Kaz Brekker was not interested in plaid.
Especially since it was plaid's fault that there were currently too many people in his office, and too many colors. Most of which were in Jesper's suit. It was deep purple and harvest orange, with knife-thin pinstripes of Sun Summoner yellow. All on a backdrop of the kind of nuanced black you only got from a dye from Shu Han that Kaz couldn't afford to even learn to pronounce until after the Ice Court heist.
"Look! Is it not the pinnacle of how fabulous I can look?" Jesper ran his thumbs under his lapels and spun for inspection. "I know, I know. It's a high bar."
Inej laughed, one foot up on the windowsill, the edge of her knife sliding bright silver against a whetstone. The rasp and slick of it was playing inside Kaz's head in an interesting way, and he thought he might have gotten the Crow Club books cleared for last month in half the time of his usual. He also thought he might like it if Jesper and Wylan left a little more quickly. He turned another page of the ledger.
"Did you come all the way over here so you could tell me how fabulous you looked in your new suit?" Inej teased.
"No!"
"Definitely he did," Wylan said. His smile was fond. "I believe your exact words were, 'let's go over and show Inej how fantastic I am.'"
"Well, sure, but I meant more in the metaphorical, personality-wise sense. The suit"—he struck another pose—"should have spoken for itself, with no prompting required. Especially since I paid extra for—"
"Matching gilded trim on your gun holsters." Kaz set aside his pen. "You'll get rolled twice, walking back to the opera house from the Barrel wearing those."
Jesper clapped his hands, face brightening. "You think twice?"
Wylan groaned. "We've been over this. It's not okay to shoot innocent people for fun, Jesper."
"They're hardly innocent if they're already mugging me. Kaz!"
Kaz nodded his agreement, which Wylan ignored. "Yes, but you're entrapping them into mugging you on purpose. Inej! A little help here, please."
Her knife slid crisply up the whetstone and it was all Kaz could do not to shiver. The breeze from the open window curled softly inside his collar.
"Jesper, you should only shoot to wound if you're enticing people to mug you just for entertainment. Wylan, what a person wears is their own business. What criminals do about it is theirs. The fault does not transfer."
Kaz looked up. He didn't care for anything that put that tone in her voice, and if a discussion of fashion prompted it, he'd happily burn a linen factory or three straight to the ground to put the easy lounge back into her spine.
He'd done it before, after all. Though they'd been shackle foundries, that time.
Wylan ducked his head, one of those twisty glances of his. "Sorry."
She shrugged. Tucked a sharpened knife back into her vest sheaths and selected another. Her braid was loose today. Nothing about Inej was ever loose. She was tucked in, tidy. Taut. Prepared. Polished. Maybe that's why Kaz's eyes kept going back to the braid, instead of staying put on his ledger. He could bury his fingers in the loops of that braid without ever untying it, and the thought was as intriguing as a fresh puzzle, unsolved.
"Inej." Jesper scooped her out of the window. He tossed the blade in the air with one hand, passed her to his other arm, stole the whetstone and tossed it a different way, then dipped her. Kaz tensed, sensing the trajectory, but in the next moment Jesper spun her the other way so that the knife came down point-first and stuck into the floor where they'd just been. Kaz caught the whetstone.
"Come to the opera with us, darling," Jesper coaxed. "You never come out. We have a private box, where you can spy on all the richest people in the city, just like you like, only from the comfort of a thickly padded chair instead of some sleet-frozen roof."
He danced her backwards across the room, Inej following with her innate grace and the hint of a smile on her face, only missing the spare turn of a foot here and there on a dance she'd never learned. Never even a full step, because she was like that.
"Me in my leathers and you in a Kleinfelder suit?" She clucked her tongue softly. "Best not waste the time, Jes. You're going to be late for the performance at this rate, and then all the people who really appreciate well-cut suits will miss it."
"So we'll order you a gown for another time, make a whole foursome of it. Wylan got us season tickets and Kaz loves the opera."
He dipped her low, swung her back up, passed her over his back, and onto her feet again. She did laugh, now, and Kaz got that uncomfortable prickle of satisfaction and jealousy he always did when she danced with Jesper. Because he loved it for her, and he hated that he couldn't do it with her. Didn't have that kind of whimsy in him, even if his leg had been whole.
"Kaz? Love the opera?" Inej said, her voice rising a little with her interest.
Wylan was looking at him then, like he could see it, and Kaz didn't care for that, so he stood and stole Inej right out of Jesper's arms when they slid on by. He spun her and dipped her, because he could do that much. He loved the way she poured her spine back over his hand with no hesitation in her. Like it wasn't even a thought that he could drop her.
Perhaps the Wraith could turn that into a backflip even if he had fumbled her, but Kaz preferred to think it was trust. The kind he'd earned back from her, at steep interest, after the Van Eck job. Every truth he gave her about what she meant to him a vulnerability paid into the hands of their enemies.
Being predictable enough to be trusted was a luxury Kaz had never cared to afford, until he saw the look in her eyes when she said, "I didn't know if you would come."
Now, he drew her back up to standing and she tipped her delicate eyebrow, just a little. And he nodded, just a little. So slight an acknowledgement of her unspoken question that no one—probably save Wylan, damn the demolitions expert with his quiet voice and keen eyes—would have noticed it.
But even while she was absorbing this new knowledge about Kaz in her silent and unruffled way, Jesper was trumpeting it to everyone within a two-floor radius, as was his way.
"You didn't know Kaz loved the opera? Not even you?" He chortled, clapping in glee. "Did you hear that, Wylan, I knew something about Kaz that even his Wraith didn't know. Mark this one down for the record books. I'll be wanting to drink to it at New Year's and Saturnalia both."
Kaz looked bored. "Opera is a form of entertainment. Most people like it, that's why they pay kruge for it. I, on the other hand, don't need to pay for my entertainment. There are enough people to rob on this island that my entertainment pays me."
"Still," Jesper said. "I knew, and nobody else did. Just wanted to be clear on that."
Jesper spun himself with a flair of well-tailored coat tails into Kaz's armchair, and arranged his gunbelt with the absent air of someone who'd done it a thousand times.
"This is how I knew, love," he said, though absolutely no one had asked. "It was back when we were peons working our way up through the Dregs, both of us. I'd get ahead in favor one week because I was a dead shot. But then Kaz would surpass me the next week because I didn't care to kill and he'd kill every third mark just for the sport of it." Jesper seemed to register the look on Inej's face as she let go of Kaz's hands and went to retrieve her knife from its point-first plunge into the floorboards. "Anyway…" he changed the subject, "Kaz always wanted to go pick pockets in front of the opera house on Sundays."
"That's math even Rotty could do." Kaz sniffed. "Rich patrons, fat pockets, dark alleys."
"Sure and that's all I thought it was, too. We lifted enough purses to stake me a free night at the tables on top of Per Haskell's skim, and for you to—" Jesper paused. "Well, whatever it was you did with money before you had Inej's indenture to pay down. Buy paintings of lambs being tortured, or whatever your pleasure." He re-crossed his legs with a flair. "But then, I noticed Kaz always wanted to come when the patrons with their fat pockets were still inside and the arias were still being sung." Jesper nodded. "Loudly enough to be heard out in the streets, I might add."
Inej turned back, her free knife already disappeared into whatever sheath or pocket it had come from. She cocked her head and that loose, graceful braid fell forward over her shoulder in a way that drove Kaz half-mad even before her question.
"We could?" she said.
He grunted.
"Would you want…?" Her brows lifted slightly.
"No."
He sat down, and went back to his ledgers.
Kaz did like opera. Jesper was annoyingly not incorrect about that. The voices sounded to him like something soaring above the ugliness that the Barrel was made of. Something beyond it, like Inej's Saints, or the look in her eye after he brought her to satisfaction and she was lying quiet in his bed. Opera wasn't regular singing any more than Jesper's gunplay was standard target practice.
But the opera had dress codes. Three-piece suits for men, and a jeweled tie pin or you'd get the worst seats there were. It wasn't trouble for him, that was how he dressed just to break a kneecap on a Monday. But for women, they required…dresses. And that's why Kaz, even after he could afford season tickets with his pocket change, had never been to the Grand Opera as a patron.
"Kaz…" Jesper cajoled. "Kaz, darling, you're not taking my point. There is nothing so fun as walking into that lobby of lifted noses and giving them all time to notice that your designer is more expensive than theirs, and that you're wearing gauche guns over the top, and that you've picked all their pockets at one time or another and not gone to Hellgate for it. Before you take the box above theirs."
Dammit, that did sound like fun.
"No," Kaz said again, and in that single word was the death of the entire conversation.
"Well." Wylan burst to his feet in a flurry of clearing throat sounds, still not shut of the last hint of his you-might-murder-me nervousness around Kaz. "We'd better be going or we won't have enough time to rub their noses in it, will we, sweetheart?"
Jesper looked fondly down at him. "I love how you always understand what's important."
"Of course I suppose if we're late, we can always blow a hole in the orchestra pit during the third act again." Wylan patted his arm and steered him toward the door. Hopefully before Jesper could the way Inej's face had turned toward the window and she'd forgotten to bid them farewell. "That's always good for a bit of standing about in the street and commenting on each other's designers."
"Yes, but all those innocent violin strings snapped," Jesper fretted. "It just seems a lot of collateral damage, even for a good cause. Can't we just bomb the first-class seats, this time?"
"Of course, of course, sweetheart, if that would make you happy." Wylan patted away and closed the door behind them without even a single glance toward Kaz to give the game away.
Kaz made a mental note to buy the lad another tenement of artists for Christmas. He never charged them enough rent, but it seemed to make him happy. Wylan had a precise sense of timing when it came to bomb fuses and rather an assortment of other important things. It had made it worthwhile for Kaz to keep him cheerful.
"Kaz…"
He did not look up at the change in her tone. He'd cost himself nearly everything, looking at someone with the truth in his eye at the wrong moment, and he'd go to his grave before he did it again.
"Mmm?" he said instead, interjecting a distracted tone as he pretended to give his full attention to mere triple-column bookkeeping.
Inej scoffed. "If you want to ignore me, Kaz, at least choose a more convincing ruse."
She perched a hip on his desk, which was all the inspiration he required.
He rose and circled the desk. "What would you prefer, Captain?"
She was that, of course, had been ever since he bought her a ship and she broke her first slaver's head open upon its decks. But he liked how her eyes flared a little brighter at the sound of her title, so he used it more often than he needed to.
He skimmed his gloved fingers along the outer seam of her leather breeches. Her breathing wavered the barest amount. If she didn't believe him distracted before, that wouldn't be a problem now.
"We could go, you know." She cupped his chin, her fingers always so surprisingly small when they laid against his skin. She tipped his face up until he had to meet her eyes, and he took his revenge by playing his hand to a more interesting location, down below. "Don't pretend you wouldn't love to torture the upstanding merchants of Ketterdam in precisely that way."
"I wouldn't." He lifted his eyebrow and stripped off his gloves. Inej's throat moved under a swallow. "I'd buy out all the boxes, too, and make them sit in third class. If I were to go."
Laughter lifted into her eyes, and he kissed her temple, because he couldn't help himself when she laughed, even on those days when she didn't make a sound.
His hands, now bare, teased under the edge of her shirt. Inej caught his wrists and immediately he stopped. But the look in her face now wasn't the kind of hesitation he'd expected. It was something far away, thoughtful, as her thumbs stroked over his knuckles.
"I could wear a gown." It sounded like a question, though he didn't think she'd meant it as one.
His teeth ground down on themselves, and he had no success at clearing the flat violence out of his voice before he said, "You don't have to. Not for those mercher scum. Come in your leathers, and if they don't like it, I'll buy the whole opera house. Or burn it."
The laughter was back at that. Something about his most violent tones brought out Inej's lightest moods. He didn't question it, because it played quite nicely to his benefit.
"Wouldn't you like to see me in a gown?" Her fingers teased over the shell of his ear, her thumb tracing that small hollow only she'd ever found, just before his ear and under his cheekbone.
Kaz considered that, mostly because his vivid imagination was playing the idea in three dimensions before he could stop himself. Her lithe legs lost in a waterfall of delicate fabric he could slide his gloved hand beneath…a tight bodice dipped low over her pretty breasts, her waist hugged by lace beneath her knives…
No, no knives, he mentally revised. This was a gown.
He clasped her around the waist and lifted, pulling her all the way onto his desk. Then again, why not knives? They would only go to scandalize society, and to enjoy themselves. Her knives would achieve both aims, neatly.
"You can't tell me you wouldn't love to walk into Ketterdam's Grand Opera House with a former indenture from the Menagerie on your arm," she murmured, her eyes too knowing.
The corner of his mouth lifted. That would make it even better, though for so many more reasons than she was thinking.
She laughed a little out loud, then, at his expression. But her eyes were more withdrawn than before. "Of course you would. You never change, Kaz."
He brushed the softest of kisses across her mouth. Like a gentleman suitor, because he didn't demand when she was in a mood like this. He saved that for when she was a different mood, entirely. "To Hellgate with the opera."
His bare hands slid up the slick leather protecting her leg, the flex of sleek muscle filling his palms as heat rushed beneath his scalp.
"I could do it," she insisted, her back stiff. "Wear a gown, I mean. If I wanted to."
He kissed her. Deeper, more wildly now, and nipped at her bottom lip in farewell before he pulled back. "You could. And you'd look like heaven itself doing it."
He picked her up. And if his bad leg gave unsteadily beneath every step, well, she'd long since given up trying to argue with him when he was in a mood to carry her to the bedroom.
Skirts would have been nice, Kaz could admit. A pretty frothy fantasy of a thing to strip back off her at the end of the night. But he liked the warmth of the leather carrying the heat from her skin as her legs locked securely around his hips. The way her eyes always looked like her own when she was wearing her knives.
"You know how else we can listen to the opera, if we care to?" he asked as he deposited her in their bed and came down in an easy, practiced sprawl over the top.
"Phosphorus bomb to the dome?"
She gasped a little as his tongue traced the line of her throat.
"Kidnap the cast?" she guessed again. "For a private performance?"
"You're thinking small, my love." He held out his hand and was lulled by the clinking of metal as she piled knives into it. He didn't like to take them from her; preferred them to be given freely. Martyred for his cause, like the saints they were named after. Once she was done, he flicked open her vest and dropped his head to open the next set of buttons with his teeth. "We can simply get a lien on the shareholders, set a false plague to drop the ticket sales, then buy the whole production for a pittance."
She laughed. "All to keep me having to buy a gown and be on display for my looks again, Kaz?"
"You're thinking small again, my love." His hand gentled, stroking down her side and cupping over the line of the knife on her belt as if to check it was still there. "I'd sink this whole accursed island into the sea to keep you being on display again." He kissed her cheek. "I'd topple the board of the Grand Opera just to enjoy a jaunty tune."
Her laughter rose over their bed as he lowered his head to her, the shadows hiding the ghost of a smile that crossed his face. That's the laugh…
#
The next morning, she was still in bed, hair unraveled across his pillow. One bare shoulder peeking out above the blankets.
She started to sleep in sometimes, after her indenture was paid. He teased her mercilessly for it, but secretly, he loved that one small flicker that showed she knew she was free, now. Almost as much as he loved the idea of her sleeping, all warm and curled in his bed, while he cracked heads and collected money in the club.
He pulled on his gloves and caught up his cane, careful not to plant it on the floor until he was outside, so he couldn't disturb her rest.
"Kaz?"
"Yes?" So much for not waking her. There was nothing his Wraith didn't hear.
"I'd like to go to the opera."
His cane came down on the floor with one controlled click. It was the sound of violence, in check. For now.
"I'll take care of it."