Preface

our hearts like holy hostages
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/38848221.

Rating:
Mature
Archive Warning:
No Archive Warnings Apply
Category:
F/M
Fandom:
Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Relationship:
Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Character:
Kaz Brekker, Inej Ghafa
Additional Tags:
Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Captivity - Noncon touching and threat of rape, Character being extremely protective over their partner, Character who regularly takes risks gets hurt while doing something that is usually safe, Kidnapped and used as leverage against the other character, Character A falls asleep on B's shoulder, Aftermath of Torture, Altered States - Fever
Language:
English
Collections:
Hurt Comfort Exchange 2022
Stats:
Published: 2022-05-07 Completed: 2022-05-08 Words: 9,541 Chapters: 3/3

our hearts like holy hostages

Summary

It’s Inej’s voice he hears in his head, calm, wise, an octave lower than anyone would expect it to be (like caramel, like milky-sweet coffee, like velvet and a thousand other things two little farm boys had fantasized about as they set eyes on Ketterdam for the first time). This is exactly the kind of intelligence you most want people to bring to you. You’ve paid for years for lackluster news just so that when this news arrived, anyone who discovered it would run to you without hesitation. Don’t ruin that now.

As much as he resents it (it feels like weakness), Inej’s voice in his head is always right. He knows that as surely as he knows anything, and yet it still takes him a long, long time to get himself under control enough to respond.

---

A simple job goes wrong, leaving Inej in the hands of an enemy. Kaz handles it about as well as you'd expect.

Notes

N.B. This story takes place in a world where the Ice Court (and everything subsequent) never happened.

 

Isilloth: I tried to combine quite a few of the tags you requested; I hope this satisfies.

Thanks to my beta, mollivanders, for so much helpful feedback.

Warnings for canon-typical violence and vague threats of sexual assault and equally vague memories of sexual trauma (though no sexual assault takes place onscreen).

Chapter 1

Kaz doesn’t shoot the messenger. In Ketterdam, knowledge is more valuable as kruge, and a reputation for paying well for news, no matter how negative, serves his interests. To that end, he’s ensured that everyone in the Barrel knows that they can show up at the Slat or the Crow Club with intelligence and walk away with kruge in hand. There are a few in the Barrel so intimidated by Kaz’s reputation that they’ll avoid him at all costs, but most of the countless thieves, streetwalkers, heavies, bookies, courtesans, smugglers, assassins, conmen, rough sleepers, and lushes in Ketterdam will run straight to the Slat when they’re lucky enough to stumble into news. They don’t often bring him anything truly valuable, but there have been just enough times rumors have given him the upper hand that it’s been a worthwhile investment.

Everre Dross is a familiar enough face at the Slat, slinking in with whatever kernels of information he can get his grubby hands on. Even in a city full of low-lives, Everre is vile, subsisting mainly on scraps scavenged from the trash barrels of the pleasure houses of West Stave. He never hesitates to run directly to Kaz when he has anything remotely like news. Half the time, his reports are unsubstantiated or stale, but enough of them earn him a few coins that he keeps coming back like a stray cat.

Despite his rags, he usually saunters around the Barrel like he owns the place. This morning, a full hour before dawn, he slinks into the Slat, looking even more ferrety than usual, and Kaz goes cold.

Instead of rushing into Kaz’s office and immediately spilling everything he knows, he dithers and stutters and by the time he actually gets it out, Kaz has already guessed. (Inej hasn’t returned from her latest assignment. He expected her two hours ago.) But hearing the words…

For the space of several heartbeats, Kaz has to fight hard to keep from launching forward and beating this little rat of a man to death with his cane. It takes every gram of his hard-won control to stay still, and seven years of self-imposed restraint come a hair’s breadth away from crumbling to nothing. Kaz doesn’t know what his face is doing, but given the way Everre cringes, his expression must be the one that the inhabitants of the Barrel speak about in whispers.

He holds on with his fingernails to the knowledge that if he snaps and kills this man, it will destroy in seconds the network of informants it took years to build: no one will ever come to him again with bad news.

It’s Inej’s voice he hears in his head, calm, wise, an octave lower than anyone would expect it to be (like caramel, like milky-sweet coffee, like velvet and a thousand other things two little farm boys had fantasized about as they set eyes on Ketterdam for the first time). This is exactly the kind of intelligence you most want people to bring to you. You’ve paid for years for lackluster news just so that when this news arrived, anyone who discovered it would run to you without hesitation. Don’t ruin that now.

As much as he resents it (it feels like weakness), Inej’s voice in his head is always right. He knows that as surely as he knows anything, and yet it still takes him a long, long time to control himself enough to respond.

Silence is one of Kaz’s most potent tools, one he can use with the skilled precision of a master jewel cutter, but this silence is as blunt as iron and as cold as the heart of an iceberg, and with each second, Everre shrinks and shrivels like a slug doused in salt.

Kaz doesn’t pay his informants directly. He receives their reports, pulls out a square of heavy cream-colored paper, writes an amount, and scrawls his signature, spiky in black ink. The informant takes it to the cashier at the Crow Club for compensation—a business transaction. Now, though, in motions as jerky as a clockwork’s mechanism, he wrenches an iron box from a drawer, unlocks it, pulls out a bag full of kruge, and hurls it at Everre. The small man only just manages to catch it before it hits the ground, his eyes wide with shock at the weight of the bag. It’s more than Kaz has ever paid for any information before, but so much less than Inej’s life is worth.

“Get. Out,” Kaz grits out, and Everre is out the door before Kaz finishes the words. Then Kaz is alone (truly alone, no cat-like presence lurking in the eaves or on a windowsill or moving silently over the creaking floorboards above). He closes his eyes, imagines ripping this room apart, destroying paper, smashing glass, turning furniture into kindling with his cane and his bare hands—with his teeth.

He doesn’t, but only because there isn’t time. His eyes snap open and then he’s bursting out of the room, shouting for Jesper and Big Bolger and Roeder and half a dozen others.

(Inej. I’m coming.)

 

In all her life, Inej has never felt this stupid. She’s danced across a wire twenty feet above the tilted-back faces of awed crowds, leapt from one building to another as silently as a cat, slipped up behind a line of guards and slid her daggers between their ribs, killing them one by one without alerting any of the others. She’s scaled a ship’s mast in a storm, slid through windows and chimneys so narrow no one bothered to guard them. Once she entered the Exchange through a vent in the attic and crossed the width of the whole building in broad daylight, moving from ceiling beam to ceiling beam with every mercher in Ketterdam blithely carrying on business below.

Now though, she’s lying on a cold, gritty floor, bruised and aching and bleeding from dozens of small cuts, blood oozing sluggishly from a deep wound in her shoulder, trussed up with ropes tied so tight that she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to get free—all because she tripped over a bucket.

Through the throbbing in her head, she tries to remind herself that it was understandable that she was distracted for the space of a heartbeat (as her father warned her a thousand times, a heartbeat of inattention is all it takes to send you plummeting).

It was a small assignment, routine. Kaz had heard a rumor that an up-and-coming gang leader named Trevinka Marr was planning to buy a mid-sized but well-established gaming house by the name of the Wheel of Fortune. This was an unexpected enough move that Kaz had wanted to know the details of the sale—a typical job, even less risky than most.

Inej had had her eyes on the woman (she’s cunning in a way that makes Inej nervous) and she already knew where Marr kept her safe. It would be easy—in and out and back to the Slat just past midnight. When she slid into the silent room, thick with the smells of fresh plaster and paint, she could hear voices from the room next door but it was a simple thing to move silently and keep her ear trained for approach.

The safe was on the complicated end of what she was capable of cracking—Kaz had trained her on just this model for the past week and she felt reasonably confident that she could get it open within ten minutes. She kept a portion of her attention on the conversation next door as she worked, but Marr and her lieutenant were discussing their cut from various enterprises that Inej had known about for a while. Some of the numbers were new to her, and she made a mental note of them, but her focus was on the safe.

Until she heard two words.

“...Suli slaves.”

The man speaking now was not the lieutenant; Inej hadn’t heard his Ravkan-accented voice before. It was slimy, a voice that would have sent a chill down her back no matter what it was saying. But those words….

“A new shipment from Os Kervo,” the man said. “Most of them probably won’t be worth much-–they rounded up the whole caravan–some of ‘em will be old and useless.”

Inej had abandoned the safe and was edging closer to the door of the other room. The room she was in was not much brighter than a cave, and the shadows around her were unidentifiable but simple enough to avoid even with every bit of attention focused on eavesdropping.

“A bunch of circus performers ran afoul of a local boss in Arkesk. Not a man to be trifled with. He decided he wanted them gone and was going to profit in the process. Ravkan government’s still too weak to pay attention to what happens that far from Os Alta.”

“How many?” Marr asked.

“Sixty-three.”

“And how many are actually worth anything?” The hate Inej had felt for Marr in that moment echoed her malice towards Tante Heleen. The woman’s brassy voice grated on her ears with every loathsome word. “I have no use for the old and ugly.”

“Even if there are only a handful who are valuable, they’ll be worth taking a look at,” said Marr’s lieutenant, a muscle-bound Kael named Glannigan. He did most of Marr’s dirty work, and Inej had been monitoring him long enough to recognize his voice.

“I suppose I’ll come down tomorrow and see them,” Marr said, voice bored. “Where are you storing them?”

Inej edged closer, determined to hear the answer. But:

A bucket.

If it had only been the bucket, she would have been able to right herself and grab it before it made much of a clatter, even with the sudden spike of pain as her ankle twisted. But the bucket was right next to a box of paint cans, which were right next to a ladder draped in a drop-cloth. She twisted, tried to recover, but before she could find her footing, she was wrapped in a length of heavy, scratchy fabric, and she was falling. She hit the ground hard, harder than she ever has, hard enough to jar her bones. Her knives had been tucked away while she was working on the safe, and it took her longer than it should have to wrench her arm free enough to whip one out.

At least she’d put up a fight. She’d sliced her way out of the drop cloth and was almost upright when the door banged open, the sudden flare of light blinding her. She fought like her life depended on it and she had felt the way her knives bit into flesh, savored the grunts of pain from Glannigan, but her ankle was screaming at her and she had banged up her entire left side when she fell. Glannigan was three times her size but moved deceptively fast—he had been a prize-fighter before Marr hired him. By then, the room was filling up with the rest of Marr’s gang-–she slipped out of Glannigan’s reach a time or two, but there was nowhere to go.

In the end, they caught her. Took her knives, trussed her up. And then Marr bent over her. Inej’s eyes had adjusted enough that she could see the white oval of the woman’s face, the heavy weight of her elaborate braids falling forward over her shoulder, the smirk. The smirk.

“It’s Brekker’s spider queen.” The satisfied purr of her voice was enough to make Inej gag. “Let’s have some fun.”

They had it.

(It really wasn’t as bad as it could have been, nothing like as dark as her nightmares. Marr had wanted to prove that she meant business, so she let Glannigan rough her up a bit, the way any Barrel gang member would another. For spite, Marr ordered him to use Inej’s own knives to punctuate her threats. None of those cuts will leave permanent damage, and Inej stopped fretting about scars long ago; the only wound she’s really worried about is where he sliced deep into her shoulder with Sankta Alina before Marr called him off.

But the thing she’d feared most hadn’t happened, and she can endure pain.)

And now, some unknowable time later, Inej is lying alone on a cold floor in some mildewed Barrel warehouse, and the only thing that hurts more than the pain throbbing its way through her body is the awareness of her own stupidity.

Kaz would give her a look that says This is what happens when you let yourself care about other people. It’s always a weakness. Every bit of her that is still her parents’ daughter resists that idea, but at this moment she can come up with no argument. Marr and her associates had tapped into Inej’s weakness without even trying, and this was the result.

Her mind is clouded with pain and blood loss but she tries her best to stay alert. Even bound and bruised and bleeding, with a twisted ankle and probably a low fever, thirst and hunger twisting in her mouth and gut, surely there will be some way to escape. If she just pays enough attention, sooner or later someone will get sloppy and underestimate her.

She wants to believe that Kaz will come for her, that she’s a valuable enough asset to him that he’ll find a way to find her, but the truth is, she doesn’t know what he’ll risk for her. In the year and a half since he took her from the Menagerie, she’s made herself valuable to him in countless ways, even helping him knock Per Haskell out of the Dreg’s hierarchy. She’s gathered information for him that no one else could have obtained, planted forged papers and faked evidence and explosives that helped him attain his ends. She is valuable.

But how valuable?

(She can still hear the greed in Marr’s voice as she said, “I wonder what Brekker will trade for her.”

Inej wonders too.)

It’s Jesper who brings the report, even though it was Roeder and Rotty who had been out. Jesper, who flirts with danger the way he does with every person he encounters, is the only one willing to venture into Kaz’s lair.

Even his perpetually-grinning face is somber but there’s a light in his grey eyes—a light that hasn’t been there since Kaz had rasped out that Inej had been captured—that brings Kaz to his feet.

“They found it. An old smuggler’s hold near Sweet Reef. Swarming with toughs dressed up to look like dock workers.”

The thing that Kaz feels isn’t developed enough to be relief. It’s more like fingertips catching a holding place during a long fall. (He’s been falling for days. For thirty-five hours, since Everre managed to stammer out the news.) But it’s something other than the marrow-gnawing cold that has filled him since Inej was taken. It’s something.

“Did they see her?” His voice sounds even raspier than usual, but he doesn’t care.

“No. But Marr and Glannigan have both gone in and out several times—wearing disguises, of course. Roeder’s pretty sure. He stayed back to see if he could catch a glimpse, sent Rotty back with the message.”

“Where is Rotty now?”

“In the kitchen, eating something. He said he’s ready to take you there as soon as you’re ready to go.”

“He has three minutes to finish whatever he can.”

“Right, boss.” Jesper hesitates, which isn’t like him, and for the first time Kaz notices how drawn and weary he looks. Inej would want Kaz to say something comforting, but that’s not something he’s capable of.

Jesper gives him what’s probably meant to be a reassuring smile, though it just looks exhausted. “We’ll get her out. She’ll be safe at home soon.”

Kaz doesn’t reply, and after a moment of shifting under his gaze, Jesper sighs and disappears, pulling the door shut behind him. Kaz looks down at the note lying on the desk in front of him. Dark purple ink on lilac-colored paper, the scent of jasmine and ambergris clinging to it. I have your Wraith. Think on what she’s worth to you. The Brass Bowl, ten bells, the day after tomorrow.

Trevinka Marr’s signature, and after that, a mocking flourish: She’s a screamer, isn’t she?

The fury that had erupted inside him when the note arrived, four hours after Everre had appeared in his office, had tried to break out of Kaz’s throat in a roar. He’d held it in, but barely. And every time he looks at the taunting words written in a looping, elegant hand, he has to fight it down again.

Inej isn’t a screamer. She’s always suffered as silently as she moves. Once she stumbled back to the Slat with her thigh slashed open and a dislocated shoulder, but only the sallowness of her skin under a sheen of sweat and the glassiness of her eyes had told him she was in pain. She’d breathed heavily through her nose while Anika cleaned the wound and stitched it up, and when Kaz jerked her arm back into place, she’d smothered a groan even as tears slid down her face.

Still, he understands what Marr was trying to do. She wants him to know that she’s hurt Inej, and on purpose. She wants him to picture it.

(He does, he does. He hasn’t slept since the news came, has kept himself awake through cups of coffee and sheer force of will. But no matter how many times he jerks his mind back on course, it slips back into the groove of a waking nightmare: Inej’s sweet face twisted in pain, the silk of her skin swollen and bloody, that choked-back groan. Over and over again. Over and over again.)

He doesn’t waste time crumpling the letter in his hand, as easy as that would be. Instead, he strides to the door and down the hall to the kitchen. Two of Rotty’s minutes are up.

His mind moves faster than his aching leg (he’s been pushing it too far, ignoring the pain, counting on adrenaline and his own will to keep him going) as he goes. He won’t know the best way to approach it until he sees the building, but already his mind is flipping through possibilities as quickly as his hands flip through cards. Once he sees what they’re dealing with, a plan will settle into place. He’ll get his girl, and then he’ll rain down fire and blood on Marr and everyone who’s ever worked with her.

Chapter 2

Inej opens her eyes to slits when she hears the heavy door being unlocked. She’s woozy with weariness, uncertain of how much time has passed since they brought her here. It’s been at least a day, she’s sure, but in this windowless room, anything like precision is impossible. There was the beginning, with the knives. Then was the last time, when she’d head-butted Glannigan and almost gotten her one hand on the big dagger he wears at his belt. In between, there were a few more times–-she can’t remember how many—when they brought her water. Either there’s no pattern to those visits or her head is too muddled to discern it.

She feels weaker than she has in years, and yet she still scrapes up the dregs of her waning energy to pay attention whenever someone enters the room. If she’s going to get herself out of here, she can’t just curl up in a ball and sink into darkness the way she wants to. When her chance comes, she has to be alert enough to grab it.

“Wakey, wakey, little one.” It’s Marr. She doesn’t come nearly as often as Glannigan, and when she does, it’s always to gloat. Inej sees the lamplight gleaming off of her dark hair, but then there’s a movement behind Marr, in her shadow, someone taking a jerky step, the motion as familiar to her as her knives in her hands, and—

Inej sits up so fast that something in her head dips and sways like a ship in a storm, and it takes a moment for her eyes to focus. When they do, it’s on Kaz’s face, pale and familiar and utterly blank, though his eyes are burning in a way that both comforts and terrifies her.

His jacket is ripped and filthy, his cane nowhere in sight. His arms are tied behind his back in the same way hers are. She’s never seen Kaz tied up before, and the sight of it is somehow worse than being a prisoner herself.

She says nothing, but his gaze has caught hers like she used to catch a trapeze, steady and sure. Glannigan pushes him from behind and he stumbles, but his eyes still hold hers.

“Your master has come for a visit, little girl,” Marr says, lifting the maroon silk of her skirt so that its ruffles don’t brush against the filthy floor. “What do you have to say to your little caged bird, Brekker?”

She is certain he will say nothing—he’s always preferred to use silence when others want him to speak. But he lifts his chin, flicks his sweaty hair out of his coffee-dark eyes, and says, voice as gravely as it had been when he burned her contract, “She has no master.”

The words are like wine in her veins.

Marr ignores them. “Would you believe he was foolish enough to try to rush the building?” She laughs. “This place is my fortress. Solid stone walls, no windows on the ground floor, the one entrance—how did he think he was going to get inside? A foolish move for one with a reputation for cleverness. He should have just waited a few hours and met me at the Brass Bowl and we could have arranged a simple exchange.”

Marr saunters closer to Inej, smiling down at her. “I was so looking forward to finding out what you were worth to him. The Crow Club? Fifth Harbor? Would he trade them for one girl who’s good at climbing through windows? Alas, now we’ll never know.” She shrugged theatrically and turned back to Kaz.

Kaz is still standing, but she knows from the way he cocks his hip and holds his leg that he is in great pain. He doesn’t stand like that except on his worst days—the mornings after he pushes himself to climb something he shouldn’t, or the coldest winter days when the storms turn the ache in his leg into a shriek of pain. But no one else, looking at him, would know he’s hurting at all.

“But of course it’s better like this for me. I have things to do tonight, but tomorrow we’ll talk business, just like we would have at the Brass Bowl. Only this time it’s your own life you’ll be negotiating for. What would you barter in exchange for that, I wonder?”

Kaz ignores the question; in fact, he looks as though he isn’t even aware that Marr is in the room, all his attention focused on Inej, like she’s the only thing in the world. She feels surrounded by that focus, cradled by it. She curses the tear that slides down her face, but she can’t stop it.

Marr snorts, irritated. Then, in a movement so sudden it shocks even Inej, she kicks out with the copper-tipped toe of her black boot, smashing into Kaz’s bad leg. He goes down with a grunt, and even as Inej struggles–fails–to stand to go to him, he’s bending into it, rolling with it just like she taught him. He’s graceless with both pain and lack of practice, but the way he hits the floor is probably less jarring than it would have been if he’d fallen like a sack of potatoes. He tried, at least.

Inej’s legs are tied as tightly as her hands so she can’t cross the space to Kaz, but her eyes track him as he sits up and meets her gaze, giving her a little jerk of acknowledgement. Inej glares at Marr with all the hatred in her heart, wishing for her knives: she would chop this woman to bits and her Saints would applaud.

Marr doesn’t quite shiver as she turns away from Inej’s gaze, but Inej can tell she wants to. Inej hides her own smug smile. Marr thinks she’s won, and there’s no need for Inej to alert her to the possibility that she hasn’t.

“I’ll give you something more to think on while you’re waiting for my return,” Marr says to Kaz. “Glannigan here has always had a soft spot for Suli girls. If you aren’t ready to talk business when I return, then I’ll give your spider queen to him for his very own. Let him discover how…acrobatic she can be.”

There’s just enough time for the words to penetrate Inej’s mind before Glannigan is leaning down towards her, close enough that she can smell his jurda- and whiskey-scented breath. “You and me, we could have some more fun, no?”

For a moment, Inej thinks she won’t manage to hold back her whimper. So many men had leered at her, just like that, their breath hot on her face, the same kinds of words used to taunt her. She screws her eyes up tight, trying to imagine she’s back safe in the Slat, but somehow even in this cold, smelly place, she feels the brush of Tante Heleen’s silks, smells the heavy scent of the incense she burnt in the room where Inej entertained.

But then there’s the gravel of Kaz’s voice, raspy and low and deadly, saying, “That won’t be necessary. When next we see each other, we will settle things between us once and for all.”

Inej feels Glannigan pull back, and opens her eyes to find that Kaz is still looking at her. He hasn’t moved his eyes from her face since he entered the room, except for the moment when he fell and rolled. The sight of his eyes, burning and dark, pulls her out of the pit of fear.

“We’ll see,” Marr sniffs, and Inej thinks she’s going to leave, but before she does, her foot strikes out again, this time finding the wound in Inej’s shoulder. Inej lets out a gasp, curling around it as much as the ropes allow, and she can feel the crusted-over wound seeping again. By the time she can uncurl her body, Marr and Glannigan are gone, the heavy metal door slamming behind them, and she and Kaz are alone in the darkness.

“Inej.” She’s always liked the sound of her name best in his mouth, somehow. Through the pain radiating out from the wound (it’s infected, isn’t it? It must be, to hurt that badly, to throb like that), she holds onto his voice, a taut line keeping her from sinking into a storm-tossed sea.

“Kaz.” She breathes in through her nose, out through her mouth, an exercise her father had taught her long ago, concentrating on mastering the pain. She hears the sound of Kaz moving; he must be wriggling his way across the floor towards her.

“What did they do? Tell me.”

His voice sounds like a curse of damnation. Inej shakes her head, letting out a long breath. “Not much. Just sliced me a little with my knives.” It’s not a lie: the ankle, the bruises from her fall, even the head injury were all her own fault.

“With your knives?” His voice is more deadly than any poison ever discovered.

“I think they were just trying to scare me. I assume they sent a ransom note?”

“Yes.” He’s finally made it over to her and she can tell that he’s leaning against the wall even though she can’t see him. She knows from her own long hours in this cesspit that the way the ropes are tied make it just possible to lean your shoulders against the wall if you can deal with your hands resting against the small of your back. “I don’t believe that they just gave you a few cuts.”

She uncurls her own body, leans back beside him. She’s not sure whether she can feel the warmth of his shoulder close to her own uninjured one or if she’s imagining it. “It was all threats and a few punches, except for my shoulder. I’ve lost some blood there.” A pause. “How long has it been?”

“Almost two days. Have they fed you?”

“Just water.”

“Will you be able to walk, when the time comes?”

The thought of walking sends a wave of weariness through her. She can’t imagine where she could find the strength for that, but she says, “Yes.”

Something about his silence is skeptical but instead of telling her he doesn’t believe her, he accepts her answer. It’s always been one of the things she appreciates most about him. “What’s the plan?” she asks.

“Later. Rest now. We won’t have to move for a while.”

That was good. Maybe by the time they had to move, she really would be able to walk again.

“I will fix this, Kaz. I know I failed, but this action will have no further echo.”

The pause before he speaks is excruciating. “What the hell happened?”

“I got caught.” Saints, it would be so easy to cry. But the Wraith doesn’t cry. “It was so stupid. I got distracted–they were talking about Suli slaves–”

“Your parents?” he asks, voice sharp.

She shakes her head. It feels stuffed with wet wool. “I don’t know. Probably not. There aren’t many of us, but even so, the odds…”

“We’ll find out. Once we get out.”

How can he say that with such surety now? “I made the stupidest mistakes.” She can see it so clearly, how he was standing. The spasm of pain across his face when Marr kicked his bad leg. Unnecessary pain, because of her. Because she failed so spectacularly at something so simple. “This is my fault. Now you’re here and your leg is killing you and that woman is threatening everything you’ve built and—”

“That woman is no threat. In a few hours, this will all be over. In a few days, Ketterdam will have forgotten she ever existed. Now rest, so we can walk out of here.”

He doesn’t sound like he blames her, doesn’t sound angry or disgusted. But how he could not be? She’s angry and disgusted with herself.

“Kaz–”

“Your orders are to rest, Wraith.”

He had said she has no master, but she has chosen to heed his words, knowing that he always has a plan. Rest will help her body start to knit itself back together; she refuses to be a liability during their escape, whenever that comes. And she’s so, so tired.

 

—-

When a warm weight falls on Kaz’s shoulder, he only just manages to keep himself from wrenching away. It’s Inej’s head, falling to rest against his shoulder as she sleeps. She needs the rest—he knows she was underplaying her injuries. His jacket is keeping her skin from touching his, but he can still feel the warmth of her.

Warmth, he reminds himself. Not cold. Living. It’s nothing like that night in the water.

But it’s so dark, and everything except for Inej beside him is so cold, so it takes many deep breaths before Kaz can fight down the flare of panic that always comes when he’s this close to anyone.

He focuses on the scent of her. He can smell her, her unwashed body, the kind of sweat that only comes from fear, a tang of blood. He turns his head so that his nose is almost touching her hair and breathes in: that’s better, the scent of her scalp. It’s such a precise smell, a person’s head. An intimate smell, not one he’s been in a position to encounter for a very long time. A living smell, as different from rotting flesh as the warmth of a living body is from the cold of a corpse.

Saints, she’s so warm.

It could be a fever. She’s leaning against him now, her uninjured shoulder pressed up against his. It reminds him of the way she’d held her other arm, the dark stain he had seen there as soon as he entered the room. The wound could be festering; she’d said she lost blood, and that last kick (that last kick that Marr is going to pay for) couldn’t have helped. If infection has set in….

He needs to know how vulnerable she is. He reminds himself of that, again and again. Even so, it feels like hours pass before he can bring himself to turn his head, then lower it.

Her forehead against his cheek. The nausea, the panic swell, but not as intensely as they might have, not when her skin is so hot. She does have a fever, there’s no doubt of that. (Kaz knows fever, remembers it broiling his own body, turning Jordie into a sweaty, moaning child calling for their mother. Before there was the icy water and the darkness, there was the fever.)

Well, now he knows. He can pull back, put distance between them. Stop touching her and banish the panic. But he doesn’t let himself. He keeps his head where it is, cheek pressed where her unwinding hair meets her forehead. He makes himself breathe through fresh-rising panic till it’s nothing more than a whisper in the back of his mind.

He’s touching her. Skin to skin. The first time.

Finally, he raises his head, letting out a ragged sigh of relief. That had been…terrible. Terrible, but not as terrible as he’d always believed it would be. He had done it, hadn’t he? Touched her skin with his for—well, it felt like hours, but surely it was just a few minutes. He had done that. If he had done it once, he could do it again, and perhaps next time for longer and—

He wants to try. He hasn’t tried to be close to someone in so long, but tonight when Marr opened that door and he saw Inej there on the ground, the spill of her dark hair, the pain in her eyes, he had wanted to go to her, scoop her up in his arms. Press his lips to her warmth, feel her breath against his skin, know she was alive. He wanted to take her back to the Slat, fill a tub with warm water, wash away all the dirt and blood from her skin. Tie up her wounds himself, wrap her in a warm robe. Tuck her into his bed, curl his body around hers. Be so close to her that he would move each time the bellows of her lungs filled. Press his hand to her heart, feel the insistence of it: undeniable proof that she was alive and with him.

He couldn’t have, even if he hadn’t been bound and guarded. But the fact that he wanted to….

He had known, when Everre said she was taken, that he would burn cities to the ground, tear down every mountain, dredge every ocean to get her back. But until he had seen her, her eyes lifted up to his in wonder, he had not known that he wanted to do things far more impossible than that. In all his life, he has only wanted one thing as much as he wants to be close to Inej. He has remade himself, remade the Barrel, bent the wills and fortunes of its inhabitants to his devices, all in pursuit of revenge. If he can do that, surely, one day, he’ll be able to lay down with Inej, bare and exposed and stripped of all armor. Nothing between them at all.

If she wants that. He has no real reason to believe that she does, except that she is still in Ketterdam. He knows that her shame, her fear of her parents’ reaction to who she has become, have kept her from going home. But she could go anywhere else–Fjerda, Shu Han, Novyi Zem, the Colonies. The fact that she doesn’t, that she stays in a city she hates, that has to mean something, doesn’t it?

Damn it all, when had he turned into such a maudlin fool? He’s disgusted with himself, and yet he cannot deny the hunger that lies at his core, right alongside his hunger for revenge.

Not that either one matters right now. What matters is getting out of here and then destroying Trevinka Marr so absolutely that no one in Ketterdam will ever even consider laying a hand on Inej again. He’d known from the moment he saw this building that he couldn’t fight his way in, and Roeder had confirmed that there was no way to sneak in and out, either. Inej might have found a way, but no one else can manage it.

To get inside, he would have to be escorted in. He had the Dregs launch an “attack” on the building, one he knew would go nowhere. He’d gambled on Marr being arrogant enough to believe that she could catch him, and then he’d let himself be caught.

And now here he is, waiting for two bells. The walls of this building are thick, but it stands next to a church with a full set of bells. They will be faint through the stone, but he will hear them. And when they toll, he will get Inej out of here.

He can’t carry her, but once they’re back at the Slat, he’ll make sure she has her bath, Nina to patch up her wounds, a soft bed to sleep in. Security in knowing that no one will ever, ever do this to her again so long as Kaz Brekker lives. He can at least give her that.

Sometime in the depths of the darkness, Inej stirs. It jolts Kaz awake.

“Papa?” Inej’s voice is so weak that it hurts to hear, confused. “Mama?”

Despite his dry mouth, Kaz swallows as she shifts beside him. Words don’t come.

But then: “Kaz?”

That, at least, he can answer. “I’m here.”

“Oh. I thought I’d dreamed—but you came.”

Then the wonder in her voice hits him, and it hurts almost as much as it had to see her bound and bleeding. Like she hadn’t thought he would. Like she’d had to lie here in the darkness and wonder if he would come for her. Of all the ways he has failed her, that one stings the most.

“Yes,” he says, and it’s a vow. I came. I will always come.

“She said…she said she would trade me for Fifth Harbor.” She makes a croaking sound and, with a chill that runs through his whole body, he realizes it’s supposed to be a laugh. “...told her I wasn’t worth that.”

Something in Kaz’s chest howls. “You’re worth every harbor in Kerch put together,” he grits out, but she doesn’t seem to hear him.

“She was going to hurt me more, but–” She breaks off, takes a ragged breath and starts again. “But…I told her…I wouldn’t be worth anything if she did anything permanent.”

Kaz has learned to live with self-loathing, the way it’s just always there, like the noise of the city faded into the background. But right now, he trembles with it. It coats his throat and tongue until he can’t speak. Can she believe that?

She shivers, and he feels the motion run through him. “I’m cold.” This despite the fever burning through her body, leaving her so disoriented. “Are we going home?”

Home. “Soon.”

“What–” Her voice cracks, and he will make Trevinka Marr and her goon die a thousand deaths before he sends them to hell. “What’s the plan?”

She always asks that. “Sleep a little more. I’ll tell you when you wake up.”

“All right,” she says, and then she slumps back against him, falling into sleep again, leaving him to sit in the dark and catalog all the ways he has failed her.

Chapter 3

“Inej. Inej, wake up.”

She surfaces into consciousness slowly, drawn from the depths by the sound of her name. Pain and darkness are waiting for her, but so is Kaz.

“Kaz?”

“It’s time to go. How are you feeling?”

Stiff, and aching. Still cotton-headed, though less so than before. So thirsty she could drink the ocean dry. But better. Just a little, but enough that, yes, she thinks she can walk out of here when she needs to. Probably. “Better.”

“Good. The door will open in two minutes, and then we’ll have eight for Roeder to cut us loose and get all three of us out of the building. I have an extra baleen in my mouth. I’m going to work it loose, and pass it to you. I’ll tell you when to bite.”

It isn’t just because of the last cobwebs of sleep that her mind stumbles over this. “Pass it to me? You mean—”

“It’s the only way.” A strangely hesitant pause, one completely at odds with everything that Inej knows about Kaz Brekker. But his voice is brisk when he says, “I’ll try to keep contact to a minimum, but we can’t risk dropping it on the floor.”

No. Not in this dark, not with the filth on the floor. They can’t risk that. Which means…

“Inej. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she breathes. And braces herself.

Saints, aren’t they a pair? Both of them so deadly, but so terrified of being touched. She’s learned to enjoy Nina’s hugs, Jesper’s arm around her shoulder. But that was different than the touching she had to endure at the Menagerie, and it took time even to adjust to that. She had been certain, when she shed Tante Heleen’s silks for the last time, that there were some things she would never be able to want.

But Kaz leans in, and she feels the fan of his breath against her face. Woodenly, she turns her head, holding herself ready. And the next moment loses all the air in her lungs, because Kaz’s lips are sliding across her cheekbone.

It’s so much. It’s so much, but not in a way that makes her want to whimper or weep or strike out or run. Not in the ways she remembers. No: everything about this is new.

He jerks back, breathing heavily, then before she can even say his name, his lips are back, brushing against the corner of her mouth. Where his arm is pressed against hers, she can feel the tension of him, the minute trembling. Again she gasps, light-headed in a way that has nothing to do with her concussion, and he corrects his aim, and now his lips are against hers, and she had never let herself dream of this. She opens her mouth to his.

A flick of his tongue runs like lightning through her, and then there’s a small disc resting on her own tongue, and Kaz has jerked away from her, no longer touching her anywhere, even through their clothes. Inej pulls herself together, reminds herself to close her mouth around the disc, hold it safely where it can’t escape.

She breathes around the baleen, trying to understand her own reaction to what just happened. She had been so sure that if anyone tried to touch her intimately again—not in friendship, not with familial love—that she would not be able to bear it. As young as she had been, she had barely felt the first stirrings of desire before the Menagerie, and afterwards, she was certain that she would never feel them again.

But now she knows: there is still an ember. For the first time, she wonders what it would be like to fan it, to watch it spread and grow.

There is no time to dwell on that thought now. When Kaz speaks, his voice is rougher, raspier than ever, and she would give much to know what he is thinking. “Bite now.”

She does. And shivers, the overwhelming memory of Kaz’s mouth on hers pushed away by the film coating the inside of her mouth. She breathes through the strange feeling, and at that moment, there’s a clatter of locks being unlocked. The door swings open and smoke begins to pour in. The light that comes with it is dim, but even so all she sees for a moment is a slender figure with an abnormally-shaped head.

Roeder is across the room and slicing through the ropes of her wrists before she realizes he’s got some sort of head covering that must help him to breathe through the orange smoke that is filling the room. No, not smoke—some kind of poisonous gas. That explains the baleen.

The ropes snap loose and Inej has to bite down on her tongue to keep herself from moaning when the blood rushes suddenly into her hands. It’s even worse when the ropes at her ankles are cut away, and during the painful rush, she is certain she’ll never be able to walk out of here.

But Roeder has already freed Kaz and helped him to his feet, passing him his cane before turning to Inej. She lets him help her upright, and forces herself to move forward despite the screaming of her ankle. She leans on Roeder’s arm more than she wishes she had to.

“We’ve got to get up to the second floor and out through the window.” Roeder’s voice is distorted through the mask as he leads her out of the room that has been her cage for two days, Kaz just behind them. “I couldn’t find the keys for the front door. Can you make it?”

She does, barely, struggling past the prone bodies of guards, up a staircase she’s certain will be the death of her, through a window and down the wall.
She passes out the moment she’s on the ground, the remnants of the baleen clinging to the inside of her mouth, Kaz’s face swimming in front of her eyes.

—--

When Nina arrives, she tries to convince Kaz to leave the room while she works, but he stares her down. She rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t tease him like she normally would. Not with Inej lying so still on the bed.

Kaz should clean up, patch up his own wounds, seek out ice for his bruises, but instead he stands, leaning heavily on his cane, watching Nina work. It takes almost an hour to purge the shoulder wound of infection, soothe the wrenched ankle, close up the small cuts, and assuage the last of the fever. Nina chatters away to Inej about waffles and the latest performance of the Komedie Brute as though the unconscious girl can hear her, but her hands are gentle and competent, so Kaz doesn’t tell her to shut up. He watches Inej’s chest rise and fall, watches her lovely skin be knit back together, and tries not to think of his lips against hers, his tongue venturing into her mouth. (It had been terrible, and it had been wonderful, and Kaz doesn’t know which feeling would triumph over the other in a fight to the death.)

When Nina is finally done, she sits back and pushes her hair out of her face. “Saints, I could eat a horse.”

“Have anything in the kitchen,” Kaz says. Then: “She needs a bath.”

Nina cocks her eyebrow and her hip at him. “Are you volunteering to give it to her?”

He doesn’t even bother to give her a nasty look, just keeps staring at Inej. She’s so grimy, her hair greasy and knotted. So still. He won’t be happy until she’s up and moving around, hair braided and clean, every bit of blood and dirt scrubbed from her skin.

Nina reaches out a hand, then freezes when he pins her with a look. Rueful, she shakes her head. “She’s going to be fine. The infection and the fever are gone, and none of her wounds were bad. She might need to stay off her ankle for a few days, and she’ll have a new scar on her shoulder, but in a week, she’ll be good as new. As for your leg—”

“That will be all, Nina, thank you.”

She snorts. “Well, at least you said thank you this time.” And then she’s gone, and Kaz is alone (not alone. Inej is here). As soon as the door shuts, he pulls up a chair and collapses into it.

In a few minutes, he’ll force himself back to his feet and straighten himself up. In a few minutes.

Inej wakes to sunshine and the general clamor of a Barrel morning. She wakes to pain, too, but not much, and for a moment she can’t remember why that surprises her. When she remembers and jolts upright, her shoulder only protests a little.

She looks around, shocked. This isn’t her room in the Slat, it’s Kaz’s, and she’s in Kaz’s bed. And Kaz is sitting in a chair a few feet away, blinking and rubbing a hand over his face, obviously woken by her movements.

“Kaz?” She can’t even think of a question to ask.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, and her heart turns over at how sleepy-rough his voice is.

“I’m fine. Kaz—”

“Marr and all her favorites are in the extra vault at the Crow Club. We’ll decide what to do with them later.”

Oh. That’s good. They’ll never get out of there. Kaz designed that vault himself.

“I’ll get someone to run a bath for you. Nina already changed the sheets in your room.” He squares his jaw, almost defensively, before he adds, “There wasn’t enough room for her to work in there.”

That explains why she’s in his room, she supposes. All right. But— “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” He rises, and it’s only because Inej is watching him so closely that she sees the slightest flicker of pain in his eyes. He’s very good at hiding what hurts him. “What would you like to eat? Nina was talking about waffles, but they might not be best on an empty stomach.”

She’s ravenous, but that doesn’t matter right now. “Did you let Nina look at your leg?”

“My leg is fine. Your bath will be ready in a few minutes. There’s water just there.”

Inej picks up the glass of water, but she just holds it, saying, “I’ll take a bath if you take one too. And I’ll have some parsnip and ginger soup if you’ll let Nina look at your leg.” Then she drinks down the cup of water.

A muscle jumps in his jaw. His eyes twitch away from hers. “Fine.”

She’s smiling as she pours another cup of water and later when she eases into the hot bath. When she emerges, pruny and finally clean, she feels like a person again, her ankle only a little bit tender, her shoulder healing nicely. She pulls on a nightdress and wraps herself in a wool robe, but before she goes to her room, she climbs the stairs back to Kaz’s office, her smile fading away.

He’s sitting at his desk, clean and as immaculately dressed as ever—he must not have lingered in his bath for as long as she did. He’s looking over paperwork, but on the corner of his desk there’s a tray with a covered bowl, a spoon, and another cup of water.

Inej pulls up the chair and sits down, removing the covering from the bowl. The rich scent of soup makes her stomach growl. “Did you eat?”

He nods his head to a plate that has nothing but crumbs on it.

“And your leg?”

He glares at her. She glares back.

“Nina helped.”

She knows him well enough to know that he didn’t let Nina take away as much pain as she could have, but it will have to do. “Good.” She picks up her spoon.

She eats in silence, savoring the flavor, and the warmth in her belly, being in clean clothes, the sunshine through the window. Kaz carries on working.

When she’s done, she sits back and says, “Was anyone else hurt?”

“Minor injuries only.”

“Who?”

“Beatle and Pim. And Dirix.”

She’ll have to speak to them later. And thank everyone. For now…

“Mati en sheva yelu, Kaz.”

This finally gets him to look up from his paperwork. She never taught him those words, never told him what they mean, but he must know, because his eyes narrow. “I didn’t ask you to make amends.”

“But—”

“I didn’t ask you to.” He pushes away from the desk, and rises to cross the room. Her eyes follow him eagerly, but yes, he’s moving more easily than he was before. He actually did see Nina.

She stands, too, lifting her chin. “You didn’t have to. My family taught me to take responsibility when I cause pain or inconvenience for other people. I made a mistake, and the whole of the Dregs—”

“I don’t care.” The words burst out of him and he spins around to look at her.

She blinks and takes a step back.

“I don’t care why it happened,” he says, voice on a more even keel, though he’s still breathing more heavily than the conversation warrants. “It doesn’t matter. If you need me, I come for you. If I need you, you come for me. Yes?”

“Yes.” Her voice sounds small to her own ears. “Of course.”

“Then you don’t have to say that to me,” he says, and turns away.

She watches him for a time, the line of his shoulders. Then she says, “You hate incompetence.”

He looks over his shoulder at her, eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

“You hate incompetence.” She takes a step towards him. “You hate stupidity.” Another step. “You hate weakness.” Another. “Those things make you angry.”

He turns, eyeing her warily. “Yes.”

“So why aren’t you angry with me?”

He looks away, gaze trained towards the window though she doesn’t think he’s looking out of it. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

She can’t help the laugh that bubbles up out of her, though it dies at the hungry look he turns on her. The way he looks at her…

She swallows, forces herself to keep her mind on this conversation. “Kaz, you have never made allowances for human weakness. Not in yourself. Not in anyone.”

“Well, what if I want to make them for you?”

She stares at him, the set of his mouth. It’s almost…surly. Like a child. Her heart throbs in her chest.

“Are you telling me not to make them for you?” he pushes.

She shakes her head. “No.” For her. For her he’d make allowances. For her…

“Then why are we still talking about this? I have things to do.”

She shouldn’t. She knows what happens when people try to touch him. She’s seen how she reacts.

And yet here she is, moving towards him, silent and sure, and he’s watching her come, his eyes steady on her face like they were back in that dank room. She reaches out a hand, slowly, slowly, and his eyes don’t move from her face. Even through several layers of fabric, she feels him go rigid when she lays her hand on his chest.

“I can make allowances for you, too,” she says, and her voice wavers, but she pushes on. Will he understand what she’s saying?

His pupils are dilated, like he thinks if they open wide enough, he can pull her right into him. He nods once, a single jerk. And when she leans forward, he goes absolutely still, but he doesn’t pull away.

She leans up, leans forward. Slides her lips along his cheekbone for the space of a heartbeat. When she pulls back, his eyes are closed, and he’s holding his breath.

She feels a smile spread across her face as she leans forward again. Brushes her lips against the corner of his mouth. Then she corrects her aim, and now her lips are against his. After a heartstopping moment, he opens his mouth to hers.

She wants to do so much more, but she satisfies herself with a single flick of her tongue against his. The groan he lets out, the flutter of his eyelashes, are reward enough for now.

She steps back, watches his eyes open. When they focus on her face, she smiles at him. Then she turns and leaves the room. (She can feel him, standing stock still where she left him, watching her go.)

(Kaz Brekker destroys Trevinka Marr so absolutely that the city of Ketterdam turns her into a by-word, the ultimate cautionary tale of what happens to those who cross the Bastard of the Barrel.

But it’s the Wraith who, with a bone-handled knife, cuts the bonds of a group of Suli slaves. It’s the Wraith who, in years to come, is known from the Wandering Isle to the southern forests of Shu Han as the Breaker of Chains.)

Afterword

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