
“We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we?”
The room crumbled in on them, at that moment. The air sucked out. Inej felt the present slam into her with a force. She was leaving, she was training to leave. She would hunt slavers on the ship that he had bought her, and he would stay and build his empire in Ketterdam.
“Do you want me to go?” he asked.
Inej nodded. She didn’t miss the hurt in his eyes. This was a necessary evil, she told herself, because she knew if she hadn’t stopped the conversation in its tracks, she would be inventing a new kind of torture. Talking without the possibility of doing.
Kaz stood and moved towards the door, but as he went, she managed to say one last thing. “We’ll talk about it later,” she said. Kaz nodded.
It wasn’t much, but at least it wasn’t an ending. Inej wasn’t ready for one of those quite yet.
◆◇◆
Kaz was distracted. Fine, he would admit it.
Never out loud, of course, not with Jesper beside him on the bench overlooking Fifth Harbor. They were meant to be staking out a merchant’s ship, trying to see when the stadwatch’s rotation shifted for whatever precious cargo was in the hold. Jesper had bet it was jurda. Kaz was nearly certain it was an order of Shu watercolors he’d been dying to get his hands on.
Except Kaz wasn’t watching the stadwatch, Kaz was watching Inej, as she scaled up the nest of The Wraith, strong arms holding tight to the ropes, bending the sails and the winds to her desires.
I would need to be the one in control.
Just the mere reminder of her words sent a shiver down him that he was not ready to unpack at this very moment.
“You must really want those watercolors, huh?” Jesper joked, and Kaz glowered, turning his attention back to the merchant’s ship.
“They’re quite valuable,” Kaz told him.
“Is that why you bought them the boat?”
Kaz did not want any of Jesper’s advice, as helpful as it might be. “I thought you were convinced it was jurda.”
“We all want her to stay, Kaz, just ask her.”
“I have.”
Jesper’s brow quirked up. “And?”
“She wants to hunt slavers.”
“Well you clearly didn’t ask very well, then.”
“She’ll come back.”
“You don’t sound so sure about that.”
Kaz wasn’t sure. That was the problem. That was what had stopped things the other night, the unsurety of it all. What was the point in talking about things that weren’t going to happen? Inej had been right. They needed to walk before they could run, and right now they could barely do that. Kaz would be lucky if he could walk her to the harbor before sending her off on her way.
“So let me get this straight,” Jesper continued, endlessly amused. “You tell the girl you want her, that you’re dying for her to stay, read her some poetry, tell her that her eyes are the color of the night sky, and then you buy her a boat to sail away on because you never want to see her again?”
“More or less,” Kaz grumbled.
“Less meaning no poetry?” asked Jesper. “That’s a shame. I feel like it would’ve worked, had you brought the poetry. You know, Wylan now owns quite the collection--”
“Please shut up about the poetry.” Kaz’s eyes were on the stadwatch now, as they changed ranks. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and made a note of the time.
Jesper just smiled. “All I’m saying is that sometimes it’s not such a bad thing to give up all that tightly wound control for another person, you know? Sometimes you’ve gotta break out the poetry and make a fool of yourself.”
He looked at Inej again, as she brought the beautiful ship he’d bought for her to her command with a twist of her wrist and a pull of her arm. Could he really do that? Give up control?
Kaz already knew the answer to that question. It was the reason he’d come for her when Van Eck took her. The reason he’d dove for her when the bombs went off. The reason he’d sat on the floor of her room at the Slat and asked for other options. He had already given up a part of himself to Inej. She just hadn’t taken it yet.
◆◇◆
Inej knew the aftershocks by heart.
After she’d left the Menagerie, other girls had found her. Girls who’d somehow, miraculously paid off their contracts. Girls who’d bit the bullet and married a favorite customer. Girls who’d discovered they were Grisha in the midst of that horrible dissociative fog and had written to the Ravkan embassy for protection. They had all thought they were free, and Inej had watched as they slowly realized that their demons would not stay behind.
For some, it was a race of bodies. How many could they put between themselves and their jailers? Every new person was a chance for redemption, with the idea that perhaps if they took enough lovers, the ones who had taken them would be forgotten.
For some, it was isolation. Not just a lack of lovers, but a lack of friends and family. They would hide in the poor houses, and when Inej would climb into their windows with food and drink, they would thank her without ever looking up.
For Inej, it had been a combination of both. She had tried the first route, spurred on by companionship with the Dregs and the slicing off of her tattoo, but always, inevitably, she would end up pinned on her back and out of her body. That was where she learned that even men she’d sought herself would sometimes keep going, unable to see the signs of her flight.
So she tried isolation, but that didn’t work either. She had found too much of a home with The Dregs. So she let Jesper hug her. Gripped Nina’s hand tightly. Fought shoulder to shoulder with Anika. Locked arms with Wylan as they strutted through Ketterdam’s night markets, searching for adventure.
But somehow Kaz had an uncanny ability to bring it all out in her. He was neither simply a body she could just put between herself and the Menagerie -- most days he could barely bring himself to touch her -- nor a friend to sling an arm around. Every touch was calculated, meaningful, hard. Except for the battle-fevered moments where he’d thrown his arms around her and sheltered her from Wylan’s bomb.
Inej was out of ideas. Other than running, of course, but she wasn’t quite good enough at sailing yet to do that.
She dropped down from the roof of the Slat and landed on Kaz’s window. He wasn’t in his office. She waited for a while, fighting her nerves and her own desire to run, when finally she heard the sound of him coming up the stairs, the click of his cane on wood.
“I thought you’d be in your room,” he said, when he opened the door and saw her on the windowsill.
“I wasn’t.”
“I figured that out.”
Kaz took a seat at his desk, putting his cane to the side, and stared at her from across the room. Inej felt his hot gaze on her but she willed herself not to look away. This would not work if she looked away.
“You said we would talk,” he started, fidgeting with his cufflinks. “About control.”
“I remember.”
Inej pulled herself off the windowsill and began to walk around the room, staying at the edges of the walls, afraid if she fell too close into his orbit she wouldn’t be able to pull back.
“I don’t want to fly away again,” she said, and pulled something from her pocket. Jurda stems. The last aftershock. The grounding effect. The antivenom to the spike in her nervous system. Her last resort. “And I don’t want you to either.”
She handed them to Kaz. He examined them for a moment. “Is that jurda?” he asked.
“The stems. Jesper says--”
“I know what Jesper says.”
Inej stepped closer to him, holding out her hand in offering. He took them, bare fingertips just grazing the surface of her palm. She fought the shock that ran through her at his touch.
“Count of three,” Inej ordered. Kaz nodded.
One. Her heartbeat was pounding. She was so scared that if she did this she would disappear, that everything would be ruined and Kaz would pull back so hard and so fast because in the end he’d just want to pin her down like everyone else.
Two. But his eyes were clear and calm, like he had a plan, like he was in control. She hated that she was seeking solace in that. That wasn’t how this needed to be. She needed to have control, or she knew she would disappear.
Three. They tilted their hands back, mouth open, and let the jurda stems touch their tongues. Inej chewed and swallowed, letting the bitter taste dissolve into a sickly sweetness she remembered well. This was what the other girls had used, to claw back to consciousness with someone they wanted. She could only hope it would work this time.
Kaz stared at her. “What now?” he asked.
Inej took a step closer, looking at his open palm, stained slightly green from the leftover bits of jurda. “Give me your hand,” she said.
He nodded and extended his left hand to her. Inej took another step closer, moving around his desk to face him head-on. She let her fingers trail over the back of his hand in small circles, waiting for the call to stop, but when she met Kaz’s gaze he looked peaceful, relaxed, longing.
“What would it take,” he asked, voice barely a breath. “To give up control?”
“You couldn’t handle it,” she told him, and she knew she was right by the way his shoulders tensed as her thumb pressed down into the small of his wrist.
“I want to,” Kaz said.
We all want things we can’t have, she thought, but didn’t say. Instead, she decided to press her luck, lifting his hand to her mouth and pressing her lips to his knuckles. She felt Kaz go still, then lean into her touch.
“Give me your other hand,” Inej commanded, and he acquiesced to that too. Only, instead of bringing it to her lips, Inej gripped his wrists and twisted. She backed him into the wall and pinned him there, hands raised just above his head. They were nearly a bullet’s length away, and Inej tried her best to keep their thighs from brushing. She was making a point, not pushing his boundaries.
She tilted her chin, mouth to his ear. “Imagine this,” she started. “But I don’t back away. I step forward, I close the gap, and you can’t turn away. You’re still pinned here, to the wall, like an insect on display.”
He made a little noise. Something she couldn’t be sure of. So she released her grip on him quickly. Her arms were nearly at her sides again when Kaz shook his head. “I’d want that,” he admitted, and his voice sounded a little broken. “With you.”
She hadn’t been prepared for that. In all her time with Kaz Brekker, she’d heard the things said about him when he wasn’t in the room, by Dregs of any gender. A lot of bad jokes about the Dirtyhands nickname. A lot of assertions about dominance and violence that she only belatedly realized were just as much a part of his armor as everything else.
Still, he couldn’t really mean it. Inej remembered the weight of him over her during the explosion, pinning her to the ground. Surely that was what he actually wanted.
Kaz raised his arms upwards again and the end of his mouth curled upwards. “Scared, Wraith?” he asked.
“Not even.”
She closed the gap before he could say another word, pressing her body fully into his, separated only by the layers of clothing they both wore. A shiver went through her. Or him. She wasn’t quite sure where it stopped and where it ended. One of her hands went to his hair, curling into his dark tufts before tugging downwards, forcing him to look her in the eye.
A warmth spread through her, up into her heart and then out, into her fingertips. He sighed, and there was a high pitched edge to it that tugged at her gut. She liked it, and she nearly hated how much she did, but it was so different from the sounds of The Menagerie. From the heavy breaths and grunts of power and pain.
“You’re having too much fun with this, I think,” Kaz breathed.
“Should I stop?”
He paused too long. His pupils were blown wide, face flushed, but Inej looked up and saw his hands were shaking. She stepped backwards, waiting for him to stop her. He didn’t.
“This was a bad idea,” she managed, through clenched teeth.
“Not all bad,” he tried, but she knew it had been too much too fast. A flush of guilt ran through her. She was ridiculous for attempting it at all. Kaz barely knew what he was getting into, and she knew far too much. She knew where this all would inevitably lead, no matter what he said.
So in the end, Inej relied on her own personal favorite aftershock. She flew out the window before he could say another word.
◆◇◆
It was only later, lying in his bed alone, that Kaz realized she had been trying to scare him off.
Much like his buying of the boat, somehow they had fallen into a pattern of gestures and actions that carried with them the meaning of goodbye. Inej had been hoping he wouldn’t be able to stand it, and she had been right, but not for the reasons he suspected she guessed at.
Truthfully, the water had been the worst at the beginning, when her hand was just lightly grazing his. Her fingertips had been cold from the night air, and it wasn’t hard for the wounded parts of Kaz’s mind to be reminded of corpses, of the Reaper’s Barge, and for the immediate aftermath of it. For a moment, Kaz had thought he was drowning.
But a startling sense of clarity had come to him when Inej had gripped his wrists with rough hands, calloused from her ropes training. When she’d run her fingers through his hair, tilted his head down to face her. When she’d pressed herself against him, careful to avoid skin on skin. It had been more like a fight than a kiss, and Kaz knew his way around fights. That warm press of bodies, rough hands, bruises and blood and the crunch of bones. It was the only time he could touch people, most of the time.
He ran his hands over his face and thought of the first time he’d seen Inej, swathed in purple silks. He thought of the damage done in that building. The two years she’d spent there, when he had been fighting his way up through the Dregs. The two years where he could’ve done something, saved her sooner, stopped the damage, if he’d only known what to look for.
It was hard, on nights like this one, not to feel consumed by regret.
The next day he joined Jesper for their second day of staking out the harbor.
“You look like shit,” Jesper said, when he sat down beside him. Kaz scowled. “Did you even sleep at all?”
“No,” Kaz growled, eyes searching for the stadwatch. “I want to burn down The Menagerie.”
Jesper nodded, understanding in his eyes. “Inej would never forgive you.”
“I am aware of that fact.”
“But you want to do it anyway.”
Jesper knew Kaz too well. It scared him, sometimes, how close a friend he’d become in such a short amount of time. “Yes,” he admitted, finally. “I do.”
“I’ll stop you then,” Jesper joked, hunching into position to get a good view of the merchant ship they were watching. “That’s her kill, not yours.”
“Have they taken the paintings out yet?”
“Not that I’ve seen. Looks like they’re waiting for someone.”
“A buyer,” Kaz guessed. Someone not from Kerch. He wondered what unlucky bastard he was going to rob of his beautiful watercolor set.
Kaz rarely stole art to sell. He liked to keep his pieces hidden underneath his bed, always subconsciously thinking of a day in the future where he’d have somewhere to put them. It was not a vision that was very cohesive with his other visions for the future, which mostly ended with him bleeding out in an alleyway sometime before he turned 30. Still, there they were.
Perhaps he’d put these on The Wraith.
The thought came to Kaz unbidden. Inej would have a captain’s quarters, and he was nearly certain a Shu watercolor would look wonderful hanging above her bed. Or across from it. Maybe it would even make her think of him when she was far off at sea.
“They’ve tightened up security today,” he noted. “The buyer must be coming soon.”
“How are you thinking we’ll get them out?” Jesper asked.
“I’ll do it myself,” Kaz said, ignoring Jesper’s eye roll.
“What?” he asked. “No audience for this heist?”
Kaz shook his head. He wanted to get these himself, to surprise Inej with one last gift. He wasn’t even sure they were Shu watercolors, but now he’d become obsessed with the idea. Or perhaps he just needed something to occupy his mind other than the feeling of Inej’s fingers in his hair, her breath hot on his skin as she tugged at him. The sensation of flying that came with letting himself go to her.
He let his eyes drift to The Wraith, Inej’s hands on the ropes. She was getting better at sailing now. It would only be a few weeks before she was gone. Yes, he had to do this for her before it was too late. He had to give her one last thing to make her think of moments on ship railings and hotel bathrooms and in his rooms at The Slat. He had to give her a reason to come back.
“Now,” he told Jesper, as he noticed the shift in the stadwatch. Jesper nodded. “Cover me from up here. I’ll do the rest.”
Jesper flipped his guns into action and slipped into the shadows as Kaz made his way down the steps to the street of the harbor, sliding his cane into place behind a loose board. It was too noticeable. He wanted to be inconspicuous for this.
Every step towards the boat was agony, but he grit his teeth and struggled through it, trailing the newest stadwatch officer until he turned the corner, before darting inside the ship.
Perhaps if he hadn’t been so consumed with the idea of the watercolors, he might’ve noticed the woman draped in blue silk making her way down the canal to the harbor. The way her curls bounced in the sunlight. The familiarity of it all.
Instead, Kaz snuck over the deck and down the stairs until he reached the cargo hold. It was locked, but that problem was quickly solved with a tool hidden within his waistcoat and a few flicks of his wrist. The door to the cargo hold slid open silently.
It took only a moment inside for Kaz to grasp how terribly wrong he had been about the load that this ship was containing. There were crates, yes, and they were marked as if for sale to an arthouse, but there were no paintings inside. There were girls.
Broken and bruised, cheeks red with tears. They all looked up when he entered, slouching back towards the walls of the cargo hold, cowering. Kaz did not know if they knew who he was, and figured it did not matter either way. Someone had hurt these girls badly already, and he knew they’d only be hurt more from this point forward.
This was the point, he decided of the past few days of struggle. Of his never-ending nightmares about those two years he could’ve saved Inej that had kept him from sleep. He was meant to save these girls.
Kaz went to work on the locks, not saying a word, even as the girls shied away from him, twisting and crying. He had one pair of shackles off. Then two. Three. Four.
A shot. Kaz barely had time to register it before he felt the pain in his shoulder. He fell to the ground, vision closing around the face that stood above him. Tante Heleen.
“You will not steal another girl from me, Mr. Brekker,” she said. Another shot rang out. And then he was in the dark.
◆◇◆
Inej had meant to leave.
Instead, she was sitting by Kaz’s bedside, fighting the strong desire to stroke his hair back from his sweat-beaten brow while he lay bleeding into his bandages because, try as she might, she could not just let him go.
Tante Heleen was never supposed to be able to hurt Kaz. She was only supposed to have been able to hurt Inej. Kaz was a part of the after. The safe part. The escape from her life of silks and cages and pain. The part that only the aftershocks of her trauma should’ve been able to affect.
He shifted, in his sleep, and Inej prayed he would wake. Sankta Anastasia, she begged. Bring him back to me.
When Kaz blinked awake, Inej tried her best to hide her tears.
“You’re supposed to be gone,” he mumbled.
“I’m supposed to be here.”
He shook his head, pushing her hand away. “Go get your shot at freedom.”
“I can get my shot at freedom whenever I want, Kaz. It’s not everyday I get to keep you from bleeding out on your own sheets.”
She had been the one to change his bandages, after the Grisha healer had seen to him. No one else in the Dregs could quite figure out how to touch Kaz Brekker, and a word of hinting from Jesper was enough for them to vote Inej as his caretaker. She hadn’t refused the title.
“What happened to the girls?” he asked.
Jesper, unlike Kaz, had seen Tante Heleen enter the ship, and had immediately figured out what was going on. When the shot had sounded, he’d raced into the cabin and, without thinking, hit Heleen square in the ribs.
By the time Inej had run over from The Wraith, Jesper had Tante Heleen strung up in the slavers chains and freed the girls himself. Inej had nearly collapsed at the sight of Kaz’s body, but had made her way across it nevertheless so she could take the satisfaction of slitting Heleen’s throat herself.
She told Kaz none of this, though. Instead all she said was “They’re free.”
“Good.”
He looked down, at his bare chest and the bandages near his shoulder. It was about time to change them, but now that he was awake Inej found herself suddenly scared to touch him, as if he would fall to pieces under the pressure of her hands.
“Can I--” she asked, gesturing to the wrappings around his shoulder. Kaz nodded.
Inej moved forward tentatively, then stopped. Her eyes traced the room until she saw what she was looking for. Kaz’s gloves. She slipped them on her fingers, ignoring the look he gave her, and began to unwrap his bandages.
He’d been lucky. The bullet hadn’t gone as deep as Heleen had probably wanted. Inej had thanked all her saints for that one. Still, it was a gruesome sight to look at. Inej had seen him shirtless a countless number of times, but she was certain she would always cringe at the sight of this scar, at the knowledge that he had likely gotten it thinking of her.
“I always think about those two years,” Kaz murmured, as if he was reading her mind. Inej froze. “When you were there and I could’ve saved you.”
“You got me out in the end.”
“I could’ve--” He winced as she tied the bandages. Groaned. “I could have saved you sooner, if I hadn’t been so focused on myself and my revenge.”
“Kaz, stop it,” she bit out, and was surprised by the command in her own voice. “You have saved me a thousand times since then.”
He sat in silence as she bandaged the rest of him up, but Inej wasn’t done. “What were you thinking? Going in there alone?”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“That’s unlike you, Kaz.”
This time she felt it, her hands on his chest, as the shudder went through him when she said his name. She felt the heat of his gaze, suddenly, as his dark eyes fixed on her gloved hands.
“I like it when you wear my gloves,” he murmured.
“Is it better?” she asked, sliding her hand upwards from his shoulder to his neck, his throat, his jaw. “With the gloves on?”
Kaz nodded. He moved to sit upwards, but Inej kept him one the bed, one gloved hand pressing on his chest, one on his jaw. “You’re not cleared to sit yet,” she said.
His eyes flashed with something. Anger, maybe? His pupils were huge. Inej didn’t care. If he wanted to be angry, he could do it when he was recovered from taking a bullet to the shoulder.
“Is it better?” Kaz echoed, staring up at her with those big dark eyes. “Holding me down like this?”
Now she understood. He was thinking of their previous conversation. About control. About need.
A pulse of heat ran through her at the thought. Inej leaned over the bed, moving ever-slowly, giving him time to turn his head, turn away, tell her to stop. Kaz did none of those things. He kept his gaze on her, until her mouth was hovering just above his, “Tell me to stop,” she whispered.
“Don’t ask me to do that,” Kaz gritted out, breath hot on her neck.
That was all it took for Inej to press her lips to his. It was not a soft kiss, but forceful, filled with all of the things neither of them could say. It was pressure, building, as Kaz’s lips opened in a soft sigh, as Inej ran her tongue along the length of his mouth, as her hand moved up to his hair to tangle in his hair with firm, leather-covered fingers.
She broke away first, after only a few moments, and when Kaz tried to chase her mouth, Inej held him back with a soft tug on his hair.
“Not too fast,” she murmured.
“Don’t stop for my sake,” he breathed.
But it wasn’t just for Kaz’s sake. It was for hers as well, for in the brief contact, her mind had flashed to the later, to the idea of being pinned down. She still wasn’t yet convinced this wasn’t where it was headed.
“Kaz,” she started, trying to figure out how to put it into words. “You can’t flip me.”
“I’m hardly in the condition to,” he said, motioning to his bandaged shoulder.
But Inej was serious. “Ever,” she said. “Or this will never happen again.”
“Never,” Kaz promised, and somehow she knew he meant it.
◆◇◆
“Inej.”
Kaz loved saying her name. It dripped off his tongue like wine, like honey, like everything impeccable and sweet in the world.
But he especially loved saying it when she was wearing his gloves, one hand pinning his to the mattress below him, one hand resting on the flat planes of his chest, on the side opposite where the bullet had struck. He loved saying it when her legs straddled his hips, pinning him down through two layers of sheets and the fabric of their own clothing. He loved saying it when she hovered above him, brown skin glowing in the light of the setting sun, hair fanned out around her, brushing the skin of his bare shoulders.
“Inej,” he tried again, but it sounded more like a whine than a name as his hips lifted, looking for friction and finding nothing but sheets.
“I like it when you beg,” she murmured, into his ear, and then sat back, giving him the pressure he so desperately craved.
Kaz hated begging, but not enough to stop the rotation of his hips, the lifting of his back, the tension in his neck as he strained for one more kiss, one more touch, one more moment.
The only skin touching were their hands, their lips, their faces. Things that made Kaz feel entirely, blissfully, alive. Inej was always careful that way, even though this night was more about her trauma than his.
He had not broken his promise to her. Even thinking about it afterwards, in the cold loneliness that followed after she’d left, had told him he never would. He’d rested his weight on enough lifeless bodies to want to repeat the experience. Inej going lifeless beneath him would be a curse to them both. Besides, it was so much less fun than the alternative.
Because the alternative was this moment, this absolution, as Inej smiled into his lips, her strong thighs holding him in place, her hips rocking against his. Above and below. Sky and ground. A strike of lightning.
“I thought there would be watercolors,” he breathed, and she nearly laughed.
“We’re not there yet, Kaz,” she teased, and he was hit with another overwhelming bolt of friction.
“Not that,” he groaned, trying to keep himself afloat enough to have this conversation, to say what was needed. “On the boat. I thought there would be Shu watercolors.”
Inej’s eyebrow quirked up. She pressed a kiss to his jawline, blissfully warm and human and alive.
“I was going to give them to you,” he breathed, just barely forcing the words out.
Above him, Inej paused, then she released the pressure on his wrists to slap him softly on the chest. “You’re so stupid,” she breathed, into him, and he heard her breath hitch as they rolled together once more.
“I’ll get you more,” he said, and he knew the wave was coming, felt it, but held it at bay until he could look into her eyes.
He met her gaze, and watched the soft lines of her smile strengthen into a smolder as she leaned down and whispered “Go on.”
Kaz fell apart in her arms.
◆◇◆
In the end, Inej was thankful for the bomb and all that came after.
She was thankful for Heleen’s blood on her hands, for the singes on Kaz’s good coat, and for the Shu watercolor hanging above her bed in The Wraith.
More importantly, she was thankful for the knowledge that she would never have to be pinned down like a butterfly on cork ever again. She’d been certain for the first few weeks that it would happen eventually, that Kaz would break his promise, but, in retrospect, she should’ve known Kaz was a man of his word.
Not every day was a good day. Some days she felt suffocated by purple silk alone in her own bed. Some nights, she would turn in her sleep in the rock of the sea and dream of arms and legs and bellies that did not belong to her. But some nights she would dream of Kaz, with kiss-bruised lips and rumpled hair and adoration in his eyes and she would wake up to the comforting tranquility of the Shu watercolor he had stolen for her room.
Kaz understood all of it, in a way she wondered if only he could. He did not write her letters -- that was not his style -- but he’d send her trinkets. A compass. A rare coin. A new knife, for each new Ravkan Saint. That one did come with a single note -- There are too many these days -- which she had laughed at and kept hidden in her pocket until she returned home.
She was still burdened with the knowledge of eventuality. Eventually, when the time was right, she would have to -- get to -- teach Kaz the full extent of sex. Eventually she would have to conquer that last wound, bridge that last gap, but she knew even then he would keep his promise.
Inej would never have to feel caged again.