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Someone shouted below in the Slat. From his place at his desk, Kaz cursed under his breath, and started his calculations over for a second time.
It was a rare, quiet afternoon. He was meant to be running some simple numbers on a potential investment. (A dock launch in the West Staves; the previous owner having retired due to untimely death.) Only, Kaz had been running those simple numbers for over twenty minutes now.
Another shout rang out. It sounded far too jovial for this time of the day.
Everyone downstairs should have been nursing hangovers until at least nine bells, Kaz thought sourly. At least then they’d be quiet.
He ducked his head out of his office long enough to bellow down the stairs. Something about individuals who wished to keep their voice boxes, and what they could do with them if they didn’t want them forcibly removed.
It hardly mattered. The ungodly truth of it was that Inej was due sometime that evening, and the anticipation was wreaking havoc on him.
Kaz ducked back into the attic, no less grumpy than he’d been before.
Inej was sitting on his desk. Directly atop his papers, no less, which had to be a deliberate choice.
She wore a very small, very pleased smile as she studied him.
“Kaz.”
“Wraith,” he coughed. And then belatedly, fixed an expression of cool detachment on his face. “I’d offer you a seat, but I see you’ve found one.”
He eyed her feet deliberately, which were currently resting on the seat of his chair in front of the desk.
“I did. Will you sit with me?”
Kaz limped over to her. Scanned her face, as if he could take her mental temperature with a glance.
“You know you weren’t expected at this hour,” he said as conversationally as he could, while taking back his chair and scooping up her feet to rest on his knee. He kept his eyes on her face, but she didn’t seem bothered by the physical contact.
“We got lucky on the way home, the wind was picking up.”
“Welcome back then,” he said. The clearest shorthand he could give for how immensely pleased he was to see her. “Jasper and Wylan will be happy you’re here. They’ll try to keep you at the Van Eck manor all week again.”
“They were awful last time, weren’t they?” Inej rolled her eyes pleasantly. “I’ve never been force-fed waffles before.”
The weight of her feet was small and precise on his knee. Inej’s posture was impeccable, even perched as she was on the lip of the desk.
Kaz felt almost woozy looking at her. The way she was framed by the window sill, light pouring in around her. Her expression as still and thoughtful as hidden pools. She looked, well…Saint-like? He finished the thought self-mockingly.
As close to a Saint as a Barrel rat might ever stumble across, anyway.
There had been a time when Kaz had wanted nothing but revenge. There had been a time when he thought he would not, could not, want anything so badly, as he wanted to see Pekka Rollins ground down into the dirt. Now, Kaz had crossed over one pit of yearning, only to find himself on the brink of yet another, possibly bottomless, chasm. His grip was sliding. He wanted Inej, and he wanted to want her.
Maybe it wasn’t so much as his grip was sliding, as he was in danger of throwing himself into the depths, headfirst.
“I’m not sure how much I want to stay with them this time,” Inej hummed. Still on the subject of their friends. “Last time Jesper wrote to me, he mentioned they were experimenting with a new formula, and it sounded like it might be noisy – oh,” she huffed.
In one smooth motion, Kaz had unhooked her slipper from her toes, tossing it lightly to the floor. He pressed his gloved thumb into the sole of her foot, hard.
Now he cocked one eyebrow at her, waiting.
Was this alright? Maybe he was rushing her. She’d only just arrived, after all.
But Inej was drawing nearer. Slowly, slowly, she tilted her head and neck down until they were level with his, only offset slightly. Putting them ear to ear, with her breath warming his shoulder.
As if her body were asking the same question as his: what happens if I move closer?
Kaz adjusted them, arranging her leg over his forearm. He had no idea was he was doing. Conversely, he knew exactly what he was doing. His thumb swiped deep, back and forth, over the sole of her foot. Then over the tendon at her heel. Into the hollows on either side, and over the delicate arch above her toes.
Inej shifted a bit. The palm of her hand landed on his opposite shoulder, and Kaz felt her transfer the slightest bit of weight there. Her fingers pressed shyly together over the strap of his suspenders. That was surely a good sign, wasn’t it?
He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t always tell her good signs from her bad signs. The subtle indicators that she was enjoying her body, or had fled it. Just now, he couldn’t so much as look at her hand on his shoulder to see if it was clenched or smooth, in case it looked too much like Jordie’s. (What would a clenched hand mean, anyhow – pleasure or fear?)
Ghezan, he was a sorry excuse for a lover.
But it was probably a good sign.
“You can talk to me, if you like,” Inej murmured. When he snorted, she added even more quietly, “It helps when you talk to me.”
“Oh.”
That was surprising – Jesper had once referred to Kaz’s voice as the sound of two tombstones rubbing together. Kaz hadn’t cared one way or the other, until now. But Inej… liked the sound of it?
You already knew she had unusual tastes, he thought to himself wryly.
Kaz had long been forced to acknowledge his hunger for Inej. But until now, it had felt easier for the both of them if he restricted himself to what he thought of as ‘forgotten’ spaces: the inner linings of her joints, the fine points of her shoulder blades. The soft undersides of her wrists.
Places that were personal, but not dangerously so. Their mouths had met before as well, but only ever briefly, glancingly. Saints knew, part of his brain was always looking for a haystack to throw them both into and tumble her in. But not if it would push her out of her body in the process.
He couldn’t imagine what she wanted to hear. But her tone was engaged, almost eager.
“I think… we should reach a new contract,” he began, biting the words off unevenly. “Now that the situation has changed.”
He raised an eyebrow, so she’d know he didn’t mean it. (Or was pretending not to, anyway.)
“The ‘situation’,” Inej repeated, looking down at where her leg was still draped over his arm. She sounded amused. “Go on, then.”
“It would say…” Kaz ran the rough edge of his glove over her ear lobe. Nudged her hair out from behind it, so that it fell down in waves to frame them; curtaining around their faces, arms, and legs.
Her body was suspended on the desk’s edge, just eight inches over his lap.
“It would say that you’re needed at the Slat. On a regular basis.”
“I always visit when I’m in town.”
“Every evening,” Kaz insisted. He couldn't leave her hair alone, it seemed. He ran it between his fingers; tugged on a handful of strands until she turned her face to his. “The crows on my roof are growing dependent. You’re needed to come feed them, Inej. No excuses.”
“What else?”
“Other requirements? Uh, taming Jesper. Make him quiet and sensible.”
“That’s impossible, Kaz.”
“Keep him out of my office, then,” Kaz amended.
From below, he studied the slope of her nose. Resisted the urge to grasp her chin and pull it down to his, the better to fall headlong into her deep, dark eyes.
The hunger for her was getting worse. The rope-width space between them was thin, and stretching thinner.
To put it off, he rasped deliriously, “I’ll need you to climb the rafters, and look down at me with that enigmatic expression of yours. You know the one. And sleep here, on the windowsill, when I’m working. And eat waffles, and lick the sugar off your hands…”
That last one might have been too much.
She tapped the buttons of his overcoat until he grasped her meaning, and undid them. Lowered herself down onto him, and curled herself up into his chest.
* * *
If Kaz was surprised by her clambering into his lap, he didn’t say so. He only pulled the lapels of his coat around the both of them, as if planning to hide her away, and reached for a thermos on his desk.
“Tea?”
Inej nodded. He couldn’t have seen her do it, but he would have felt the movement.
She sipped the tea down slowly, one teaspoon at a time. Kaz asked her questions about her latest trip: about where she’d made landfall, and what entanglements she’d had with other ships. Inej knew she wasn’t much of a storyteller, but he marked her words closely all the same.
Time passed, and the light coming into the room turned the fierce orange of a dying sun.
She liked being close enough to feel the rumble of his voice in his chest. She liked that he was willing to wait, and pause, and let her acclimate to the feeling of being tucked against his shoulder.
She really liked his shoulders. The cut of his collarbones, in particular, and the way she could feel them through the fabric of his shirt. She roused when Kaz’s voice came to a halt – realized she’d been rubbing her cheek against said collarbones, absently, during their conversation – and his shark’s eyes locked onto hers.
“You’re not afraid now. Are you, Inej?” He looped one gloved hand around and under her hair, gripping the nape of her neck very lightly.
“No,” she breathed. Because she wasn’t, really. She was only as scared as a teenage girl would be, before climbing into a boy’s bed.
“And you’ll stay with me, if I talk to you?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Good. That’s good, sweetheart. Would you sit up now?”
Sweetheart. Inej’s eyebrows lifted in surprise, as Kaz propped her further up in his lap, and pushed one hand against her stomach.
“I want to understand how you climb,” he murmured. His voice sounded like waves passing over a pebbled beach.
He was rubbing his thumb over her naval, fingers flexing just below it. Flexing and relaxing; bunching up her blouse, and then releasing it again. “I’ve seen you climb enough, but I never seem to process it. Like I forget as soon as I look away. I’d call it Grisha magic, only, the Grisha can’t do what you do.”
“It’s not magic. I practice too hard for that,” Inej reminded him.
“Mm. Is it just your size that lets you do it?” He asked intently, as if he really wanted to know. Squeezing first her ankles, and then her wrists.
She reached to line up their hands, palm to palm. He obliged her, before sliding his fingers up and down her forearms, as if to demonstrate how his hands nearly stretched from her wrists to the crook of her elbows. Compared to him, she really was quite small.
“…or is it just a matter of strength, and balance?”
“I don’t – it’s,” Inej stopped and sighed, quietly.
It felt almost as if it were Kaz’s voice was touching her, instead of his hands. Like it was the scrape and rasp of his words climbing over her knees, and rubbing at the base of her scalp. Inej had always liked his voice, but ever since they’d come to their own peculiar understanding, she’d had come to realize how much more she was affected by it at close proximity.
He'd kept his gloves on today, but she didn’t mind this once. Not when his armor was coming off in so many other ways.
“It’s all of those things,” she finally murmured back. “And…”
“Yes?”
“Oh – Kaz, I –”
“Are you still alright, Inej?” He asked, with his cat’s tongue voice. Smooth and rough at the same time.
Kaz’s fingers were running up and down, up and down the sides of her hips in jagged lines. He seemed as though he wanted to grab her properly, but wanted more for her to settle into him first.
“Yes, but –”
“Good. Then you’ll tell me how you climb?”
Inej stared into his face, overwhelmed and then suspicious. He was smooth-faced, but for his smirking eyes.
He was definitely toying with her, the bastard. (But very, very gently. And not in a way that made her want him to stop.)
“I should never have asked you to talk to me.”
“I disagree. My job is to scheme; your job is to bring me information that assists in the scheming.”
“Was my job,” she corrected him.
“Is your job. You can still bring me useful information. Just from farther afield.”
“I didn’t realize I was still on the Dregs payroll.”
“You certainly could be again,” Kaz offered fluidly, as if he’d only been waiting for the opportunity. “Only I don't know if you'd take any pay? Last I checked, I believe you told me you wouldn’t take anything more from me.”
“No, because the one ship you bought me was enough,” Inej rolled her eyes.
“Well then,” he replied calmly. As though she were only proving his point, and not the other way round.
“You would try the patience of a Saint,” she sighed.
Kaz smiled crookedly at that. She blamed herself for giving him an opening: he loved nothing more than to tease her about her religion. “If I do try your patience, wouldn’t your Saints only tell you to forgive me, Inej?”
“You’d have to actually earn your forgiveness first,” she replied wryly. Trying to suppress a blush at his expression, through sheer will alone. “I don’t think you’re trying for it at the moment.”
“Aren’t I?” Kaz contradicted her.
And then, very carefully, he raised her index finger to his mouth and kissed it.
They both shuddered. It was almost too much.
“Aren’t I, Inej?” Kaz asked again, this time brushing his mouth over her three middle fingers. He seemed to steel himself against a second shudder in the aftermath. At the taste of her, she wondered, or the feel of her skin?
She stayed very still. His breath moved shakily down her palm.
“That’s how,” Inej murmured, as he pressed a firmer kiss into the crease between her thumb and forefinger.
“Hmm?”
“How I climb. It’s all those things you said before. But it’s also about having a strong grip, in my hands and my feet.”
“These hands, right here?” Kaz held one up. Bit down gently on the heel of her palm, with a sort of precise hesitation, and then kissed the bite.
“These ones,” she confirmed, smiling faintly. “I don’t have a different set that’s just for climbing.”
“Hmm,” Kaz nodded in acknowledgement. Drew the tip of a finger into his mouth – lightly, but the resulting sensation was so lush and lurid, that Inej gasped.
Apparently, that was too much. The revulsion seemed to take hold of him immediately. Kaz released her hand abruptly; nearly threw it away from himself. He tipped his head up and away from her, leaning back as far as he could in the chair. The tendons in his neck had flared up, lizard-like.
Inej couldn’t help stiffening, too. She slipped back up onto the desk, trying to calm herself. Trying not to feel hurt, while he kept his gaze strictly averted.
Why did it always bring her shame, to feel the skittering of her own pulse, and the blush on her own cheeks in those moments, and know she’d been aroused? Why did it call back the murmurs of a hundred hateful men, who’d gleefully called her a whore before and after they’d had her?
His chair scraped sharply across the floor boards.
“You need to eat, Inej,” Kaz said roughly. He jerked himself out of his seat, reaching for his cane. “I’ll bring you something from the kitchen.”
She didn’t bother to say that he might as well rest his leg, and let her go fetch something. She supposed she did need to eat, but that wasn’t the point.
He was absent long enough for Inej to slip out to the roof, and feed the crows he’d claimed she was neglecting. There was some crushed hard tack in her pocket: almost inedible for human teeth, but the crows seemed to like it well enough.
She scattered the last handful over the rooftop, and then rebraided her hair with absent hands while she watched them feast. The sun dipped below the roofline, and the temperature of the air around her began to plummet.
It was better when Kaz returned. His eyes had cleared and sharpened again. They flicked immediately to hers as he entered.
He’d brought cheese and meat, bread and preserves, and had refilled the thermos with tea.
They ate slowly. Inej asked him questions about a particular lock she’d encountered on her travels, employed by a highly unpleasant ship’s captain. On that particular raid, she and her crew had been forced to take a hatchet to the door of the brig – it had cost them precious time, and nearly undone their entire ambush.
Kaz took down notes about the lock. He asked for more details than Inej could be sure of, and made a sketch that she would normally find very interesting. Only by that point she was full, and tucked back against the windowsill, and trying to explain that she’d been up since three bells, having drawn the early shift on board the ship that morning, and –
He picked her up from where she was swaying, and half carried her, awkwardly, to his bed.
He was still running his hands down her braid, frowning at it as though it were a problem to be solved, when she fell asleep.
* * *
It was three bells again. The time of Inej’s shift for the past week. It seemed her body hadn’t forgotten.
Her mouth dragged sleepily over Kaz’s neck as she began to stir. Though he’d been asleep seconds ago, he certainly wasn’t now.
Inej’s body was on top of his body.
There was the requisite nausea – the urge to free himself – but it helped that she would be easy enough to shift, if he needed to.
Her hips were on his hips. Some long dormant part of his brain was waking up to take notice.
She was alert enough to have raised her head in alarm, her eyes wide, and check his expression in the near-darkness. They both remembered the time on her previous visit when he’d removed both of their shirts, smug and self-satisfied. He'd envisioned stretching her out to her full length, like a cat, and instead he’d wound up dry-heaving in a corner.
It’s just a dream, Kaz told himself firmly. In the hopes of fooling his own mind, and preventing it from reacting. He buried his head into the crook of her neck and shoulder, and rubbed his mouth over everything he could reach. The softness of warm skin, the jut of her bones beneath. Just a dream, just a dream. Inej made a sound that was long and low, but it resonated through him like the crack of a gunshot.
“Kaz,” she said in a gulp. Her voice was four parts wanting, three parts dread.
But those were odds he could fix. She’d told him how, even.
His lips crawled up her neck and over her jawline. Passing into the unknown, uncharted territory of the plains of her face, and up to the shocking sweetness of her mouth.
Between kisses, he kept up a string of loaded words.
Not about her looks, of course. He wanted to tell her that she was beautiful. But he was sure Inej had heard that a thousand times or more, and what would it mean to her to hear it yet again?
Instead he told her about how he imagined her on her ship, climbing up the rigging with her face to the wind. How he imagined her in his bed, there waiting for him when he limped home in the night. How he wanted both those things, and the maddening impossibility of accomplishing the two at the same time.
He told her, while lifting her up onto his stomach, and rocking her body side to side with his body, what it was he was doing with her. How he wanted her to feel. Her knees were on either side of his rib cage, her ankles down by his hips, and he wrapped his hands tightly around them to avoid touching her too intimately, too soon. He’d always liked her ankles, anyway. He could feel the muscles and tendons and the smooth, sure skin overlaying all of it.
Inej huffed and sighed and occasionally dropped low, strung-out syllables into his mouth: he drank them up, and kissed and rocked her, and rocked her some more. He flexed his hands on her ankles until she pulled back and gave him a drowsy, contented smile, and it felt safe enough to roll her beneath him.
He ought to tuck her into his coat forever, and carry her around with him, stashed like a prize. If only she wouldn’t hate that so much.
He glanced a hand over her throat, and she reached up to hold it there, pushing harder.
Kaz stiffened. Unsure of what it was she wanted.
“Just hold on a bit,” she insisted. And alright, that he could do.
He notched his thumb in the little gap between her collarbones. Wrapped his fingers around the side of her neck, and added slightly more weight.
“Can you feel that, Inej?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and sounded somewhat frantic about it.
“Good. Stay there; stay. I’ll make it good for you.”
Good. It was good. Overconfidence was a killer, but she was under him now and her hips were bumping up against his, almost beseechingly, and Kaz was awash in triumph.
He could do this. He could make her trust him. He could make her open herself up to him, like a book falling open to an unread page.
* * *
The next night, and every subsequent night of her stay, she continued to rise at three bells.
The second night, he spent a quarter bell holding her against him, her back to his front. Running his hands over her, head to heel. Rasping words into her ear until she shook with want, and pushed back into him with all the leverage she could gain.
“You used to be so patient, Inej,” he mocked her. Tilting her head back, so he could delight in her wild-eyed expression. “What happened to the wise, proverb-spouting girl I used to know?”
“She was provoked… too many times,” Inej mumbled, giving him an affronted look, “By a man who forgot how many knives she was wearing.”
“You took them off to sleep, remember? You’re dangerous enough without them,” he told her with a snort. And took the risk of pushing her over gently, onto her stomach, and climbing on top of her.
He could do nearly anything, it seemed, as long as he talked her through it. It grew progressively easier to walk her up the ledge of her own self-discipline, and then unceremoniously shove her off of it.
Saints, he loved the sound of it when her every breath grew audible. When every contraction of her lungs was tied to a drawn-out gasp, so he could tell just how very alive she was under his hands.
He warned her to be quiet sometimes, so the Dregs on the floors beneath them wouldn’t hear and wonder just what Dirtyhands was up to. He never meant it. If she bit her lip against her own human noises for any length of time, he took extra pains to unravel her again until she couldn’t.
“Inej. Is this really fine?” He’d demanded, on the fourth night.
He’d anchored her hands up over her head with his own. He felt ashamed of his own predictable desire to be in control, to do things his way – but she’d only tightened her hold on the bit of his sleeves that she could reach, and said his name in a way that drew him back down to bite, and lick, and bite again on his way down her sternum.
Wondering what kind of fiend would use his teeth to show his affection.
And what kind of girl would recognize the gesture for what it was?
But he was starting to recognize her tells. Tonight Inej’s eyes were particularly wide and unfocussed. Her movements grew more erratic, almost every time he spoke to her.
He pried the trousers off of them both, hastily – Inej had been tugging pointedly, but she didn’t seem to want to be the one to remove them herself. For the first time, he felt the roll of her hips without anything more than a sheet between them.
“Fuck, Inej. Fuck, sweetheart, can you keep going?”
She made a pained sound in response, jerking back into his hold. As if the words were hooks dragging into her.
Kaz lost all control of his mouth completely.
He couldn’t keep track of the things he was saying – the fantasies and confessions that worked their way out of him – how he wanted her so much, too much, to stay away from her; how she ought to stay for the winter, so he could keep her warm and wet for him in his bed – all while he grasped her round the waist and ground them further together.
Her desire almost a mirror image of his.
Her eyes widening, even as Kaz’s were narrowing in savage joy – she trusted him, she trusted him – he found himself growing sharper, more exacting than ever, in his efforts to feed her and make her hungry at the same time.
He’d never told her he loved her before, had he? It came out in a snarl when he pushed into her, and she started shaking. She was going, going, almost gone, and then keening it back to him, and that somehow overwhelmed them both.
The sun peaked over the rooftops to find them panting, exhausted, and completely spent. Inej rolled herself up tight against his side, fingers hooked over his upper arm.
Kaz wouldn’t have admitted how hard it was to hold her afterwards.
He knew it would hurt infinitely more not to.