Author's note: This is an extension of any of my worlds where Kaz and Inej have slowly, painfully, crept into being able to touch each other. Without Armor or Healing Touch series. I use a bastardized version of the canon from both show and book, here. Also, in my world, Kaz's office and bedroom is above the Crow Club, and I've given up trying to wrangle it back into the Slat.
My Filthy Heart
Inej picked up the razor-edged letter opener off Kaz's desk. Put it down. Checked the gun rigged beneath his lap drawer. Still loaded, freshly oiled. Swept the dust off the mantle and toyed with a small carving of a baby seal he'd stolen from a pirate they'd drowned, years ago. The smallest of knots rose in her throat and when she heard the punch of his cane on the stairs, she wasn't sure if the knot eased or grew bigger. Both, somehow.
She nearly dropped the carved seal and quickly put it back. Cleared her throat and brushed at the edges of her vest as if the leather could wrinkle.
"Ridiculous," she growled at herself, and threw a glance at the window. The third flight slowed him so much she could be two roofs over on top of the Veldenplatt before the breeze even settled from her passing. She ground her teeth. Today was not the day she'd start running from Kaz Brekker's disapproval. No, if he wanted to give her the silent treatment she'd soak in it like a warm bath, and he could go to the devil if he thought making her miss him would change her convictions.
By the time he opened the door, she was perched on their bed. His chin turned more sharply in her direction than it should have before his eyes slashed away. It had been a long time since her appearance had surprised him. A pang dropped down through her, like a string with a weight on it, extending all the way down from the knot in her throat until it pulled simply all of her out of balance.
Had he stopped watching for her, then? After their fight?
"Didn't think you'd be here."
Click.
Click.
Click.
His cane marked off the three precise steps to his desk.
"And where else would I be?" She'd stopped sleeping in her tiny room in the Slat months ago. Her ship was tucked tidily into Berth #22 at Fifth Harbor. The pillow on the right side of his bed was a little softer than the left; a change he'd made after listening to her punch and tug at it in the middle of the night.
He shuffled papers on his desk, his voice still as brusque as it was on the gambling floor. "You know why. Yesterday."
"You were going to burn an entire orphanage, Kaz." All the prayer in the world couldn't have kept the scathe out of her voice. If anybody deserved to be the one angry after that argument, it was her. But he was the one who'd been freezing her out.
His shoulder lifted a bare inch, not bothered for more. "It didn't come to that."
She didn't even need to say, But it could have. It wasn't their first time on this dance floor. They knew the steps. What she didn't know was why this time, he was the one with his back up a whole day later, when it should rightfully have been her.
And because he was Kaz, he didn't tell her. He just sat down at his desk and attended to business. Every slash of his pen marking money transferred out of other pockets and into his. Never using a pencil when a pen would do because he never made mistakes—at least not that he'd admit to, the utterly infuriating man.
That's how it went while the clock ticked off first thirty minutes, then an hour. She sharpened all her knifes and repaired the axe-slash in her coat's sleeve. She nearly made an excuse to go out the window and scout the city beyond a hundred times. But she would not bend first, nor beg forgiveness for whatever slight he'd created in his mind when he'd been the one ready to burn children out of their homes. Two of the small ones in that orphanage she'd rescued herself off slaver's ships, for Saint's sake! She had a right to her anger.
And she clung to it for an entire other hour, as the clock stroked past midnight, past when they normally moved past rustled sheets and droll-voiced teases as they arranged their pillows, sometimes heated touches and fast breathing peaking before they eased down the other side into sleep. Tonight, Kaz kept working.
When his pen stopped moving, it was a whole new level to the silence that had already scraped her nerves raw. Suddenly, she could hear each second ticked away on the clock in between the minutes.
She would not speak first. But when he finally did, she flinched.
"I know you…" He swallowed, roughly. "Care for me."
He didn't look up, but she hadn't seen him fight so hard for words since that first day he'd admitted he wanted something other than gold and revenge. I want you.
It was so far from what she thought he'd say that she had to run it through her mind two or three times to make sense of it, like she had when she was first learning the harsh consonants of Kerch. Her heart ached, because he'd never laid himself open like this. Never once hinted at what he might want or need from her beyond what she freely gave. And not even now, furious and tense as she was, would she deny it.
She nodded once, sharply, even as tears came to call in her eyes.
He wasn't looking at her, but Kaz wouldn't have missed her answer.
Now his face rose, lines of his cheeks drawn so tight they could have sliced her, black eyes as distant as the night's horizon. "But you wish I weren't like I am. That I didn't do the things I do."
His words doubled her over like a sucker punch and she struck back before they could sink any deeper in her and shake her resolve. How dare he bring that up now, the thing they never spoke up, when this should be as simple as anything?
"It was an orphanage, Kaz."
"I didn't burn it, Inej."
His eyes flamed now, though, torching straight through all the air in the room when he looked at her.
"That Razorgull boss cares nothing for adults. And if I hadn't threatened so many children at once, I'd have had to hurt one right in front of him." A flick of a gloved hand, dismissive. "Easier to fake, at a distance. A man planted in the bushes with a tinderbox and a wink. Smoke from a far window that the mark doesn't know is an unused store room and blaze set in a metal trash can. Up close, the best you can do is take a toe, not a finger. A harmless slice carved into some squalling brat's cheek who'd no doubt come back to try and stab me in the back someday."
"But you would have," she said, as if he'd said none of the rest. "If he'd called your bluff, you'd have called his harder. I've heard you say it a thousand times." Her chin lifted. "You'd raze it to the ground if you had to. I know you would, and don't you lie to my face, Kaz Brekker."
"Of course." His nose twitched, dismissive. "But I'd start on the edge furthest from the stairs."
She huffed out a strangled breath that felt like it must turn into a scream.
"They're CHILDREN."
"WE'RE children, Inej."
Both his fists slammed down on his desk and she wasn't sure if the pounding in her head was surprise, or horror.
"The age of majority in Kerch is eighteen and neither of us is that even now, are we?" he snapped. "We took the Ice Court as children. We brought down the entire economy of Ketterdam with a con game and a bit of chemistry. We singlehandedly turned the tide of the war for Ravka, fought a legendary Grisha saint, restored another, and helped bring down the Fold and an unkillable hoard of shadow monsters, all as CHILDREN." He collected himself, his gloved hands flexing once before he laid them, palms-down, on his desk. Jaw hard.
"No one showed me mercy. Not when I was eleven or ten or even nine. I was twelve when I finally made it into the Dregs and had another soul to watch my back again, whilst I slept. And if you think they went easy on the hazing when a pup like that thought he was equal to joining the dirtiest crew in the Barrel, well…" He sneered. "Then you must have been born on a flower eating ambrosia on your eggs."
She swung her legs down from their bed, leaning forward a bit. "You had no one to protect you, Kaz. It doesn't mean you can't make a world better than what we've known."
"Mercy comes at a steep price, in these streets."
He picked up his pen, as if that was the end of the argument. But his impeccable magician's hands had a fine tremor in them and she saw it. The Wraith saw everything. And she couldn't stop thinking about how he'd started this conversation. What that might mean about what was coming.
"You showed mercy to me." It was a whisper.
He hurled the pen and she jumped as it hit the floor. "Do you know why you don't have a Dregs tattoo? Why Per Haskell agreed not to mark you, when he'd never let a single asset go unclaimed and free to change sides to another gang, much less one as expensive as you?"
"I thought you made a deal with him," she said, her heart thundering.
She hadn't been afraid of Kaz in years, not for herself. She wasn't now, as much as she was afraid of…what this might be. What this conversation might be leading to.
"Or you lied and told him I already had. He never saw my arms. No one did." That first night in the Menagerie, Kaz had told her that to be a spy, she needed to be less noticeable. She'd been only happy to cover herself from wrist to chin, after all those years of Tante Heleen showcasing her skin for strangers.
He yanked up the sleeve of his shirt, the button ripping off as if popped by the vicious cording of the muscles underneath. "I took a second crow and cup over the first, only that one they did with a red-hot needle to remind me that if you betrayed the gang, I'd take your punishment."
Her next breath choked her. She could see it now. The Dregs symbol was darker than his other tattoo, the R, and slightly raised. She hadn't realized that was from burn scars. All those times she'd ran her hand over that tattoo, and she'd never thought…
"I paid for your mercy in my own blood," he said. "It didn't come for free. Nothing does."
"Kaz!" Her hand jumped to her throat, unbidden. "Why would you…when you'd only known me for a week?"
He only grunted.
"And you say you have no mercy." Her voice was quiet, just like her steps as she crossed to him.
"Whatever scraps of it are left have gone to you, Inej. I'm telling you I can't afford more."
His voice scraped, in a different way than it did when he was threatening. It ached now, like it was echoing the throbbing in her own chest. How did this feel like the end? Why did this feel like the end of them, when he'd said no such thing?
"I've done everything you've ever asked of me. Even crawling my way free of the gloves when it—" He struggled for the right word, but they both already knew how much that had cost him. How much he'd suffered for it.
"But I can't undo…this." Black leather flicked as he gestured to his chest. "Me."
"Kaz!" Her face twisted, that he'd think that's what she was asking of him, but his eyes had fallen closed, lashes trembling, and he didn't see. A grimace crossed his face, as if he were fighting back fresh pain.
She pushed herself up to sitting on the edge of his desk, hardly breathing. She couldn't touch him, when he was bad like this. They'd found that out from long, hard trials. But she lifted the fall of his hair from his forehead. Folded it, very gently, back from the ruthless lines of his face.
"I don't love you for the things you do, Kaz. I love you."
His eyes came open then, accusing and so, so hurt. "And what am I, if not my actions? Men fancy themselves all sorts of things, but the only truth is in what they do. It's the only real way what's inside a man shows itself." He reared away from her still-hovering hand. "There's nothing to love about a person besides their actions. Anything else is fairy tales and fantasy."
"Oh, nonsense." She scoffed. "If that were true, you'd have fallen in love with Nina."
"What? Nina!" He came all the way out of his seat at that, his cane tipping over where it had been resting against his desk.
Inej folded her arms and lifted her chin. "She has the curves of a woman where I fit into boy's clothes, flirts and plays in that careless way you respect. She enjoys a good fight as much as a good waffle. She didn't just steal a single tank, she leveled an entire army right in front of you. If you were going to fall in love with someone's actions, you'd have fallen for Nina."
She gestured, sharp and impatient.
"Matthias spent his whole life hunting, imprisoning, and executing her people. If people came to love each other for what they did, those two would sooner love a stone, but they were alight for each other in a way the sun itself couldn't have matched. No, if people fell in love with each other's actions, you'd have fallen for Nina." She hopped off his desk. "And I'd have chosen Wylan."
"I rather think Jesper might have had something to say about that," Kaz muttered. He reached to go back to his desk and she slid between him and his work. Between whatever artificial end he might put to a conversation they both knew wasn't over.
She laid a quiet hand on his chest, though it he wasn't steady enough to be touched yet and she knew it. He was so much taller than her when she came this close. She forgot sometimes, how he could loom over her.
She gave him a single phrase, the syllables liquid on her tongue despite how long it had been since she'd heard another say it. Kaz always knew more Suli than she expected, especially lately, but the slight crease between his brows told her that this wasn't one of the ones he knew.
"Like calls to like," she repeated in Kerch. "Not that you want to admit it." Her fingers curled softly against his shirt, the way they'd once curled around his gloved hand. Their first touch, truly. Chosen, rather than a matter of life and death. "I used to think the idea you couldn't stand was that there might be part of me in you." She stepped back, tipping her head so her braid fell over one shoulder. "Now I wonder, if it's not that you hate how much of you is actually in me."
Those long lashes only flickered once in response, but his voice was cold.
"Why, because you've killed?" He laughed. "Killing isn't the worst thing in the world, Inej."
"No? And what is?" She was abruptly furious again, the way only Kaz could pull out of her.
"Slaving. Stripping a man's will from him." His eyes traced her face. Distant and yet still giving him away. "Torture, after an hour or two. The first twenty minutes is really all you need to find out anything on earth, if you do it right." He snapped his fingers. "After that, it's just for you."
Her own laugh hurt, it was so brittle. "No more than twenty minutes of torture. What a line to draw, Kaz."
"At least it's my own line." His voice quivered with fury. "Chosen myself, from hard experience and harder mistakes. Not fed to me by some greased-palmed, corrupt priest or hypocritical parent." He stepped into her, the words spat furiously into her face. It was like he expected her to give in, back away from him.
Instead, she lifted her chin, stubborn. "You're always rushing to remind me how monstrous you are. Because deep down, I think you're afraid you're not."
"No." His denial was a prison door, clanging shut. "Because if I'm not, neither of us will live to regret it, not in this place. And I won't let that happen. I've too many enemies, Inej. If I find mercy now, they'll skin me alive, and flay you right in front of my eyes to drive the point home. You can want me like this, or you can want me dead."
Silence hung after that, because he wasn't wrong.
"But I see you wishing." His next words came out black, like an accusation. Like the ugliest truth he'd ever told her, and for all his faults and omissions, Kaz never lied to her. "That I was…"
He didn't finish. Instead, he took up his cane and he turned his back to her, limped away.
"That you were what, Kaz?" she whispered, though she was afraid she knew. The breeze from the open window was colder than rain, now. It smelled more like ice.
"It's only been you, for me. Did you know that?" He turned, the ripped sleeve of his shirt the only line of him that wasn't impeccable. "There's something broken in me. Missing, just like mercy and goodness. When I was young, younger than you at the Menagerie, I thought there might be a girl…" He paused and Inej's eyes widened. She'd never heard him talk about another woman, never. She was rabid to hear more and at the same time, she couldn't stand to hear who. "But once I was older, and saw more of how men wanted women, I realize what I felt for her was probably closer to what starts a friendship, with normal people." He gestured downward, with the hand that held his cane. "It never moved. Didn't bother me the way other boys' did to them, not until…"
Her heart throbbed. "When."
So many possible answers. So many things it could mean.
"The bathroom at the Geldrenner."
New breath found her lungs, but surprise, too. "Not when you saw me at the Menagerie, all on display in kohl and the barest scraps of silk?" She snorted. "You can say it, Kaz."
"As a Suli lynx with misery in your eyes?" He scoffed. "No."
He turned to face her again and all the relief she'd just felt dissipated like steam and that dire something was hanging in the air between them again. That very final something.
"If it's not you, for me, it's no one," he said, just like that. "But you hate what I am."
She'd never taken a wound that hurt half so much.
Her face twisted, and she slammed both of her hands flat into his chest, knocking him back an uneven step. "Shevrati," she cursed. Know nothing.
"But I'm not wrong, am I, Inej? You just don't—" She didn't let him finish. She tore a kiss from his mouth, their teeth clashing hard and drawing blood from anything caught between.
"Inajiatu," she swore, shoving him back another step. He stumbled over his cane, knocking it to the ground. Deaf to the Gods. She kept coming, ripping buttons blind off his shirt as it fisted in both her hands. When he slammed against a wall, it rattled the whole Crow Club. Her shoe scraped at the wool of his trousers as she half-climbed him, not giving him space even to breathe between the violence of her kisses. His breath hissed inward.
"You're afraid of the light in you," she accused. "The dark in me. But I'm not." She tore off her shirt.
"And I should be," he said, into the gap she shouldn't have left him. She abandoned the shirt half off one shoulder and surged back toward his mouth. But it was too late, because he was already on the counter-attack. "If you keep making me wish I was something I'm not, it's going to get us both killed."
Even she hesitated at that, her fingers stuttered into stillness where they'd reached for his jaw.
"He looked at you yesterday, did you see that?" His eyes glittered darkly. "When I told him about the orphanage. He looked to you to see if I meant it. You're becoming my weakness, Inej. Van Eck saw it and it nearly cost your legs. Now…" He shook his head. "If you start believing I have good in me, they'll see it in you, and they'll stop fearing me." He nodded, once. "They'll kill us slow, after that."
His clothes were still askew from her assault, hers half-off. She'd paused too long now, let his words get too deep under her skin.
"If I can find your parents, our enemies can, too." Kaz's assault marched on, precise and cruel. He was winning, and he knew it. He shook his hair back from his eyes, steady and cold once more. "You should have kept hating me."
"You don't mean that." He couldn't. She knew why he was doing this, dammit, and he didn't mean it. Did he?
He looked at her, and it all but drew blood. "Don't I?" The words dripped.
She slapped him.
His cheekbone felt hollow under the same hand that had stroked it so many times. The pain shocked through both of them as their bare skin collided.
His eyes flared with energy, and for just an instant she thought he was going to kiss her back.
"Don't run game on me, Brekker." She grabbed him by the lapels of his shirt, shook him. "You want me to call your bluff. That way you're forced to do your worst. But you're forgetting one thing. We're not on opposite sides."
"Don't you get it, Inej," he rasped. "We ARE opposite sides."
His words hit her so hard she had to grip his shirt to keep herself on her feet.
Tears were streaming down her cheeks now despite her best attempts at keeping her face stiff, untouched. He didn't fight her back because he didn't need to. Kaz's levers were so much stronger than even his fists could ever be and he knew it. He liked to win without even lifting a finger. But he wasn't enjoying winning this time. Even she could tell that.
She didn't know how to argue with him, he'd come at her from so many sides at once. And all she could think was how much it would hurt to think the person you loved despised who you were. How much it did hurt that he'd finally told her she was the only one for him…right before he pushed her away.
"When I was in the hold of that ship," she whispered. "They threw the food down to us. Barely a few crusts, for dozens of us, so we'd have to fight for it. I was the smallest, barely fourteen, and I won. Nearly every time. There's a reason I was still alive to make it to that day being sold on the dock to Tante Heleen." She swallowed. "If that was my reward for stealing food from the mouths of other kidnapped children, it was just indeed."
She raised her face, and she could feel the steadiness of her saints coming back into her, though she hadn't even had the breath to call them by name.
"You gave Wylan the crow and cup tattoo, even though you never told him you didn't enter his name on the gang's rolls. So he wouldn't have to be beaten through the gauntlet if he ever wanted to leave, but he would feel like he belonged. He was claimed. After his father betrayed him, and he felt adrift in the world." She straightened, her hands gentling on his shirt. "We're neither one of us as simple as you'd paint us, Kaz."
His eyes were like a cornered animal, and he was Kaz. He was capable of damned near anything when he was backed up to a cliff, and she knew it. This was dangerous now. And still she pressed on.
"Do you remember what you told me when I said I didn't want to kill?"
"I probably taught you how to hamstring a man instead." His voice was gravel and graves.
"But you never told me you'd force me to. You just said, 'you stop your enemies any way you can.' The way you looked at me, Kaz…" She shook her head. "You knew some people would never stop as long as they drew breath. You knew, even then, that I'd have to."
"Yes."
"And you knew I could."
His eyes flickered.
"Don't deny it. It wasn't just that I'd be a good spy, what you saw about me that day in the Menagerie." She drew closer, their lips within a breath of each other now. "Your dark sees mine, but you thrill to mine and despise your own."
His chuckle was too sparse, too dry to convince her. "You're wrong. I don't regret my darkest sides. I invite them to dinner and serve them two desserts."
"Then why," she whispered, "are you trying to force me away from them?"
They were both breathing harder than they should have been, for two people only standing against a wall. The clock struck one.
"Slap me," she said. "If you're so evil as they say, slap me across the face and I'll know I truly should leave you."
She took one step back, enough that he could wind up properly, and squared her shoulders. His jaw flexed, and she saw it in him. His first, knee-jerk reaction of horror and right on its heels, the calculation. He was thinking it over, weighing it, and she pushed harder because it made her furious. This was her exact point, though she hadn't yet found the words to explain it to him.
"We both know you're capable of it, Kaz. Of any amount of evil, once you have your reasons. So hurt me. Hurt me badly enough that I'll go."
He stared at her, poised like a wild animal on the edge of exploding. His chest heaving, eyes two black stars ripped in a night that had gone ugly. She braced herself.
And he broke. His head falling to take her mouth, his hands fleeing until they could be buried in her hair, thumbs cradling her face. He kissed her softer than even their first time, deep and aching and bittersweet like a quavering groan. And she caught his tongue with hers, because she knew how to make the fire burn the deepest in him now, this complicated, tormented man.
"Goddamn it, Inej." He boosted her up on him, his devious hands caressing her ass. He staggered forward as she bit at his neck, licking the hurt places. They fetched up against his desk and she flexed her legs, driving him against her before he was ready. The leather on his hands caught in the loops of her braid and pain lit up her scalp, urging her on as he tried to fight out of his gloves to feel her without ever stopping the kiss.
"You lied to me." She threw what was left of her shirt away and ripped open the end of the binding across her breasts, letting it unravel as it would around her waist.
"Never."
"You said you wanted me to leave you." Her voice came out smaller now, the hurt in it bared to him now that she knew she'd won.
He'd ducked his head to her now-bared breasts and she groaned at what he did to her in response to her accusation, then groaned for a different reason when he lifted his head to clarify, "I never said I wanted that." He dipped back to her breasts. "Just that we'd, you know, likely die if you didn't."
"Fashimita," she accused, swearing at him more in Suli and she swore she felt him kick harder in his pants in response to the insult. She had his shirt off now and his gloves were on the floor. She sucked on the place just beneath his ear that always brought him strongly into the game. "You could find a way to keep us both alive if we were buried alive in the open ocean. Don't try and pretend it's beyond you."
"Tried finding a way to breath underwater already," he reminded her. "I nearly drowned pushing the limits of the baileen, if you recall."
"Nearly." She bit at his ear. "Counts for nothing."
"Inej…" It sounded like begging, like pain he could no longer keep in. "Let me do this. This one last thing for you. I can't be a good man. But I can do this." His hands had gone to fists at her sides, pressing into the hard wood of the desk instead of her hips.
She cupped his head against her neck, the bump of a scar at his hairline tickling her throat. The two of them against the world, the way it had felt for years. Without this, she didn't know what she would do.
"No one fits me like you," she whispered, and that must have been Suli that he knew, because he stiffened. It was hard to speak words this vulnerable in Kerch. Easier when she could pretend he might not understand her, that her begging would remain her secret. But for what she said next, she forced herself to switch to their shared language.
"Don't make me go." She stroked his hair, the soft place beneath that he'd let no one else shave except for her. "If anyone would come at me to get to you, I will give them a fight like none they've ever known, and they'll go crying back to their mothers when I'm finished."
His breath broke ragged against the upper curves of her bared breasts. "My queen. Queen of the Barrel and the high seas besides. Gods damn it all, I love you."
She smiled fiercely. "I know."
They didn't make it to the bed.
He had to use a dagger on her leathers when they caught in a twist at his haste in removing them, and he took her still half-dressed with the knot of his bad knee digging into the floor with every thrust. Her climber's hands holding him to her, begging in one more language yet for him to stay.
He fit her, just like she'd said. Like no one else could. Deeper than she'd allow anyone else. Fiercer and more animalistic than she ever thought she'd want.
He groaned at the end, as he spilled into her. "I would have tried to be a good man for you," he panted, the words almost lost to the sawing of both their breath. "If I could. If it was safe."
"I know," she whispered, squeezing him way down deep where she'd allow no other man, not so long as she lived. "I know who you are, Kaz Brekker."
His head fell against her breastbone and she thought she felt him leave the ghost of a kiss there, as both their breathing slowed. The floorboards grew cold again, gradually, beneath her bottom.
"Are you hurt?" His voice was rougher than usual, like they'd torn something loose in the depths of that argument. "Did that—I shouldn't have let it get so rough."
She kissed him with a skim of teeth, just beneath his ear. "You would never hurt me." Not with his hands rather than his words or his endless, ruthless schemes. She'd known it even as she'd stood up and taunted him to slap her. He was capable of it; she hadn't lied about that, either. But he would not.
She rolled to her feet, kicking away what was left of her pants.
"Come to sleep, my love." It was another Suli word she used for it, but this one she'd taught him before. It didn't just mean affection. It meant someone who traveled your same road with you. Knew its bumps. Fixed your wagon when it was broken. Shared the last scrap when the food ran out. It was Suli for Crows, he'd teased her, once when he was in a lighter mood.
She took him to bed. His knee nearly sent him back to the floor, after so much abuse, and their clothes were a ruin. Inej was moving as smoothly as ever, quiet like she could fade between shadows, all so that she could listen.
That dire sense of finality that had been hanging in the air was gone, like a demon that had been banished. But she could hear the tick of the clock once more, and Kaz's eyes slipped past hers even when he folded her in close to his chest, closer than they usually ever slept for fear of lashing out in their nightmares.
She knew which part was still turning over in his head. Was aware that she'd won one argument and was somehow still losing the other.
It was silent after they went to bed. For a long time, while he feigned sleep and she thought on it, his arm warm around her waist like the sweetest, sharpest reminder of what she could lose, if she couldn't make him understand this.
Finally, she turned on her side. He opened his eyes without hesitation, as if he, too, had been listening to the tick of that clock.
"I shouldn't," she said. "And maybe you're right. Maybe it doesn't make any sense."
He nodded, once.
"When I kill," she tried to explain, "when I cross the lines of what I know is right and wrong, I'm disgusted with myself. And I keep waiting…I know I should feel that same disgust when you do it, too." His lashes flickered, the tiniest tell of him absorbing the hit. "But I can't. It doesn't translate that way, when it's you. I know what you are, Kaz. I—" She rolled on her back, licked her lips. Stared at the ceiling. "I like it," she admitted, with a pang like her Saints might be listening.
"The way I know you'll always win, how cleverly you outmaneuver our enemies. That look you get in your eye when the most devious ideas occur to you." She paused. "It's only sometimes, when you go too far…and even that's not what you think. I don't hate it, hate you. I just worry…"
"Worry." His voice was caustic, skeptical. She could tell he didn't believe her. "Hate me, Inej," he offered. And when she rolled back to see him, his eyes were dark, very serious. "But don't lie to keep the peace. Not with me."
"I can't hate you," she breathed. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. I worry because…I don't think you even know it yourself, not really. How often you're doing things you don't want to do."
His face slammed shut all in an instant, withdrawing even further from her though he hadn't left the bed. "I don't do these things by accident, Inej."
"You always have your reasons, I know. But I don't think you're choosing as much as you think you are."
She swept her hair back over her shoulder, propped herself up on an elbow so she could see him in the bare bar of moonlight that stretched from the single window.
"The way you can make yourself do things… with what you told me about swimming back from Reaper's Barge. With the Ice Palace. I think the cap sort of just…came off you somehow. You realized there was nothing you couldn't do, if you had to. And I don't think you ever stopped to think after that, not really, if you wanted to be doing them."
"I told you," he said, an edge to his voice. "They're my choices, Inej. Tell yourself whatever you want in order to sleep at night but you don't have to make excuses to my face about why it's okay. I never pretended to be a good man."
She touched his lips with one thumb, skimming over them. Her chest felt dark, and troubled. "There are choices and choices, though, Kaz. You know, at the Menagerie, they didn't have to beat me every night."
He didn't stiffen, but a certain kind of electricity came over his body. He never asked her to stop, when she spoke of her time there. Always listened. Still, she could tell it scraped in him nearly as sharply as it did to her. This time, she said it anyway.
"Some nights they had to force me," she said, "but more often than not, I made myself do what they wanted. Because I didn't want to take another whipping, because I knew I couldn't escape when I'd already tried every vent and alley and trick. Because I had to earn more money for the scraps of a hope of being free someday." Her thumb slipped away from his lips. "All the things I told myself, but it was me who lay down in that bed every night, and it was worse. It was worse to get in the bed myself than to be held down."
He was trembling now. Like a floor trembled before a bomb burst. She held his eyes.
"You're a rich man, Kaz. You told me once that means you get to do what you want now. If it's too dangerous to be who you want to be in Ketterdam, let's go. Between the two of us, we speak the languages of nearly every continent. I have a ship. Anywhere we land, anything we choose to do, you'll remake yourself as a richer man. A powerful man."
She took a breath. "But please, Kaz. Don't keep making yourself do things you don't want, like burning children. No matter to what ends."
The wind whipped past in the alley outside, rattling the panes of his open window. He didn't blink.
"I see it in you and that's what frightens me," Inej said. "Not the fact that you can do it. But the way it twists in you, when you make yourself do those dirty things. That's what I hate, Kaz. It's not that I hate what you do, even when I do. It's that I hate what it might do to you."
She tipped her forehead against his, frustrated and desperate. If this didn't work, he'd find some new way to drive her away and next time, it might be so clever that she didn't see it coming.
"Because I love you, in a way that slips between my words so I can't tell it to you. I've been trying all night. But I don't know how to make you hear it, when to me, it doesn't explain itself in words. It just is."
Her nails traced his cheek, just a scrap of a touch like a crescent moon glimmering high in his sky.
Kaz caught her hand, and he took it back to his cheek. "Maybe," he said. "You can. Maybe you did."
#
Author's Note: I do realize there's a double standard about relationship violence being portrayed in this fic. I'm not saying it's right, but Inej does know how to get through to Kaz. And like she says herself, she's not purely good.
Apologies for my made up Suli words. I wanted to include them, and truly have no idea how to begin inventing a fake language.