Almost.

He had almost died. She had almost been too late. Tante Heleen had almost gotten her pound of flesh. Kaz had almost lost all his blood.

She hated him sometimes. He was so frail even though he pretended otherwise, and if he died, what then? Inej wasn’t going back. She couldn’t. She’d have to run, to spurn the offers of help Jesper would inevitably extend, to disappear more thoroughly than she ever had as the Wraith. And she probably wouldn’t manage it. Kaz was paying her contract and what that meant, in practice, was that he’d placed her in bondage more comprehensive than the Menagerie ever would have managed.

She hated him. Almost.

She’d stitched up his wounds. She’d had to; he wouldn’t let anyone else into his room when he was like this, and he spurned the idea that he’d bleed to death without care. “A few scratches,” he’d wheezed, as if his wounds were equivalent to a paper cut.

His wounds: a deep slash along his side, another across his shoulder, and a gut-wrenching nick in his inner thigh. The nick, as its name implied, wasn’t deep enough to need stitches, which Inej was grateful for. The intimacy of bending over to care for him was too much even applied to innocuous regions.

But it had been close. His artery was right there, blue blood stark against his pale, pale skin. He’d kept his genitals covered, averting his eyes when Inej had insisted on examining the cut, giving him salve for it. She hadn’t spread it on herself. This wasn’t Menagerie work, lascivious intent behind every innocent touch.

Some part of her had wanted to, though, and this was Kaz. The Bastard of the Barrel, a title that anyone who’d been to the Crow Club could tell you was an understatement. He knew, now.

He slept under the influence of a sedative, and Inej sat in his room, touching her knives one after another, praying to the Saints. Oh, how Kaz would mock her when he woke up, for this and for her -

What?

Compulsion?

Instinct?

Affection?

What could it be called in truth, the way she kept her loyalty to Kaz, returning over and over like a flower bent to the sun? Kaz had given her an opportunity better than what she’d had, work she didn’t fear. Was it just gratitude? Fear transmuted?

She was still worrying over it when he woke up. She noticed, of course: the change in his breathing, the minute shift of his body on the bed. Little human movements that, not so long ago, would have been cause for panic, for prayer.

This wasn’t the Menagerie, though. She had three exits Kaz knew about and two he didn’t. She was safe, and that safety rested on something better than trust.

“You should have left.”

“And hear two days from now that Dirtyhands was found dead of fever? No.”

“I’m not feverish.”

“You’re flushed.”

“That’s not the fever, Inej.”

She hated when he said her name like that. Like he knew something. “Well, forgive me, then. I’m not a doctor.”

“No. You’re my Wraith.” Her heart twisted in her chest even as he added: “So you should be out earning your keep, don’t you think?”

It was cruelty as careful as a surgeon’s needle, as devastating as a Heartrender in a battle. Inej bit back so many curses when she was around Kaz that for a moment it didn’t occur to her that she’d failed this time. Her temper flared - she was on her feet - breathing hard, hand on her knife, staring at Kaz as anger overwhelmed her.

His eyes were bright. Was it really not fever? Impossible to tell from over here. “Inej.”

“No. No, you don’t get to do that, Kaz! We’re - we almost died. I killed for you, and you’re pretending that’s nothing to you! Along with your own life!”

He managed to make his expression even more inscrutable than usual. “It’s not nothing to me. I’ve told you that already. It is, however, part of your job description.”

“Oh, fuck you, Kaz Brekker,” Inej said, and -

Well.

What she remembered later was this: she meant to leave. She almost did. She had a hand on the doorknob, a boring but effective exit, when she heard him.

Actually, heard was a bit of an exaggeration. The noise he made was barely a noise. It was more of an instinct, something on the edge of her conscious senses. But she turned, and she saw him staring at her.

She saw what he looked like when he was afraid.

“Inej,” Kaz said. His voice broke on her name, a gravelly awfulness.

She was at his side before he could try again. She pressed her hand to his stomach without warning, watched the muscles jump as he gasped. Her fingertips were only inches from the stitches in his side. Fear sparked in his eyes, rippled over his body.

Was it just fear, then? “Kaz.”

“Do something else,” he said, eyes closed, a vein standing out on his forehead, “or stop touching me. Inej, please.”

She liked that too much. She especially liked the way his throat moved when he caught a gasp before it could escape.

“Kaz,” she said again.

He tried to move, a sudden burst that seemed like it would end with him bleeding on the floor. She pinned him with one hand on his uninjured shoulder, her other moving to his non-dominant hand, grabbing the wrist and squeezing. Kaz had endured torture and constant, nagging, daily pain, but he subsided anyway, his lean body pressing itself into the mattress.

There was no part of him that she’d never noticed before, but seeing him like this made it different. He wore only a scrap of underclothes; she could see him hardening, the sweat gathering at the base of his neck, the flush teasing at his thighs. The hair on his thighs, feathery, standing straight up.

His thighs, and the nick on them.

“What are you doing,” Kaz said, his voice sharp and almost-afraid, as Inej rubbed two fingers over the tight curve of his inner thigh, the edge of his cut.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though she wasn’t really. “You’re very nice to look at, but when I touch you, I can feel your heart speeding up.”

“When you touch me, I find myself in a very different place.”

Inej understood, of course, even if she was pretty sure she’d never know the details. She said, “Guess I’d better keep you here, then. Tell me how to do that.”

Another ragged breath. “I’m not sure. I sometimes - close my eyes. Hold myself in - enclosed spaces are better in a way. Something else to focus on. Something different.”

“All right.” She moved her hand away.

That was when it happened, the blurriness of her own actions. Everything moved very slowly and quickly at the same time. She pulled pillows out from under his head; he moaned when she touched him. She felt his cock, hard and lean, against her hip. She took her clothes off, hung them up to keep the fine dark Crow’s Club fabrics fresh.

She went back to the bed, and he - they -

Maybe it wasn’t blurry so much as hard to remember. She had discovered a cowardice in the way her heart clenched to think of Kaz’s hands on her. She’d been straddling him at first, his cock trapped between them, her cunt wet on his thigh. He’d moaned, and then he’d fallen back and said: “Come up here.”

She’d thought he meant her mouth. But then he put his hands on her hips and urged her up, up.

When she realized his intention she stopped, bit her lip. She was clenching around nothing, tightly enough that he might be able to feel the rhythmic movement of her muscles. She said, “That seems like doing things the hard way, Kaz. Don’t try to convince me it’d be therapeutic.”

He didn’t. Instead, he only said, “Come on, Wraith, don’t tell me you’re scared.” And of course she couldn’t let that go unchallenged.

When a dock blew up in Ketterdam, when a firefight broke out in the Crow Club, when a Grisha clashed with Fjerdans in front of the brothels, Inej knew what to do. There would be evidence to gather, fallout to eavesdrop on. Rumors, truth mixed with hysteria. Death and money. None of it surprised her anymore, and none of it could compare to the cacophony unleashed upon her when Kaz put his mouth between her legs.

She was wet. She’d known that already. Wet and painfully empty, the lightest tough enough to set her head to spinning. But when his tongue touched her - a tentative flick, hardly anything - she lit up from the inside. Every inch of her was on fire. She felt desperate down to her toes, shivering and needy and disoriented, the terror of a fall and the euphoria of a climb mixed together until she was all topsy-turvy, rotating around a single point.

Kaz, under her. Kaz, inside her.

Her knees sank into the bed. She hovered just a little too far over him like this; he had to crane his neck to lick her. He urged her closer, but she didn’t comply until he glared up at her. She wanted to laugh, lightness in her lungs as if she’d chewed too much jurda. She threw her head back and stared at the ceiling, cracks in the plaster mirroring her own mind when Kaz sucked her into his mouth.

He was messy. She hadn’t expected it. She’d never done any of this, so maybe she just didn’t know what to expect, but she’d have thought Kaz would be a control freak here just like he was in every other area of his life. Instead, he sucked on her clit and tongued her folds and bit her thigh, moving like he didn’t know where to go, what to do.

His hands shook on her thighs, ragged nails pressing into her skin.

She remembered that he was scared, too, for all those understood-but-not-known reasons. She said, “Kaz, stay with me,” and reached down to touch his hair.

He glanced up at her with bloodshot eyes. She said, “Why are you looking at me? You said the dark helped. Close your eyes.”

It was like she’d struck him with a baton. A shudder went through him, strong enough to jostle her. He exhaled and oh, that felt strange and she wanted more of it.

He closed his eyes and gave it to her.

At first his hands only splayed on her hips, anchoring her as he licked her. But every time he touched her, she became a little less in control of herself, until she was slumping over him to grab the headboard. She moved her hips then, catching his nose - fuck - pressing his head into the mattress.

He moaned, sending vibrations through her. It felt so good she felt like she was losing herself, becoming someone completely different, someone shameless enough to stiffen her spine again - hands still gripping the headboard, back straight - and move her hips. Thrust them, undulate her spine.

Riding Kaz’s face, thighs pressed against either side of his head.

It felt incredible. She wasn’t even sure what she was touching, what he was doing; she only knew pleasure sparking down her spine, her clit lighting up over and over, clenching around Kaz’s tongue and then around emptiness and wanting more, always more.

She didn’t say anything. Of that she was certain, later. She bit her own lip to keep those thoughts inside, but Kaz really was a bastard. He guessed them; he knew. He eased her off him just enough to get a hand between them, and then Inej was sinking down on three of his fingers all at once, sobbing at the feeling of his mouth alongside them, his tongue rubbing her clit just a little too hard.

He wasn’t gentle with her. His eyes stayed closed and he stayed silent, fucking her so hard she couldn’t help but bite down a moan, hitting a spot over and over that had her crazy for more. He caught his fingers on her, too, making sure she felt him enter her, the way she had to stretch to fit him. He tongued at her clit with the same rhythm he fucked her, and when she sank down further on his fingers, so open she could only chase more, he pressed his pinky inside, too, holding her. Opening her.

And still he didn’t talk, and neither did she. She heard only their breathing and her own noises, wet and open. She was so messy that when Kaz pulled out a little to move his arm, she could hear her cunt clench around sudden nothingness.

That was what broke her. “Kaz. Please, Kaz, please.”

“Inej,” Kaz breathed, and then he pressed back inside her.

She fucked him. That was the only word for it. She fucked him until she came, and then when he clutched her and said, “Not yet, please, Inej,” she fucked him until she came again. That second time took longer and it felt slower, stranger, a warm tide almost knocking her over.

Kaz pressed his face to her thigh, eyes closed, and breathed. She petted his hair, even as her legs began to shake. She could feel moisture against her thigh, and when he moved away, his eyes were red.

“I suppose I ought to thank you,” he said.

“No,” she said, and reached down, wrapping her hand around his cock.

It was sheer selfishness: she didn’t think she’d get another shot at this, and she’d be damned if she’d end it without knowing what Kaz looked like when she touched him.

This was what she’d remember. His eyes fell shut and he gulped in air like he hadn’t expected it to feel good. “You’re pretty like this,” she said on impulse, and pressed her own legs together when his cock jumped in her hand.

“Inej.” A gasp, a prayer.

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t generally think you’re pretty, Kaz. Most of the time you frighten me. But right now, you’re very pretty.” Liquid oozed out of the tip of his cock. She put her thumb in it, spreading it around. That must have been the right thing to do, because his back arched off the bed, his hands twisting in the sheets. Holding himself down since she refused to. “You did a good job just now. I’ll let you do it again, if you want. Did it help?”

“Inej.” This time he sounded disbelieving, and well: join the club, Inej thought. But she couldn’t stop herself. Madness had her in its grip.

“Kaz,” she said, keeping her tone light. Almost mocking. “Answer the question.”

Barely a whisper, a declaration intended only for the Wraith: “Yes. It helped.”

“Good. A pity you can’t take meetings like that; we’d own Ketterdam before the year was up.”

A guttural moan, and he came all over himself. Inej’s stomach swooped; she stroked him through it, kissing his shoulder just above the stitches when his breathing began to slow down. There was come all over him, his stomach and his chest, a single wet white droplet on his nipple. His chin was still shiny from her, his cheeks flushed and dirty. It was too much. She looked away, closing her eyes against her body’s sudden need for more.

After that, it got really embarrassing really quickly.

“Um,” Kaz said.

She wasn’t touching him anymore, but she jerked away all the same. “I’m sorry. Are you - the stitches look all right still.”

“The stitches are fine,” Kaz said. “No need to apologize.” A horrible silence. “Thank you.”

She sat up, swinging her legs out of bed. Her thighs were trembling a little; she took a deep breath, willing herself to stand anyway.

It didn’t quite work. She felt glued in place. She had wanted things before, burned with it even, but desire for freedom or revenge had bitter tastes. This was only sweet, shining in her chest, a fire she couldn’t stand yet wouldn’t put out.

“Stay,” Kaz said. Not a Wraith whisper, but a firm command, loud enough that Inej would have heard it were she listening at a window.

She turned to him. Something passed over his expression when their eyes met. “What if I leave anyway, Brekker?”

He didn’t so much as pause. “Then I’ll expect my Wraith to have valuable information for me come evening.”

She could destroy him with what she knew right now. She still hadn’t kissed him. They were very likely to have a number of powerful criminals trying to kill them in the near future. It was a bad time to change anything about their lives together.

“All right,” she said, and lay back down. Not touching, not quite, but near enough that Inej could imagine bridging the gap.