When Kaz walked in on the sight of his deepest, most delicious fantasy, he closed his eyes and thought of death.
Wet, clammy death. Bloated death. Death with a braid that shone like silk poured over leather. Dark, knowing eyes gone sightless and filmed as they floated on the harbor away from him.
His stomach momentarily lost its footing, but he was getting used to the nausea. He wasn't a virgin to living inside his own worst nightmare, after all. For Kaz Brekker, that was just a Tuesday.
He opened his eyes, thus braced, and rasped, "You remembered."
On his bed, Inej shifted. Candlelight swimming across the steel of her knives, soaking in and gone to the black of their sheaths. Warming the miles of smooth brown skin in between.
All your knives and none of your clothes.
It was one of the nights when he'd been proving to both of them how many ways he could pleasure her with his gloves still on. His Wraith, all undone from a trifecta of orgasms, had found a way to use her words to even the scales: by demanding his fantasies. She wanted the images that occupied his devious brain when he was easing her clothes away and leaving his intact.
It had taken him a full week of days before he could think of one that could be put into words. No one would understand, he figured, how what appealed to him wasn't sexual acts themselves. No matter how dirty or depraved or forbidden. What unstitched his mind and brought him to a point harder than any steel was her. Her breath washed over his skin. Her idea that outraced his own. The way gravity gave way before her when she swung from one building to another. Her, her, her.
This was the best way he could explain the concept of purest Inej: all knives, no clothes.
She turned onto one side, watching him approach. The leather of her sheaths was cinched to tighter notches than usual to be strapped onto her bare skin. The straps teasing into the deepest shadow at the juncture of her thighs. A dagger, gleaming on the outside of her leg.
Her vest held the most of her blades and she was wearing that, too. One button was left undone so her breasts swelled above the deep V of it, just the hint of darker circles revealed over the edges of the leather.
He began to sweat, all the way to the roots of his black hair.
His gaze scoured her delicate ankles, with even more delicate blades strapped to them. The one hidden in her hair, winking at him with a single gleam of light. Straps criss-crossing the dent of her navel to secure the one at the small of her narrow back.
Her chin, sharp. Her eyes, liquid and dark as the night sky.
"It doesn't feel how I thought it would," she said.
He kept his face utterly the same as he approached the bed. The desire pulsing in him like a dark heart would wait.
"No?"
His cane punctuated the silence as he came nearer.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
It made no fourth sound as he leaned it against the bed. Sat down on the edge next to her, when she was barely an arm's reach away and naked of anything but leather straps and unadorned blades. That tidy and capable body revealed in every subtle curve of muscle. She was every kind of beauty his thunderous brain could have ever conjured in the universe.
He did not reach for her, never took wasn't given. Just waited. This bed was the only space where Kaz did not, would not, steal.
Her gaze traced his jawline, like a familiar touch.
"It makes me feel…different." Flames lit in her eyes. "Like I want to walk out that door and make the whole city see me as this. See how it doesn't change me, to be breast and curves and soft skin instead of leather."
"Do it," he rasped. "I'll watch them bleed in your wake and I'll not need a single touch to come to completion."
She laughed. "Oh, Kaz…"
"Don't ask me not to be so bloodthirsty," he warned.
"I would never." She grabbed him by the lapels of his coat, rolled him underneath her on the bed. His cane clattered to the floor as the blankets twisted with their movement. "It's the height of sin," she whispered just over his lips, "how I never want you to be different than this."
"That's where you're wrong," he said. "I am the height of sin."
As if to prove it, he took her mouth. And though her soul was clean, her kisses never were. It was the one loophole in his curse, because there'd been no kissing on Reaper's Barge and once she knew it, she took full advantage. With tongue and teeth and lips as lush as the dreams he still couldn't afford to have. But when she forgot herself and her fingers curled around his neck beneath his collar, his jaw locked and a full body shudder took him.
"Wait," he choked out. She'd already rolled, like she was anticipating the crash of a carriage. Straight off him and to a crouch he'd seen her use a thousand times before she loosed her knives in her own defense.
He ground his teeth together against the rise of nausea and yet to the horrible parade of images in his head, he added more. Inej torn open and bloody. A stone on her grave gone dusty with age, outliving him by relentless years. The panic eased into familiar agony and it was instants, only, before he was back with her.
The flare of satisfaction in her dark eyes was all the reward he would have ever needed. "That was faster, that time."
He sat up with a precise flex of muscle, holding her gaze with the certainty that came of mastering his body, once again. He tugged at the fingertip of a glove, loosening them one by one.
When Inej had first come to him and told him she what she wanted, the visions used to side-swipe him. He figured out the pattern quickly enough: he got what he wanted most, and then his canny brain rushed in to remind him of the peril. Of what it cost him to want. How it weakened him when his enemies had a chain they could yank to move him, one that was pierced through a very vulnerable place.
But Inej had asked him to touch her, and so he'd needed a way to fight the flashbacks. It was simple, in the end. He changed the order.
If you can't beat the odds, change the game.
Bring the fear in first. Breathe it in. Bite it in the very center of its face and chew its sinews and swallow its every truth down into your gut. Dare it to tell you anything you don't already know.
Fear was like any other enemy. It had to be met unblinking, so it knew it could not back you down.
Kaz had been practicing. So now, he could look at a woman so beautiful she was like his soul's own daydream and not have to jerk away.
Visions still threatened but he didn't tense, because he already knew every curse they threatened to lay upon his deserving head. May you be alone in all the world. May the only ones you trust be rotting under your hands. May you not have been smart enough, strong enough, quick enough to save them.
Someday, he suspected, the nightmares would again become truth. He knew it. And so his fears came for him and found him unwilling to run.
He lay his glove aside. Inej's breath snagged, and her tongue darted out to whet her lips. He flexed his fingers, once, just to watch her watch. Her eyes never caught quite so hard when he was removing the rest of his clothes. His scarred body, others had seen. His hands? Perhaps only her.
He held out his other hand and swore he could feel the temperature of her skin rocket up in an instant.
"Help me with my glove?"
She leaned forward and bit the fingertip of his glove, tugging with her teeth. He groaned, thickening in his trousers.
"My debt to you is steep, after that greeting," he murmured, his eyes wandering down the weapons he'd wished for. The woman's body beneath. "How would you have me pay it?"
Inej's skin was too dusky to show a blush the way some from the north did. With mottled red and pink in their cheeks. But hers still showed in averted eyes. In a certain way her braid would twitch forward-its long pendulum giving away the downward tilt of her chin before her head even did.
"With your mouth," she whispered. "On my…"
"Knives?"
He grinned like the shark he was.
He shrugged the full sweep of his coat onto the floor, but left his starched shirt on as he knelt low. His bad leg he kept straight, foot on the ground so the pain wouldn't distract him from feeling…every…last…thing as he traced the bone of Inej's ankle with his lips.
He kissed her sheathed knives the same way she prayed to her saints. Eyes closed with gratitude. The repetition of each motion a tribute. These blades were her strength. Her freedom. Her justice. They were as dear to him as her bones. And he'd buy her new of both, at any price, if she were to break them.
After all, he hadn't been gathering blackmail on local Grisha healers for a lark.
His teeth skimmed the slim muscle of her calf as she shifted restlessly on the bed, beckoning him higher. He bit the buckle of her thigh sheath, nearly panting as he worked to bring himself back under control again. Then slipped the dagger out from the small of her back so she could lie more comfortably. He kissed it and laid it aside while she watched, her eyes luminous.
He brushed his mouth along every strap as her skin grew dewy and heated. Playing with the change in texture between thick leather and all the parts of Inej she normally kept hidden from the world. The whole time, despite the strengthening tide of his own desire, he was alert. Waiting. Because Inej guarded her center even when she was with him. It was utterly unconscious, he knew. The way she shifted her legs to shield herself. Tipped her hips this way and that. But the more heat he called up from her, the more her legs relaxed. And it wasn't until they eased all the way open for him, her heels wound around the back of his thighs and tugging him in, that he brought his mouth down the bare center line where he'd unbuttoned her vest. Descending her navel and the crisscrossed straps of the back sheath. And slid his tongue right into the center of her desire.
She arched and cried out so loudly she clapped a hand over her own mouth to stop it.
"Don't." He squeezed one hip with his bare hand, the sensitivity of the sensation a new surprise to him every time. "Sex is the simplest of the things the Dregs could think we mean to each other."
It was a cover, of sorts, for all else they had become.
When he kissed his way back into her most sensitive spot, her hand fell away from her mouth. She let her breath to break audibly when he closed his lips around her. And when he bathed his tongue in the taste of her, she allowed one moan, slow and broken, to tumble from her mouth. Loud enough to stretch down the stairs to listening ears. Kaz's thighs flexed under his trousers, the sound calling him to thrust. His shoulders bulked, as if he grew larger just from the idea of others knowing she was his. Stupid, territorial thought, but he was yet a man, beneath everything else he might be.
"Kaz?" Weightless fingertips stroked at the shaved place beneath his hair, then vanished as if she wasn't sure yet what he could bear. He wished he were certain, too.
"Mmm?"
"May I feel your hands?"
He twitched. At the beginning of this, she'd asked for his mouth and he'd told himself that was why he'd mostly been bracing his newly-gloveless hands on the blankets to either side of her. They'd done…that… many times now, with him sinking his fingers into her still guarded by leather and tormenting her with its texture. It was one of her favorite things. But he saw how she watched his hands, and Kaz Brekker understood the tease implied at the very heart of desire. That which you cannot have always calls the strongest.
His fingertips trembled as he stroked her entrance, unbelieving of how different she felt there without his gloves. Especially when slicked with desire for him, prepared by his own tongue to ease to his touch.
Inej would leave him. He hammered the words into his head before the visions could get the drop on him. She'd die a thousand miles out to sea before he could ever lift a finger. She'd die right in front of him, screaming for help.
Kaz did not allow himself to hesitate, once he'd prepared in his own bastardized way. Instead, he sank into her and let her surround his fingers, taking him in like the quietest embrace. He slipped in easier without having to work in leather, and then crooked his fingers in a familiar beckoning. But when he found the spot, she pulsed liquid all around him and stopped moving at all. His nightmares howled.
"Breathe," he begged her hoarsely, and her chest stuttered upward as if she'd forgotten. He set the clock of his heart to the in then the out of her ragged breath. As long as it moved, so could he.
Her whole body arched, her bare buttocks coming off the bed. Her small hands fisted in the pillows and Kaz smiled, darkly. Ferociously. He'd forgotten, for an instant, how much he loved this. It reminded him of when he'd learned to hear the tiniest clicks of lock tumblers, and suddenly he could follow that small sound to all the riches in the world.
"I forget, my love," he murmured as he bent his head. "Did you ask for my fingers…or my mouth?"
This time when she cried out, he knew she'd forgotten about every member of the Dregs that might be hearing them.
Wet skin became his fondest friend instead of his greatest enemy as she rode his hand, his fingers driving mercilessly into her as he hummed against her mound, coaxing with the flat of his tongue until she unraveled, begging, into the palm of his hand.
"Kaz…"
He wasn't even sure she was still awake when she said it, as he eased up next to her on the bed. Her head tilted against his shoulder, her gleaming braid all mussed from the thrashings of her head against the pillow.
"Yes?" he said anyway, not to leave her unanswered. Even if she might be halfway to dreaming already.
"You made one mistake."
She rolled atop him in an instant, caging him with uncompromising thighs. It was a wonder the front of his trousers didn't shoot into pure flame from the damp touch of her, still warm from his mouth.
"Did I?" He arched an eyebrow, unconvinced.
She shrugged out of her open vest and hung it, heavy with metal, on the post of his bed. He was distracted by the pert upward press of her small breasts when she bent over, so it wasn't particularly surprising to him when her hand returned with a blade in it he hadn't seen her retrieve. She hooked its tip under the silk of his tie and he gritted his teeth and groaned, low and rough.
"You forgot how I get after you do that to me." An impish smile crossed her killer's face and snip his tie surrendered to her without a peep of protest. "And you left me armed."
"Praise Ghezen," said Kaz, with the most fervency he'd ever said the name of a God in his life.
He didn't even hear the pop of threads when she cut the first button off his shirt. Just the release of pressure when he could breathe more easily. And Saints, did he need the extra air suddenly, with her hair fallen forward to tickle at the fabric of his shirt.
"If you've been practicing with your gloves…" she said, her voice softer now. More of the Suli girl she'd been than the Wraith. More of his friend than his partner in crime. "Then does that mean you've also been practicing…" She tapped her knife to the button on his pants.
He hadn't, actually. Been practicing that. But the principle was the same and moreover, he really, really wanted to.
"Yes," he lied, the rasp of his voice scraped even rougher than usual. "Course I have." The button tinked off the wall when she cut it away.
His hair slipped away from his overheated forehead as his head fell back on the pillow. He couldn't even remember what fear was, with her blades so near his cock. He wanted to claw the wool off himself so he could feel the chill of her metal. Wanted her to stab him in the chest just so part of her could be sunk as deep in him as he wanted to be in her.
He was sick, obviously twisted in the head and he loved it about himself, suddenly. Loved her, so much he could hardly think straight. He fisted the braid at the nape of her neck and reared up to skim his teeth over her bottom lip.
"Kaz?" A voice came through his door just then. "There's trouble at the tables and we need you to—"
One of Inej's knives hit the door with a deep thunk of blade parting wood.
"Right then." A cleared throat. "We'll just see to that ourselves, then."
"See that you do," Kaz said, the amusement clear without him even raising his voice. He kissed the point of her chin and lounged back onto the bed, eager to see what she might do to him, in a dangerous mood such as this.
She palmed a new blade, whirling it into her hand and scrambling off Kaz to crouch with flashing eyes, at his side. He watched, rapt.
The tip
Dragged
Down the front of his trousers
…opening expensive tailoring to chilly air. Every hair on his legs prickled to life. The knot of his bad knee was laid bare in every scar. The dark linen of what he wore beneath his pants exposed in the highest reaches of her cut. She came back to the top, slashing one glance at him. He was all but panting for more, the fist of his throat bobbing once as he scraped a swallow. She flipped the knife so the flat was to him, the blade facing out, and she slipped it into his underclothes. It cut cotton effortlessly, the threads parting without a sound.
His cock flexed so hard she had to cup it with her other hand to hold it out of her way. His pants were ruined, cut from hem to waist and panting open for her on both sides. Then she fisted the leather of his belt and he moaned. Jagged and unconscious. He wanted her to slice his nipples, give him pain and pleasure to heights others couldn't handle and ride him until he couldn't breathe.
She cut his belt. Her arm flexing with muscle and the leather giving way with a fight. The buckle fell to the side, still clasped but useless against her will. He wanted to frame that fucking belt, because it was everything he felt when it came to Inej.
Fuck, he was lost.
The tide of water came for him all in a rush and he choked with the abruptness of it. The piles of dead. The smell. It had been years since he remembered the smell.
"Don't you dare," Inej ordered, and pain twisted, in a place so different from his memories it jerked him back to the present to find she'd reached under the sliced ruin of his pants and cupped him bare, squeezing balls and cock both. It left him in a twist of pain and desire so sharp he could focus on nothing but her face.
"Do it again," he begged.
She added her nails this time, the smallest scrape to that sensitive place behind his privates and he shoved into her touch, the heel of his shoe digging into his own mattress as he seethed closer to her. The knife she'd been using was buried up to its hilt in the pillow next to his head and he turned his head, inhaling like he could smell it.
"My shirt." He shouldn't have asked for it. It was his last armor, and she was too bare. Those tight tits of hers would be too good against him and the defensive traps laid inside his own mind would have him drowning in fire pox on Reaper's Barge in an instant if she so much as leaned forward.
"Are you certain? It looks expensive."
"It cost two carriages worth of kruge." Shipped all the way from Shu Han. He bought it for a con on a particularly status-conscious merch. He pulled a knife from her thigh sheath, giving her a small, secret caress with his thumb on his way by. "Do it."
She took the knife and slashed an X across his chest, so fast he wasn't sure she hadn't opened his flesh beneath. He couldn't possibly have cared less. She bent and bit the hem of his shirt, yanking the last few threads free with his teeth, and he rose beneath her, his legs bunching and bucking like a wild thing. She hurled the knife, unseeing, and it clattered to the floor without even sticking in a target.
"Kaz, please…" She clawed the last shreds of his pants out of the way as his desire rose, thick and eager in her palm. "I don't know if you can but I need—and I don't think anything else—and I know you—"
"Shhh…" He reached down and took himself in hand, rubbing his tip at her slick entrance, then up higher in the place he most liked to tease her. She made a sharp sound. He eyed her. She had at least half a dozen knives still left and more than the will to use them. He half-hoped she would, so he teased her a little longer.
"Kaz!"
His name had been begged for mercy many times in his short, ill-spent life. But this was the only time he'd listened. He sheathed himself in her with a shock of sensation, bright and true, and then braced himself for the consequences. But nothing came. Perhaps he'd looked the fear in the eye enough times it had backed down in defeat.
Perhaps not. Either way, he didn't stick around to see how long he'd be allowed to keep a good thing before it was taken from him. He just went straight for the heart of what he needed, in whatever time he had left.
He reached up and took the woman above him into his arms. Drawing her bare and beautiful down to his chest so their bodies could lie together completely for the first time in both their lives. A dot of fresh moisture touched his neck where her face had tucked in and she trembled, squeezing him deep where he lay inside of her. He murmured against her hair, words in another language that he'd practiced and practiced, but never said in front of another living soul.
She spasmed in bright physical response to his words, losing her breath. "Kaz!"
But his body was done waiting for the rest of him, and it was rising beneath her, his hips driving a ruthless rhythm. The echo of it pounded soundlessly between his ears with the pure, animal satisfaction of something that had existed centuries before he had. He bit his own cheek until blood ran, battling himself back into control and slowing his rhythm, seeking for that place in her that always made her whole body jerk. It was hard to find with her on top of him so he tipped her onto her side and drew one flexible leg up high at their sides, clasping her ankle and the knife atop it to tilt her hips and drive into her and—ahh!
There it was. She jolted as if from a lightning strike. He dug deep in her, rutting thick little pulses right into that spot until she screamed with it, biting at the flapping-free collar of his shirt. He dug his fingers into her hair, calling her on in Suli as he fucked her. He pulled her against him, coaxing her legs wider and grinding her mound tight tight against his belly until she was coughing and gasping, squirming against him. When he felt her release, he let go of every grift and trick, gathering her tight in his chest and just holding her as she sobbed her pleasure into the crook of his neck. His strokes were as off-balance as the rest of him now, and he didn't even register until spots darkened before his eyes that he was breathing too hard. Too much and not enough all at once and the power of what hit him was so much stronger than it had been when he was alone that it felt like part of him was being torn out.
He gritted his teeth against a yell that wouldn't be swallowed down, so that it came out low and harsh and agonized.
Inej laid her hand over the thumping vein in his throat, tilted her head against his temple. The faint scent of her hair—oiled knives and cinnamon bark—was the only air he could breathe for long moments as his body flashed hot, then cold, goosebumps raking his chest as he poured himself into and into and into her.
"Be easy, my love." Her small fingers sifted through his hair, traced the curl of his ear. Caught him, when his muscles gave up their quaking and released all at once. Her voice rose and fell in a susurration, and he should be able to translate the Suli words after all his study but right now, his brain was a knot.
He fell forward, barely catching himself on an elbow, and stared down at her like these were his first eyes. He'd fucked several of her sheaths crooked on their ties, and her skin was chafed red beneath the straps, her hair half out of its braid. She looked spectacular.
He couldn't quite believe he'd managed it, at long last, without just everything going wrong. Perhaps you could steal just one perfect moment from beneath the god's noses. Like a heist, impeccably planned.
Something piqued in him at that, familiar like the first step of a path he'd found before. Perhaps some heists weren't so impossible as lesser people seemed to think, and if you had the right crew, the right preparation, you could pull off maybe…even more than one.
He laid a kiss at Inej's brow and watched her slip into sleep. He'd be scheming on it, that much was for certain.
Author's Note: In my story One Thousand and One Nights I wrote my first version of Kaz and Inej finding their way to each other in the bedroom. And one of the most quoted lines in all my reviews was: "You're fooling yourself, Inej, if you think I wouldn't fuck you with your knives still on," Kaz rasps. "I've always found them…interesting."
The collective interest in that line was my inspiration for this fic. That, and an uptick in readers on Gentle Isn't Safe, the prequel to this fic.