"Flesh can be cut," Inej said quietly, her back pressed to the door. "Cut so easily."
Kaz heard her voice quivering from the other side of the wood. Inej had cried the first time she'd taken a human life. This was her second, and this time a Kaz could hear was her; the shaking in her voice and her shallow breathing.
He tried to imagine how she looked right now. Her brown eyes sunken, her hands shaking with blood covering every inch of her body. Her hands gripping her daggers. Blood dripping off the tips of the metal. Her chest heaving, as she can barely even bring herself to cry.
You always remembered your first kill.
Once you take your first life, taking your second is so much easier.
Kaz remembered the first boy he'd killed. The hours he had begged and cried to go home. Begging for mercy that Kaz didn't have. He was so small, a child just like Kaz, and yet it took so long for him to die. But it was so easy.
A knife can cut through flesh, swiftly and easily. Painlessly.
A fist on the other hand…
"And bones can be broken," Kaz said. "Broken with much difficulty."
Leaning against the door, he heard Inej swallow. She didn't reply.
The image of the little lifeless boy sprung into Kaz's mind. He quickly forced it down, as he felt dead bodies and rotten skin on his flesh. The smell of death assaulting his senses.
Kaz's first kill was commit with anger, Inej's first kill was a request.
Kaz asked her to kill, and she took up her knives.
She didn't complain or object. She'd only silently wept once she'd taken her victims life.
Not even Kaz had cried when he'd taken his first life. He'd only felt rage, blinding him, driving him mad for all those hours.
Behind the door Kaz heard shuffling. He stepped aside, waiting, his eyes fixed upon the door. It opened. Inej glaring at him.
Shock struck through him, but his expression barely changed. He forced down his feelings, only meeting her stern gaze. He'd expected her to be a mess. Her hair to be everywhere, and to be stricken with fear; how wrong his assumptions were.
Inej was covered in blood, the same as his imagination. But she stood with her back straight, her eyes blazing, and focused. She stepped forward, leaving bloody footsteps behind her. Her hair was braided neatly, almost appropriate for a dinner party. Her knives sheaved, and in the small scabbards that hung at her hips, Kaz could tell they were cleaned.
She was silent, leaning against the wall, down the long hallway. In this ugly abandoned slum in Ketterdam.
Inej and Kaz both knew his death would better for everyone in Ketterdam, but the discomfort of killing someone without them knowing seemed to get to her. She didn't speak. Her eyes only looking up at the sky through cracks in the wood.
Kaz searched her face for any itch of anger or fear, but there was nothing. Her bronze skin in the moonlight glistening with the red blood dried to it. She noticed Kaz staring as her eyes narrowed, her expression unphased.
"I think we've done enough for tonight," Kaz said coolly.
Inej nodded.
Kaz began walking, making his way back to the Crow Club as silent footsteps followed him in the shadows, so silently he could barely make them out, as they entered the night.