Chapter Text
It made no sense, that Inej would love being overwhelmed by Kaz. That she’d like his cane pressed across his shoulders up against a wall, the startling weight of him pressing her into a bed. But she was giddy with it. All the touch she’d been denied all these years. She knew any scrap of his body at a glance but it felt different to touch, somehow, than it looked. Better.
She should have wanted a gentle, pious merchant, maybe. Someone who would read the paper and smoke a pipe and be up before every sunrise to walk to his law-abiding work. She knew that’s what Kaz expected her to want. It’s why he’d given her that stack of money, her contract back, her ship. He was always giving her freedom, and only with his eyes did he beg what he truly wanted her to do with it.
This. Only, ever, this.
His breath hot in her hair, black leather of his gloves caught between her belly and the band of her smallclothes. His wrist flexing as he whispered a finger up the center of her.
The binder for her breasts felt too tight, pressing tight around her ribs like she’d been running and running for miles. “Kaz, I can’t breathe…” She gasped it, a little dizzy, a little light.
“I can fix that.”
His hand disappeared from her and she ached, arching as if she could call it back. But then he hooked a finger in the top of her wraps and jerked it down, all at once, so the binder lay unraveling around her belly. Her breasts sprang free, nipples taut and deep brown. The sudden wealth of air felt head-whirling in a new way, the chill of the room drawing her skin up all sensitive and goosebumpy.
So that when his thumb traced up the lower curve of her breast, she felt it like she’d felt nothing in her life. Inej’s eyes fell closed, unable to take in more than that. She blessed her Saints for his gloves. For every time they’d both cheated death to bring them back to this moment. For everything that was making it possible for her to have this, with him. Broken as they were, to get this one gasp of a perfect moment, one inhalation of a normal life.
Or maybe even…better than normal.
Hard as she’d pushed to have him without his armor, she liked the feel of his gloves moving over her bared skin. They were textured and interesting, and they felt like Kaz and no other man.
She let her lashes peek just the smallest bit open, so she could watch. She liked the predator’s focus on his sharp face, the way one strand of blackest hair fell forward to cross his brow. The strange, pent-up look in his eye she’d never seen from him before. Warmth curled up from her heart like a wisp of campfire smoke.
It was when Kaz looked his most dangerous that she felt the most safe.
She’d worried if they tried…but no. The memories didn’t seem to be able to find her like this, when his gloved touch matched none of her memories. The men in the Menagerie had treated her like she was small and delicate. Baby-talked to her, which made her feel ill for so many reasons. None of them gripped her like she was a woman with her own passions. None of them had a nimble hand wrapped in leather that somehow knew her most secret and wanton desires.
Like when the skim of his knuckles turned to a sharp tweak of her nipple, and she rose, hungry to his touch. Gasping for more.
She’d always liked that Kaz never treated her like someone fragile.
When she’d first joined the Dregs, Brass Knuckles Barry had gone sweet on her. Always stepping in front of her when there was a fight. It scared her, because if the others thought she couldn’t hold her own, she’d have more fights on her hands than she could win at once. But Barry didn’t seem to get that, always gallantly stepping in her way until one day, she’d had enough and stabbed him in the back.
Only a little stab, but it was still the loudest she’d ever heard Kaz laugh.
She slipped a hand inside his unbuttoned vest now, careful to keep it over his shirt. His hip flexed sharply forward and for an instant, he pressed against her and she could feel his hunger match her own. His hand climbed her throat now, closing like a death threat but with the weight of a butterfly. She pulled him down and kissed him like that, leather heating her skin, her breasts bare against the brocade of his vest.
It was just…she’d been the best in her family of acrobats, even as a child. The steadiest on the wire, the flashiest on the trapeze. She had been the queen of her world, reigning even over gravity itself, and yet she’d still ended up on a dock, a little nothing with her skirt rucked up. Kaz had treated her like someone who was dangerous. Someone you didn’t have to be careful with.
All these years, she’d let people think she was the heart of mercy in the Crows. Their conscience. But when someone gave way in fear before her, she secretly loved it. As much as Kaz did. Perhaps more.
Those rough gloved hands were traveling down her body again, the texture of the palms awakening her breasts until they tingled. Passing the loosened wreckage of her yanked-down binder, and touching one thumb into the dip of her naval as it passed, like a salute.
She squeezed her legs tight against the one of his that parted them, restless. Then he slid beneath the linen of her smallclothes and every scrap of her beneath there was sensitive. The rest of her was all sidewalk and this was a piano—a new note to play every time he shifted the smallest bit.
He was slower now, his head fallen low enough that his hair tickled her brow. She was afraid to open her eyes because she knew if she saw him this close, it would be impossible not to touch his face.
She could still remember how the planes of it felt from that one, terrible day in Shu Han when they’d been poisoned. When she awoke from a too-perfect dream of him to find the real thing was dying while she slept. She’d had to pin him down and force his mouth open while he fought her. She still remembered the flare of his nostrils as he panted, the intensity of his panic heart-peeling when he wasn’t in his right mind enough to be able to hide it from her. But she also remembered the hard line of his jaw under her palm. The soft spot just in front of his ear that she stroked as she begged him to wake up. The change in his eyes when they focused on her. For that one, long instant before he jerked away from her.
That’s how she knew, even now, that Kaz wanted her to touch him. Even when he couldn’t take it, he wanted it.
She opened her eyes. It felt unbearable, to look at her old heisting partner while his long fingers traced sparkles dancing up inside her. It was another thing she remembered from that day in Shu Han. He’d taken off his gloves for the tea ceremony and the grace in the way he’d touched his third finger to his forehead had made her squeeze, deep and secret between her legs. It happened again now, but she was wet and slick and he was close enough his gloves slid when they found that part of her. His eyes had gone hazy. Not scheming face, but something…else. He looked more open than she was used to. His face less hard but no less elegant.
She hooked her thumb inside his belt and those scoundrel’s eyelashes of his stuttered hard. Her fingers splayed across the front of his trousers, and she could feel him beneath the wool, oh yes she could.
His fingers delved deeper, meeting her raised ante with a challenge of their own. Her legs closed on his invading knee with a little cry at the bolt of pleasure. Her nails scored the front of his pants and he pressed into her touch, panting. He didn’t mind it rough, either. She should have known.
She felt like the Wraith then, though her dark clothes were all torn away and tumbled onto his floor. Her fingers stole down the length of him, uncharted territory to any but her. She could feel the ridge just beneath his tip where he swelled even larger. It flexed beneath her hand.
She couldn’t focus anymore. He’d found a new rhythm on her, drawing a circle that kept crossing this lightning-bolt place high up between her legs, then revisiting the damp, slippery place below. She wanted more, she wanted something, but she didn’t think they could—and then she was almost out of her mind enough to beg him for it, even if it was something he couldn’t give.
“Be easy,” he whispered in Suli, raking his teeth over her shoulder where it was still covered with the scrap of her shirt. And then he slipped his finger inside of her.
“Ah!” When had Kaz learned to speak Suli? The thought was lost too quickly behind the entire ocean of sensation. She’d been entered before in her life, a thousand times, though it had been years now. But never with a roughness of black leather, every seam and smoothed-soft place awakening her from the inside. It felt…exquisite. Especially when he flexed his finger, one of those odd lockspick’s movements that only Kaz seemed to make. A magician’s flourish that melted him deeper within her and then found a place that—“Oh!”
He was bent low over her now, braced on one elbow by her head, his leg thick and hot between hers, as if he was overheating in all those clothes. Inej had to catch herself as her hands spasmed in his shirt and nearly slid under to hard belly beneath. Lights were flashing behind her eyes and a deep, odd sort of satisfaction was sinking into her. It made her want to melt and tense all at once, her body following a sinuous crunch that lifted her in tighter to his hands.
“Saints, you are beautiful like this,” he rasped. “Do that again.”
She exhaled, the groan of it catching in her throat as she hooked one leg behind his hip and rolled up into him. The brocade of that vest felt so, so good against her peaked nipples, and she caught his hand between the front of his own trousers and her body and that gave her leverage to press him deeper, taking him in hard little bucks that felt somehow like the way he would have moved. If it were all of him inside her and not just one clever finger. A kiss whispered over her cheekbone and her heart jolted—on skin, how had he?—but it was gone again before she could wish for more.
“If you relax, I might be able to give you more…” he murmured. There was pressure at the base of her and she ached, but he was right. She was clenched so tight around his finger, made bulky with the leather, and he couldn’t enter her with more. She loosened her leg, a little sulky, and slid back down to the bed beneath her. Holding his eyes, she let her leg slide open. It was hard, for an instant. Like baring your throat. But it felt good, in the next, because he brushed a kiss over her lips and murmured something in Suli she didn’t catch. Just the lullaby of her own language and then her body was softening and he was pressing a second finger into her. She had to stretch to take it, and the leather rasped against her, making her pulse with a new wave of slickness that eased his entry.
“I want you to—” She didn’t have the word for it, not in Kerch, and it sounded like a growl in Suli and it was probably not one of the words he knew, but then Kaz flexed his strong wrist and he was driving deep in her, making her take the wider stretch of him and that was just it, Saints, why did she need it like that? But it was perfect, and her head thrashed on his stolen pillow, hair tangling with the pulled-open scraps of her shirt.
“My Wraith, my gorgeous assassin…” He was whispering to her, returning to her mouth like now that they’d discovered kisses were the loophole to his haunting, they couldn’t possibly have enough. Her belly twitched, convulsing helplessly as she rose for him. Her rhythm was erratic, unstudied. Driven by unschooled passion and a need that gripped her so deep she wasn’t sure now if perhaps it had been building for years. Every time she heard the rap of his cane or saw that fierce lift of his mouth when he was pleased. The slash of his voice when he wasn’t. She shuddered, his fingers driving more easily into her when she thought of it, her body giving way in a slick rush to invite him in.
“Kaz…”
He swore, blackly, his hips jerking once against her clasping legs. He flexed his fingers, snuggling that roughest rasp of leather right into the deepest place in her and she cried out, it was so sharp and perfect.
“Again,” she begged, even as her hands found him. One gripping his back, holding tight to the strength of him in this trembling moment. The other sliding down the front of his trousers. There was a tiny damp spot now and his whole body shivered when she gripped him but that was good, that was right, because she didn’t want to be alone when she was falling apart. She stroked him, softly, so glad that it was only fabric they needed now, to allow her to do this safely. So he could feel this and love it as much as he did.
“Saints, Inej…”
“More—I—” Her voice was sharp and there was a panic in her now, like there was something happening and she was afraid if he stopped now it just wouldn’t work and she didn’t know—
His fingers curled, finding that deep, shuddering place in her. Then he pressed hard into her body. Before she recovered from the everything that made her feel, he thrust deep in her again, making her stretch for him. She had no idea she had so many sensitive places, so many shades of pleasure to be felt, and his clever fingers were coaxing all of them to brilliant life. And one more thing registered: Kaz’s hands had begun to shake. So even while he moved like the confident con-man who could ferret out anyone’s most hidden desire, she could feel what this was doing to him. That his breath was as ragged as hers.
It’s what broke her, beautiful and sudden and all at once like the iridescence of a soap bubble POP. And then she was clenching around him, every wave of it bringing the rough leather of his gloves into sharp relief, her walls quaking around him. The sensation heightened into an unbearable cry and she buried her face in his collar, gripping his hand against her with her smallclothes all tangled between them. He jolted, his body grinding down on hers, and that felt better, oh Saints, that felt like everything they were supposed to be doing. She shuddered, low and quaking.
His weight came down onto hers, steady and comforting, the scent of him reminding her of a stakeout with them both tucked alone together into some safe shadow. The bolts of pleasure eased away into trilling little glitters of sensation and she freed a hand to cup the back of his neck, flipping his collar up to keep him safe.
His chest was heaving with his breaths, though he didn’t make a sound. His pants were very wet now, and his gloves, when he withdrew from her, stroking softly in farewell. But he didn’t seem to mind and secretly, she thrilled to it. The mess and the triumph of it, to having beaten all the things that would have held them apart from touching one another. To have fought their way to where they could be together in his bed with their clothes all akimbo.
“Kaz…” She drew him close, and he shifted himself fully atop her. Stroking her hair with his ruthless criminal’s hands, letting her feel even the lump in his once-broken, badly-set knee.
“If anyone disturbs us,” he growled, his arms curling around her. “I’ll hang them by their heels from the Hanraat Point Lighthouse.”
She let her eyelashes flutter closed, a soft smile finding her face.
Perhaps it was wrong, but Kaz Brekker, in all his black ruthlessness, made her feel safe.
And maybe, just maybe, she thought as she stroked his shoulder beneath dark brocade, I do the same for him.