Chapter Text
“I asked you once, what you want.”
Kaz had just finished washing his hands when he heard Inej speak. He’d sensed her entrance only a blink before: a shifting in the air, something in him piqued to life. An instant later, the cold wind that accompanied her through his window hit his back, and he had an excuse for the gooseflesh his high-turned collar hid.
“You did,” he allowed.
It wasn’t the strangest thing she’d ever said, upon entering his room. This girl who he’d sent hunting after the secrets of the most powerful people in Ketterdam’s far flung trading empire. But this statement was the one that made him pause, stilling down his own reaction and tucking it deep where no one could glimpse it. One look, that was all it had taken for Van Eck to realize Inej Ghafa was the only lever by which Kaz Brekker could be moved.
In the mirror, he watched her behind him. Her shoulders were squared like she was about to make a move.
“You never asked me in return.”
“I didn’t need to ask.”
He smoothed his gloves back on and turned, face hardened into its normal forbidding corners. Knowing what people wanted was his business. It was the only capital he needed to turn a profit.
Her braid twitched back over her shoulder, her hair as on edge as her posture. “Maybe you don’t know everything, Kaz Brekker.”
“Alright, I’ll play. What do you want, Inej?” His voice murmured out softer than most people ever heard it. Because she was angry enough to give away more than she usually did, and that caught his interest.
He just wished he thought she was about to ask him for something he could give. Impossible heists, unbelievable amounts of money. Lies, spun into gold. Freedom, purchased at a steep price when he’d had barely his own teeth to his name.
Her lashes flickered and her drawn-up courage seemed to fail her. She turned partially away, his window a lithe vault away for her, multiple painful steps for him. He’d never be able to catch her in time.
“I want…” She wasn’t looking at him. “What Nina and Mattias had. I want the wink between Jesper and Wylan.” She tipped her face back up and her dark eyes hit him like a swung chain. “The way they laugh about it. I want the laugh, Kaz.”
“You’ve come to the wrong place.” He knew what she was asking for, that it wasn’t just a laugh she was asking for, but she wouldn’t find either at this address.
Somehow, his denial only seemed to make her steadier. “I know people…do,” she said, with the frankness they had between them when they were planning a job. “Not just for money, I mean. I can’t imagine it. I mean, I didn’t use to be able to imagine.” She darted another look. “And then I started to…”
Want.
The word hung between them, like it was speaking itself. Kaz was a creature of want. He let his desire propel him like fuel. But this sort of desire had been locked away since that bad night when he was still a pup in the Dregs, before he got his gloves. Before he realized girls and fun in dark alleys weren’t going to be his path.
“And you’re asking me?”
He shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t have even acknowledged it in the room, but it was like a sharp prick at him and with Inej looking at him like this, he couldn’t let it go.
She nodded. Once. So slight an assassin could have missed the movement.
He crossed the room to her. The punch of his cane a tick-tocked warning to his enemies that he was coming closer. He’d trained the entire Barrel to shiver at that sound. The whole city. Half the nation of Ravka.
Inej didn’t even blink.
She was backed up against his desk, so even if she wanted to step back, she couldn’t. She reeled just slightly closer, her breath so unsteady he knew she’d had a long, hard night—maybe more than one—before she gave in to ask this of him.
She’d thought he’d say no. He guessed that, too, and it was a sick twist behind his heart that she had the stones to ask anyway.
He lifted his free hand, and the tips of his clever fingers didn’t quite rest against her neck. Close enough he could feel the heat of her through the slits in the leather. His thumb touched the point of her chin, stroked so lightly back toward her jaw that a tremor ran through him when she took a breath.
“If you want to do that, really want that, after everything…” His voice was as rough as a sack of stones, grinding. “It should be someone gentle. Kind.” He said the word like an accusation, and he meant it toward himself. He wasn’t sure if gentleness had been in him, when he was born. It certainly wasn’t in him now.
He used to look, after every murder. To wait for that thing people were supposed to have, that made them sorry. But it was always his enemies who ended up sorry, and Kaz saw the use in that, so he eventually stopped looking for anything more.
Inej’s eyes flicked up to him and his body tensed, all the way down his stomach and…below.
“Maybe gentle isn’t what makes me feel safe.”
His breath stopped.
Inej grabbed him by the tie and yanked him toward the wall, backing herself up until he was looming right up against her, his greater height emphasized as a shadow in the candlelit room. His hands shot out, bracing himself on the wall out of instinct, caging her in. His cane clattered to the floor.
“Do you remember this?” Her lips were a bare whisper away from his jaw. Kaz might be dying. “When I first got out of the Menagerie and you were teaching me to fight.”
“You’d freeze.” And he’d feel like the worst villain, in a way that twisted sicker in his gut than crime had in years. If there was guilt to feel after murder, he imagined it couldn’t have felt worse than that. Her small body underneath him, cowering.
“And you’d make me fight,” she whispered. “Again, you’d say. Again. Fight or die, no third choice.”
He closed his eyes. Inej squirming under him, coming back to life. It was wrong, that it did something to him every time she’d break free of the frozen silence and start to move again. It felt like the first dollar he ever stole for himself. The first bully that backed down from him. It felt like the kind of freedom too expensive to buy.
It was just the frozen moments when her breath fluttered like a trapped bird. That’s what he hated. When her body came back to life, even when it learned to twist and strike and hurt him, his body came to life, too.
“Do it.” Her voice was black, hungry. It sounded like his own.
“Do what.”
His hands closed into fists, knuckles digging into the wall to either side of her head. She should hate this. Being boxed in. This close. To him, of all people.
“Make me fight you again.” Her tongue darted out, licked her lips. “Push me.”
The way she fought these days, he’d be dead in seconds.
“I thought you wanted to laugh.”
“I want…” She twisted away and he should have backed up, should have let her go. But Kaz Brekker was not a good man. So he blocked her and waited. “I want not to fear it,” she finally said. “For it to be mine, not me to be its.”
His eyes flared. He understood that, like a key understood its lock. It made him wish there were someone left to kill for her, but he’d dispatched Tante Heleen—screaming—months ago.
“And I like…” She looked agonized, trying to spit out the words, but Kaz was already there.
“Gentle doesn’t make you feel safe.”
“Yes,” she breathed it, her lashes fluttering a little as her head fell back.
His arms clenched, trying not to lean nearer. Why would it, growing to her adulthood in a place like the Barrel? But far back in his mind, in the place that was always calculating, he thought…maybe not.
Inej had always just been…Inej. A breath of clean air, blowing down these dirty streets. She’d learned to play their filthy games, to best them. Even once she’d begun to kill, she remained herself in a way he watched, admired, like a spectator. It was possible that if she wanted this now, she might have always wanted things this way. His blood surged hot at the thought. And another: Whoever he’d once been as a child, he was only this now, and this. He. Was what she wanted.
Kaz Brekker could win any game. He wasn’t the strongest or the quickest. Hell, he wasn’t even always the smartest in the room, though he was never going to admit that to Jesper. He won because he only ever played the hand he was dealt rather than wishing for another, exploiting every weakness and every strength of any particular game. He wasn’t shy to cheat, either. He could find a way to give her this, even if he wasn’t whole.
He swooped to retrieve his cane and set it hard across her shoulders, pinning her arms down right across the pressure points that sent numbness and tinglings dancing down like a Grisha’s spell. “You know how to get out of this now.”
“Yes.”
“You can kick out my knee, twist and drop, bite my nose right off my face.”
“Yes.” It was almost a whimper.
“But you don’t want to.”
“No.”
Kaz leaned in, a shark back in the sea. “You asked me once how I would have you. Clothes on, still gloved. As if I couldn’t.”
He spun her face-first to the wall. She was all covered in leather and fabric. His gloves on. Nothing but hunger on his horizon. He pressed her close, once, letting her feel the strength in him as he set aside his cane.
This is what she wants.
Then he skimmed his hands down. Over the dip at the small of her back. The flair of her ass.
Lightly.
Because he knew.
No one had ever touched her like this. No one had ever teased her. No one had ever given her a kind of rough she could thirst for.
Kaz had no trouble with the contradictions in people. To his quick mind, they all made sense.
He dropped his head to the nape of her neck. Grinding her harder against the wall, the heave of her lungs lifting both of them. His hands cupped her hips—so small—and his thumbs flicked along the bare skin just above her waistline. He could feel the change in texture through thin leather, but his gloves were still on.
“I used to want to kill everyone who touched you.” He rasped it against her neck, her braid laying long along his cheek. “And then I saw you kill one of them instead. And it was so good, I didn’t want to do anything but watch.”
His hand slid around the front of her, steadying her quaking belly.
“Kaz…” she half-moaned his name, and his whole body came alive at the sound.
He bit her. Through the fabric of her shirt, the scent of her hair filling up his whole head. He blinked once. He needed to think, to plan this like the most important con of his life. But her breath was breaking and her ass was arching back against him and it was all he could do not to thrust.
She wanted pleasure. Sex. What Nina had. Wanted her skin to belong to her again the way his still did not.
He flicked open the button on her pants. And then with his other hand, he began to unbraid her hair. Inej wasn’t breathing. He noted it, taking weight off his bad leg and nudging that knee all along the back of her thigh. His gloved finger flicked out the knots in her leather tie like it was nothing. Swam up the coils of her braid, unraveling as it went. The thumb of his right hand rubbed slow circles on the small patch of bare skin her loosened button had uncovered. She was breathing again, in quick, deep jerks now. And then she pressed back against him. He had an instant to worry that she shouldn’t find him thick and hard, and then it was too late.
“Ignore it,” he rumbled. “That doesn’t matter.”
Tonight wasn’t about him and he was glad. Because with his gloves on, his vest still buttoned, he was the master of everything he could see. Maybe that, not some gentle, gullible farmer, was what Inej truly needed. She was his queen of the Ice Palace, after all. Thief of tanks and instigator of the impossible.
Her belly hollowed with her next inbreath and his thumb slipped deeper. The first teeth of her zipper began to part under the pressure. He found her undergarments, thin linen.
“Kaz, Saints…” She spun, her hands coming up to reach for him and she stopped herself at the last instant, gripping his lapels instead. Thick wool, bunching under her hands. He hadn’t taken off his coat when he’d come in. “Can you—” She licked her lips, watched his.
He rather thought he couldn’t. But lips weren’t skin, not really. Perhaps it was different. He planted his hands hard against the wall behind her. “If I hurt you…” he growled. “Hurt me first.”
It was the only way he could think to warn her. She was fast. Quick of reflexes and of mind. The only way he ever got the drop on anyone was by thinking three weeks ahead of them, and right now he couldn’t even manage the next five minutes.
Which was why he still wasn’t sure what he might do if he tried this.
She nodded, her eyes like the moon and the whole sky behind it. “Go on.”
He dropped his head, her full lips just skimming his. He wouldn’t have thought he knew what to do with kissing, but instinct took him and he wanted that mouth and then it was opening beneath his, crying out the smallest sound as he crushed her to him. That braid in his hand, her arms around his neck, pressure around his hips. His bad leg barked, sharply, and he fell, catching her weight against the wall. Her legs came up and squeezed tight around him and that felt secure. He liked that. He kissed her deeper, tasting something like the dark cinnamon bark scent of her. The wind against rain-wet bricks, the oil she used to keep her blades from rusting.
“Inej.”
She smiled, fiercely. “The way you say my name…”
He kissed it into her mouth and she curled against him, his cock thunderingly hard beneath his coat and it pinched, painfully. He spun, ignoring the quake of his bad leg as he took the extra step to deposit her on his desk. Her hands clenched again on his lapels, her thumb skimming his throat, and his head swam.
He jerked back, the scent of her too good, too dangerous. He checked behind him, furious he hadn’t thought to watch for someone entering the room. His brain had been so full he hadn’t been on guard for once. But it was quiet.
“Rotty’s on the door, Jesper’s on the stairs,” Inej reminded him. “Anika on the tables, so Jesper can’t get distracted.”
Kaz nodded once. Right. He planted a shaking hand on the desk. Kissing, apparently, was okay. Made sense. He hadn’t been doing too much kissing on Reaper’s Barge. But even the skim of her thumb on his throat almost went…badly.
“Don’t reach for me,” he warned her. “Let me lead. So you can…”
Her eyes went soft. “But if you could…”
“Not tonight.” It wasn’t as important, and it would take longer, and she didn’t deserve to wait. Not tonight. Not ever, really.
He pressed forward, tipping her onto her back and she tumbled down in a rain of half-unraveled braid, like a flag across his desk.
“Take your coat off, at least.” Her quick thumb flicked the big buttons out of their holes, and his body throbbed with an immediate understanding of the flare it was, for a woman like her to want what was…beneath. Kaz filed that away for another day, as he shrugged out of his coat and laid it across the chair, not wrinkling the expensive wool.
Her eyes were alight, watching his every movement. Her trim pants already open. He hooked a finger into the gap, tugging a little so she slid toward the edge of the desk and the zipper peeled open a few more teeth. Inej gasped, her face going a little hazy.
“Wrap your legs around me.”
Her breath stuttered and her eyes lit like candle flames. She brought him in with legs tight with muscle and he ached thicker at the touch of her.
She reared up to sitting, her fingers tearing open the buttons on his vest. Without meaning to, he surged against her and she rolled her hips in approval with something like a purr deep in her throat. “Kiss me hard, Kaz.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before he was at her. She meant it, even over the thunder of his own pulse he understood that; understood her. They were more alike even than he’d given her credit for, all these years. She was good, yes. Cut glass clear of soul, like perhaps only her Saints could be. But she could be hard when the world demanded it, and when Inej started to kill, she did it quickly. Cleanly. Beautifully. She liked the power that it gave her to always have a knife to put to someone’s throat, and he loved that part of her. It was that part of her that told him to grip her by the nape of her neck. To hold her ruthlessly against his body and kiss her like he’d wanted nothing else, all the days of his life. He didn’t need to go easy. Not with this, not for her.
What made Inej Ghafa feel safe was knowing he’d give an entire city a plague to save her. That he’d leave splintered bones and broken men in his wake, if anyone stood between them. She knew what he’d done to earn the moniker Dirtyhands, and she wanted those hands on her, anyway.
Kaz almost lost the thread of his own game, hands gasping against her back, her hair wild around them. But the heat of her burned him back to life and he followed her down to the desk, his vest hanging half unbuttoned. “Inej.”
He pulled back, just enough that she could see the flash of his eyes. “Tell me what you want first. This?”
He trailed a black fingertip over the buttons of her vest, the rise of her breasts beneath her shirt. Her head rolled on the desk, tangling her own hair. “Or this?”
His hand traveled lower, cupping her through leather, and sweet Saints he could feel the heat of her through all the layers between them. Wet skin was his hardest nemesis and still, he was enough a man to want exactly this until it nearly drove him mad.
She yelped a small cry, rolling against his hand. “I…” She was shaking all over now. “Please.”
“Easy, Wraith.” He rubbed his thumb across her, gripping more firmly. “I’ve got you.” With his other hand, he teased her knee to a bent cock, her rubber-slippered foot resting on his hip. Her toes wriggled for purchase, catching on his belt edge like it was the barest dime-edge on a cliff.
Her breath came out long as he stroked the inner seam of her pants. From one knee all the way down to where his hand still rested over her center. Back up. Unhurried, enjoying the shape of her. He thumbed her again, because he felt a jolt go through her when he’d passed over something in that vicinity. There. He found it again, noted it.
“Kaz!” Her foot hooked his shoulder, pulled him down to her as her hips rolled hungrily and she stole a sharp kiss, her small teeth scoring his lower lip. “Take me to your bed.”
He nearly went blind, in an instant. “Say it again,” he rasped, and she just smiled. He picked her up, swung her and caught her knees so she was the smallest bundle against his chest. And just for a second, he remembered her limp and bleeding on the dock. Running like he’d never run in his life, the pain in his leg like it would never be the same again. He’d been startled, upon reaching the ship, to find out he could still walk. He’d have done it all over again, anyway. But he’d have killed Oomen slower the next time.
Her breath was hot against his neck, and he felt the moment she made herself pull back, tucking his collar up safe against his skin. Goosebumps begged for more of her touch, and he didn’t dare. He laid her across the sheets like a piece of stolen art. The sweet brown of her belly showed through her open zipper. He hooked one finger inside. “May I?”
She laughed, teeth flashing. “I didn’t know you knew those words, Kaz Brekker.”
“I save them for special occasions.” He stripped those muscle-tight pants off her legs and flicked them aside. Her underclothes were smaller than most, so as not to catch and drag at her mobility. Something flickered in her expression and he eased down on the bed beside her, his fingers playing up and down her inner thigh again. She gave a little shiver and with a quick roll, she was atop him. Bare legs gripping his hips, thighs warm through his shirt.
She cocked her head at whatever expression he was making. “Oh. You like that, then?”
He let the corner of his mouth lift, amused she’d need to ask. Surely she must know what she looked like. A conquering queen, her hair a curtain of silk falling forward over one shoulder.
He hadn’t expected to crave so much, the warmth of her against him. He ran gloved hands up her thighs, clamping them tighter against his sides.
Inej’s breath stuttered, her hair falling back as her head tipped. “Those gloves…”
He frowned. “Are they too rough? I’ve others.”
She gave him a look he’d never seen on her face before. He wanted to sear it into canvas. Melt it in flame-colored wax and cast it in bronze. Sacrifice nations in its name. “I’ve never felt them…like this.” On her bare legs…
So she liked that, too. Well.
His thumbs flickered inward, registering the softer skin there with the slits in his glove tips. She gave a small gulp-cry.
“Inej.” He bent his head to nip at her fingers, where they were braced on his chest. “I want you to slow me, if I need to be slowed.” He nudged at her wrist, sliding the bridge of his nose down it. It felt different enough from hands that he could steal this small touch and the scent of her was intoxicating. He risked a kiss, to the place where Nina had smoothed away the Menagerie tattoo. “Don’t worry that you’ll…hurt my feelings.” He said it dryly enough that her laughter cracked across the end of his sentence.
She ran her hands down his chest, tugging at the remaining buttons on his vest, and he tried to stop thinking about how much he liked that. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t take off all the barriers between them tonight. He still liked, with a darkly-spiced satisfaction, the feel of her unbuttoning his clothes.
The backs of his fingers flickered over the loose linen of her underclothes, and her eyes grew wider. Stilled. Then he thumbed open the bottom button on her vest. It hung, still heavy with her knives tucked in each sheath. She rolled her delicate shoulders once he’d unbuttoned it, shedding it into his hands. He brought it to his face, inhaled. So many years, he’d chased the scent of her, so careful never to inhale too deep when anyone could catch him at it.
Something flickered against his cheekbone. “Sorry. I forgot—” The touch was gone.
He opened his eyes, and he felt he was burning all the way down to his bones. Like heat was where he lived now, and he could breathe flame and wreathe smoke through his eyes. “Soon,” he promised her. “For tonight…”
His hand climbed beneath the now-loose hem of her shirt. Trailing across her belly, sure and strong, gripping the swell of her hip just so her head fell back and she rolled against where he was standing hard. It was difficult, after so many years of dreaming of touching her, to be awarded so many touches at once. He skimmed his thumb from the nip of her belly button down, watching. She was biting her lip, her breathing gone to scraps. Her hands fisting in the cotton of his sleeves. He dropped the heel of his hand to the front of her underclothing. She pressed into it, sounds dying in her throat that he could just barely hear in the parting of her lips.
His fingers swirled, traveled the leg openings on either side of her small clothes. He knew where the roughest places in the leather of his gloves were, the wear and cracks from hard living and too many washings. He used them on the softest places on her, and was rewarded with the most ragged of breaths.
“Inej…” His throat was tight for no reason. Seeing her perched atop him like this reminded him of so many afternoons watching her perched on his roof, feeding his crows. Seeing her luminous face change so much, seeing her happy…why didn’t he have more memories of this? He knew the Trade Minister’s favorite three bank accounts, the secret mistress of everyone on the Merchant Council, the combinations to most of the bank vaults in the city. All that information he wanted to shove out of his head to make more room for this.
She reached down, lashes long and eyes dark. He braced himself, because he wouldn’t push her away. But when her small hand found him, it smoothed his collar up and cuddled in against the hot pulse in his neck, letting him feel her touch translated through the texture of expensive linen.
“Go on,” she murmured, and the heat of her…Saints it was steaming through his pants now. But he wanted her gloriously naked, first. To find out how to make every inch of her skin feel decadent. Like Nina and Matthias, she’d said, and he didn’t think Nina was the type to dart straight for the prize. Not when there was more enjoyment to be had along the way.
He took her other hand, his fingers falling so naturally into hers that even with the gloves, it felt like they’d done this a hundred hundred times, though they’d never. He didn’t want to let go, especially not when she gripped him a little tighter, at the end. But he delivered her hand to the top of the ladder of her buttons, and let the heat he was feeling reach his eyes.
Her lips fell open on a gasp. A little fuller than normal, swollen from the kisses, or the bites. They were deepest red, without a touch of rouge, and he wanted to lick them. Kaz had to blink twice at the thought, it felt so foreign in his mind, but then buttons were giving way and he forgot to think anything at all.
The more she watched him, the sharper his eyes got on hers, until the charge in the air between them was agonizing. In his peripheral vision, deep brown skin was opening in a V, and as much as he wanted to see that, there was nothing in his universe but her eyes, building steam at her own boldness. Driven on by whatever reaction she was reading in his face, the flexing of his suddenly-tense fingers on her lean legs.
Her last button gave way, the two sides of her shirt fluttering open at her hips though her wrapped binder still shielded her breasts. She faltered, her lashes flickering down as her gaze fled his. She’d been a spectacle plenty, he knew, and she’d just remembered those days.
He tipped his hips up, using his greater weight to tip her and roll her beneath him. It was a gamble and he treated it like one. His face unreadable, eyes sharp.
She could have fallen for Jesper, he reminded himself in that first, stone-breathed moment. Any moment in so many years, she could have had effortless charm and kindness and bottomless energy matched with a skill in the bedroom born of enthusiastic practice.
If she wanted gentle, he thought as he pinned her body full-length beneath his, she could have had Jesper.
Instead, she’d come to him. The thought struck him again, like a grandfather clock who struck the hour over and over again until you could feel the gong down deep in your soul.
She stilled for just a second, and he started to feel that ill twist in his throat, and then her body came alive, tearing and gripping at his, her nails raking him through his shirt. He hauled an aching knee high enough between her legs that when she arched, she caught hot against him.
Her mouth fought his and he loved it, lashed his tongue with hers like they were having one of their thousand arguments about tactics. Pretending they wouldn’t both win because they both loved being stubborn so much in the meantime. He groaned without meaning to, and she scored his lips with her teeth.
She was so sharp, his Wraith. He’d given her so many weapons, when he first brought her to the Slat. Axes, chains, barbed rings sharp with poison so one slap could kill. Anything to keep her alive long enough. Shoot first, he’d taught her. Don’t worry you’ll kill someone who doesn’t deserve it—every fool in the Barrel deserves death. He’d wanted guns for her. She was so small, it seemed best to fell her enemies before they’d gotten close enough to use their bodies against her. Especially in those first days, when she’d shied away from anything close.
But she was steel-cable strong. He hadn’t been expecting that, and when he’d nearly been propelled out onto his own roof by one of her kicks, he finally admitted that he needed to play to her strengths. And her strengths were knives. She could cartwheel them as gracefully as she could her own body. She understood the route they’d travel instinctively and they worked like she did—glancing past, silent, so you didn’t realize they’d robbed your whole heart from your own body until you were left, bleeding, in her wake.
“Kaz!” she moaned it now, arching beneath him. “I want—I don’t know, I—”
She wouldn’t know, he realized in a clap. She’d been taught the art of pleasing men, not women. Men paid. Men took.
He’d never been taught anything. But Kaz Brekker knew how to see. So he slipped a hand between her legs, and he watched for her tells.