Kaz’s vision came back into focus. The water receded. He was standing in a hotel bathroom. His fingers were pressed against Inej’s shoulder. He could feel the fine muscles beneath her skin. A pulse beat furiously at her throat, in the soft hollow just beneath her jaw. He realized she had closed her eyes. Her lashes were black against her cheeks. As if in response to his shaking, she had gone even more still. He should say something, but his mouth could not make words.
“Tante Heleen wasn’t always cruel,” Inej continued. “She’d hug you, hold you close, then pinch you so hard, she broke skin. You never knew if a kiss was coming or a slap. One day you were her best girl, and the next day she’d bring you to her office and tell you she was selling you to a group of men she’d met on the street. She’d make you beg her to keep you.” Inej released a soft sound that was almost a laugh. “The first time Nina hugged me, I flinched .” Her eyes opened. She met his gaze. He could hear the drip of the faucet, see the curl of her braid over her shoulder where it had slipped free of its coil. “Go on,” she said quietly, as if she was asking him to continue a story.
He wasn’t sure he could. But if she could speak those words into the echo of this room, he could damn well try.
Carefully, he raised the shears. He lifted the bandage, creating a gap, feeling regret and release as he broke contact with her skin. He sliced through the bandage. He could feel the warmth of her on his fingers like fever.
The ruined bandage fell away.
He took up another long strip of towel in his right hand. He had to lean in to loop it behind her. He was so close now. His mind took in the shell of her ear, the hair tucked behind it, that rapid pulse fluttering in her throat. Alive, alive, alive.
It isn’t easy for me either.
He looped the bandage around again. The barest touches. Unavoidable. Shoulder, clavicle, once her knee. The water rose around him.
He secured the knot. Step back. He did not step back. He stood there, hearing his own breath, hers, the rhythm of them alone in this room.
The sickness was there, the need to run, the need for something else too. Kaz thought he knew the language of pain intimately, but this ache was new. It hurt to stand here like this, so close to the circle of her arms. It isn’t easy for me either. After all she’d endured, he was the weak one. But she would never know what it was like for him to see Nina pull her close, watch Jesper loop his arm through hers, what it was to stand in doorways and against walls and know he could never draw nearer. But I’m here now , he thought wildly. He had carried her, fought beside her, spent whole nights next to her, both of them on their bellies, peering through a long glass, watching some warehouse or merch’s mansion. This was nothing like that. He was sick and frightened, his body slick with sweat, but he was here. He watched that pulse, the evidence of her heart, matching his own beat for anxious beat. He saw the damp curve of her neck, the gleam of her brown skin. He wanted to … He wanted.
Before he even knew what he intended, he lowered his head. She drew in a sharp breath. His lips hovered just above the warm juncture between her shoulder and the column of her neck. He waited. Tell me to stop. Push me away.
She exhaled. “Go on,” she repeated. Finish the story.
The barest movement and his lips brushed her skin—warm, smooth, beaded with moisture. Desire coursed through him, a thousand images he’d hoarded, barely let himself imagine—the fall of her dark hair freed from its braid, his hand fitted to the lithe curve of her waist, her lips parted, whispering his name.
All of it there and then gone. He was drowning in the harbor. Her limbs were a corpse’s limbs. Her eyes were dead and staring. Disgust and longing roiled in his gut.
He lurched backward, and pain shot through his bad leg. His mouth was on fire. The room swayed. He braced himself against the wall, trying to breathe. Inej was on her feet, moving toward him, her face concerned. He held up a hand to stop her.
“Don’t.”
She stood in the center of the tile floor, framed by white and gold, like a gilded icon. “What happened to you, Kaz? What happened to your brother?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me. Please.”
Tell her , said a voice inside him. Tell her everything. But he didn’t know how or where to begin. And why should he? So she could find a way to absolve him of his crimes? He didn’t want her pity. He didn’t need to explain himself, he just needed to find a way to let her go.
“You want to know what Pekka did to me?” His voice was a snarl, reverberating off the tiles. “How about I tell you what I did when I found the woman who pretended to be his wife, the girl who pretended to be his daughter? Or how about I tell you what happened to the boy who lured us in that first night with his mechanical toy dogs? That’s a good one. His name was Filip. I found him running a monte game on Kelstraat. I tortured him for two days and left him bleeding in an alley, the key to a wind-up dog shoved down his throat.” Kaz saw Inej flinch. He ignored the sting in his heart.
“That’s right,” he went on. “The clerks at the bank who turned over our information. The fake attorney. The man who gave me free hot chocolate at Hertzoon’s fake office. I destroyed them all, one by one, brick by brick. And Rollins will be the last. These things don’t wash away with prayer, Wraith. There is no peace waiting for me, no forgiveness, not in this life, not in the next.”
Inej shook her head. How could she still look at him with kindness in her eyes? “You don’t ask for forgiveness, Kaz. You earn it.”
“Is that what you intend to do? By hunting slavers?”
“By hunting slavers. By rooting out the merchers and Barrel bosses who profit off of them. By being something more than just the next Pekka Rollins.”
It was impossible. There was nothing more. He could see the truth even if she couldn’t. Inej was stronger than he would ever be. She’d kept her faith, her goodness, even when the world tried to take it from her with greedy hands.
His eyes scanned her face as they always had, closely, hungrily, snatching at the details of her like the thief he was—the even set of her dark brows, the rich brown of her eyes, the upward tilt of her lips. He didn’t deserve peace and he didn’t deserve forgiveness, but if he was going to die today, maybe the one thing he’d earned was the memory of her—brighter than anything he would ever have a right to—to take with him to the other side.
Kaz strode past Inej, took his discarded gloves from the sink, pulled them on. He shrugged into his coat, straightened his tie in the mirror, tucked his cane under his arm. He might as well go to meet his death in style.
When he turned back to her, he was ready. “Whatever happens to me, survive this city. Get your ship, have your vengeance, carve your name into their bones. But survive this mess I’ve gotten us into.”
“Don’t do this,” Inej said.
“If I don’t, it’s all over. There’s no way out. There’s no reward. There’s nothing left.”
“Nothing,” she repeated.
“Look for Dunyasha’s tells.”
“What?”
“A fighter always has a tell, a sign of an old injury, a dropped shoulder when they’re about to throw a punch.”
“Do I have a tell?”
“You square your shoulders before you start a move as if you’re about to perform, like you’re waiting for the audience’s attention.”
She looked slightly affronted at that. “And what’s yours?”
Kaz thought of the moment on Vellgeluk that had nearly cost him everything.
“I’m a cripple. That’s my tell. No one’s ever smart enough to look for the others.”
“Don’t go to the Slat, Kaz. Let us find another way.”
“Step aside, Wraith.”
“Kaz—”
“If you ever cared about me at all, don’t follow.”
He pushed past her and strode from the room. He couldn’t think of what might be, of what there was to lose. And Inej was wrong about one thing. He knew exactly what he intended to leave behind when he was gone.
Damage.
S he followed him anyway.
If you ever cared about me at all.