Archive of Our Own ^beta

“What happens when you take their money and you become a rich man?”

“Then you can steal my secrets, too.”

i.

The first secret she steals from Kaz comes long before he’s rich.

She’s fifteen, shaking rainwater from her hood as she slips through his attic window intending to vomit information at him and then escape down to her little closet of a room for a rest and a change of clothes. Her mouth is already open and Councilman Visser’s particularly embarrassing sexual proclivities are on her tongue before she notices what’s strange about the scene before her.

Kaz is seated at his makeshift desk like normal, and while his hair is losing its careful control and falling over his forehead in waves, that’s not that unusual for these wee hours of the morning. No, what’s strange is his posture—not hunched low over his ledgers in a way that makes her back hurt just to look at him, but slouched so far back in his seat that he’s nearly off of it, legs akimbo in front of him. His eyes flick to her briefly, but he doesn’t rush to sit up in a more dignified manner, just registers her presence in a bored manner and returns his gaze to his hands in front of him.

His bare hands.

That’s definitely the strangest part of this whole equation, and the sight of his pale fingers in the dimness of the oil lamp casts all thoughts of Councilman Visser or the comfort of her warm bed out of her mind.

Kaz flexes the fingers of his left hand, turning his wrists so he’s looking at the backs of his hands rather than his palms, and grimaces a bit. “Got into it with a patron at the Club,” he says mildly to his own hands, although she’s sure the words must be for her benefit. “Bastard dislocated my finger.”

Inej stands there in silence, waiting for him to sit up and acknowledge her so she can begin her report. Not that that’s standard practice or anything, but recently she’s been trying to condition him into being polite to her by withholding information until he behaves like a human being. The jury is still out on whether this is an achievable goal.

He does turn to her, but only to hold his hands toward her, palms out. “Do these look the same to you?”

She takes it as the invitation it is and moves closer. Automatically, she reaches out to take his hand in hers, to inspect it the way she would for one of her cousins who had injured themselves in the practice tent, but before she makes contact with it, he wrenches his hands back toward him, holding them up near his shoulders as if he’s being arrested.

“Ah-ah,” he chides, although there’s an edge in his voice and a seriousness in his eyes. “Don’t touch the masterpieces. Haven’t you ever been to a museum?”

Inej rolls her eyes, no longer afraid of his disapproval the way she had been in those first days out of the Menagerie. It’s amazing how quickly she became acclimated to his prickly personality, inoculated against it through exposure like a childhood disease.

She places her hands on her knees instead, leaning forward over his hands as he holds them out again, palms flat toward the ceiling this time. She knows she’s supposed to be comparing the angle of his fingers to ensure everything is back in place, but she can’t help but be distracted by the very sight of his hands at all.

She’d heard ridiculous rumors about the gloves while in the Menagerie, and nobody in the Dregs seemed willing or able to dispel any of them. The day she’d gotten her first pay from Kaz, she’d been cajoled by Jesper into placing a bet on which of the rumors she believed to be true. She’d put down two kruge on poor circulation, because she liked Jesper and hadn’t wanted to turn him down when he was going out of his way to include her, though he’d been displeased with both the size of her bet and her lack of imagination when it came to the rumors. Personally I’ve got fifty on claws, he’d said, marking her down in a little leather-bound notebook.

Well, that’s fifty kruge Jesper’s never going to see again, she thinks absently.

Kaz’s fingers are long and pale, nary a claw in sight, and no bloodstains either. The pads of his fingers lack the calluses that hers have gained back after the last eight months of knife-wielding and wall-scaling, and for a moment she thinks that they must be incredibly soft. It’s a very odd thing to think about the boy in front of her.

“Which finger was it?” she asks, trying to focus on the task at hand.

“Left middle,” he says, then adds, “I need that one.”

She rolls her eyes again and examines the finger in question, comparing it to the others. It’s a bit swollen, the first knuckle wider than on the other hand, but it looks straight. “Can you move it?”

He does so, forming a quick fist and then opening it up again. “It’s stiff, but it moves alright.”

Inej nods, then stands all the way up. “It looks like it’s back in right. You should probably ice it, though. Keep the swelling down.”

He gives a noncommittal grunt, turning towards his desk and picking up his pen in his left hand. He writes a number in the debit column of the day’s ledger, then sighs and switches the pen to his right hand. “What’d you get on Visser?” he asks, not looking up at her.

She heaves a sigh and retreats to the far side of his desk, sinking onto the apple crate he keeps there and picking up a spare pen to play with as she fills him in on what she saw through Visser’s bedroom window that she’d really not like to relive now.

As she does, she can’t help but sneak glances at his hands as they move down the page, scrawling debits and credits and balancing figures. No claws, no bloodstains. No terrible scarring, although she does see a shiny rope of scar tissue across the knuckles of his right hand. It mars the pristine white skin of his hands—even paler than the rest of him—but it’s certainly not so ugly that he would try to hide it away behind black leather.

They’re nice hands, she thinks absentmindedly. As far as hands go, anyway.

She thinks about the way he pulled back when she reached for him—it gives credence to the rumors of his touch burning like brimstone, but she’s always thought that one was particularly far-fetched and isn’t inclined to reconsider it now. Maybe she was right about poor circulation, or maybe he’s strange about illness, or maybe he’s simply such a kleptomaniac that he’s decided it’s best to take constant precaution against leaving any fingerprints.

Whatever it is, it’s really none of her business.

When she’s finished her report and Kaz dismisses her to go get some rest, his pen finally comes to a halt for a minute. He keeps his eyes firmly on the ledger in front of him, but there’s something in his voice that catches her attention when he says, “I trust you won’t say anything.”

He doesn’t want anyone to know, she realizes. To know what? That he’s a boy of flesh and blood after all? That the gloves mean something to him that isn’t immediately visible to the human eye?

“That your middle finger is out of commission?” she fills in instead, allowing him the dignity of his secrets. “Of course not. Wouldn’t want anyone getting too complacent thinking you won’t direct it at them.”

One side of his mouth hitches up in a smirk. “I knew you’d understand.”

As she heads down the stairs, the dampness of her clothes registering for the first time since she swung in through his window, she thinks that maybe she does. She doesn’t have all the pieces, or even most of them, but something in her understanding of him has shifted, and she won’t take that lightly.

ii.

The Ketterdam Suite of the Gedrenner Hotel has been a hive of bustling activity since they arrived two days ago, but in the small hours of the morning, Inej slips back in through the window after rendezvousing with Pim to discuss the situation in the Barrel and finds it silent. Kuwei has curled up on the chaise lounge in the corner of the suite’s study, and in the study she finds that Jesper and Wylan have shoved two couches close together so their hands can meet in the middle. Colm’s bedroom door is shut, as is the one Nina and Matthias have claimed, and through the slightly ajar door to the smallest bedroom, she can see Kaz’s cane propped against the foot of the bed. When she leans, she catches sight of him sitting up on the bed, kneading at his bad knee.

She should leave it alone. They haven’t spoken, not really, since the bathroom. He’s closed up like a perennial flower preparing for the winter, and the only words they’ve exchanged have been strictly related to the job, anything that happened in that bathroom strictly off limits to him. Which is fine. She needs the job to keep her from reliving the feel of his lips against her neck, his hair tickling the underside of her jaw, the brush of his hips against the insides of her thighs when he leaned in close. If she thinks about any of those things, she’ll go mad.

She hasn’t been able to stop thinking about them.

He’d tried, and she desperately wants to try again, but he doesn’t seem willing to let himself. He’s written that vulnerability off as a failed experiment, and it hurts to be alone with him and feel him building the wall back up between them one brick at a time, sealing himself into a prison of his own making.

She’s so tired of hurting around him, and of the way she’s more likely to start thinking about all those things she shouldn’t when he’s near. So she stays away. When necessary, they talk about the job. She doesn’t ask how he’s doing, whether his broken ribs are still throbbing or if Genya Safin fixed them. She doesn’t comment on the deep purple bruise spreading across his cheekbone and up over the bridge of his nose. She doesn’t let herself imagine pressing her lips to it, kissing it better the way her parents used to do for all her scraped knees as a child.

In the silence of the Geldrenner at night, devoid of distractions, watching him lean over his knee, his half-shadowed face twisted in pain, she feels her resolve weaken.

Room service had brought up a chilled bottle of champagne earlier in the evening, and the ice in the bucket is still mostly intact. She shucks some of it into one of the towels they didn’t end up using for bandages and carries it down the hall until she stands silently on the other side of the doorframe, where she pauses. She doesn’t know why. It’s been ages since she felt she had to be invited into his space.

“Either come in or leave,” Kaz says wearily, not turning to look at her. “Don’t just stand there.”

She pushes the door open and walks in on silent feet. “How do you do that?”

She’s asked the question a thousand times, her inability to sneak up on him an infuriating exception to her general invisibility, and she doesn’t expect an answer. He’s never given her one before.

“I don’t know,” he says, his voice wearier than she thinks she’s ever heard it. “I just do.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you admit you don’t know something,” she says, coming to stand in front of him.

The bruise across his cheekbone looks worse than ever in this light, and the open collar of his shirt reveals the edge of another creeping across his collarbone. Briefly and vividly, she imagines him stripping his shirt off and her standing between his legs, tending to his wounds the way he did hers. She imagines leaning forward to press her lips against the spot where his neck meets his shoulder, returning the favor. She wonders if it would drive him as mad as it drives her.

“There’s a first time for everything,” he says, shattering her little fantasy.

She clears her throat and holds out the bundle of ice. “For your knee.” Her eyes travel over his face. “Or your cheek. That could probably use it, too.”

He chuckles, then winces when his split lip opens, blood bubbling up on the surface and reflecting the dim light from the hallway. He decides to plop the bundle over his knee, extending it in front of him with a sigh. “You should sleep,” he says.

“So should you.” He gives no response, his gaze far away. Scheming face has taken up permanent residence on his features lately, though tonight it’s sharing the floor with exhaustion. “I mean it,” she says quietly. “We’ll never have a chance of pulling this off if you put yourself in an early grave from sleep deprivation.”

He doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring, and she thinks she can see the gears turning behind his dark eyes.

She wants to trust him. Wants to believe with all her heart that he knows what he’s doing, that he’s as confident as he always is that he’ll maneuver all the pieces available to him and come out on top. Unfortunately she knows him too well to deny what she sees in his eyes.

“Kaz,” she whispers, her resolve to never need anything from him again cracking under the weight of her exhaustion, “tell me this plan is going to work. Tell me you can see something I don’t.”

He doesn’t look at her, just adjusts the ice on his knee. “You don’t like it when I lie to you,” he says, his voice scraping over his throat like a rake over stones.

He’s right. And though the words themselves are no comfort, though the reassurance she was seeking is nowhere to be found, some part of her softens at the reminder of how well he knows her.

She reaches out into the gulf he’s enforced between them since the bathroom and touches two fingers to his shoulder, feeling the slightest heat of him through the fabric of his shirt. His eyes follow her fingers without turning his head, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Get some sleep, Kaz,” she says eventually, and leaves, closing the door behind her.

When she wakes a few hours later, she finds him running through the auction with Matthias, all the confidence in the world back in his eyes. She knows the uncertainty he showed last night was a vulnerability, and she’s sure he’d call it a weakness. Whatever the term, it will stay between them, she reassures him with her eyes when he finds hers across the sitting room.

He gives her the barest nod of thanks, and the plan moves forward, a boulder rolling downhill, unable to be stopped until it reaches its destination.

iii.

On the docks at Fifth Harbor, just past sunrise, she discovers his hands are indeed as soft as she once suspected.

She learns a lot about him that day, and a lot about herself. She learns about the long memory of crows, and about the incredible lengths he’ll go to in order to make her happy, and that she’s not nearly so willing to walk away from this city as she’d once thought. She sees miracles in the form of her parents flying up the quay toward her, and in a ship in the harbor bearing her old moniker, and in Kaz’s fingers on the knot of his tie and the nervousness in his voice.

She keeps coming back to the hands, though.

Once she’s felt their touch, shaking and unsure but there, once she’s held them in her own, she never wants to let go. She wants to hold his hand and stroll along the docks, looking out at the gulls in the harbor. She wants to squeeze into one side of a booth in the Kooperom instead of sitting across from him so she can go on holding him. She wants to sit on the overstuffed couches in the Van Eck mansion with him and hold his hand for hours, no matter how sweaty their palms get.

She doesn’t end up doing any of those things—they’re all far too public for the fragile beginnings of this relationship to withstand. But on the rare moments they find themselves completely alone, she finds herself staring at his gloves, silently willing him to take them off so she can touch him again. And as often as he can, he does.

She slides in through his attic window while he pretends to be working, though she knows it’s all for show. When he actually wants to get work done nowadays, he does it in the office he’d usurped from Per Haskell, where he can better keep tabs on all the Dregs roaming about the Slat. This old makeshift desk is reserved for helping her sort through sordid evidence and for the pretense of work while he waits patiently for her to distract him.

She perches on the old apple crate and leans her elbows on his desk, hands out, expectant. He smirks and sets his pen aside, laying one gloved hand in her waiting palm. This is a ritual they’ve been developing, like a sort of mating dance, and it never fails to send a thrill through her.

Delicately, she slides the button at his wrist free of its hole, then tugs gently at each of his fingers until the glove pulls free, slowly revealing his pale hand underneath. She places his hand back down on the desk, and he gives her the other one to repeat the actions.

She doesn’t let this one go, cradling it reverently in her palm, hovering her other hand over his upturned palm, letting the anticipation build within her. Then, she carefully traces her index finger along the lengths of each of his, one by one, over the ridges of his knuckles and to the pads of his fingers, trying to make out the swirls of his fingerprints in the dim light.

It reminds her of Elder Nereli, an ancient woman back in the caravan who could read the future in the palm of a hand. She could have made a fortune on it by peddling her skill to the Ravkan crowds, but she’d refused. It was a sacred skill, to be used only when at a real crossroads, not to tell a giggling teenage girl when she would meet her true love.

(Before Inej had embarked on her first journey aboard the Wraith, her mother had told her she ought to go see Elder Nereli, but she had turned her down, more interested in finding out the future for herself.)

There are plenty of Suli who do not share Nereli’s integrity when it comes to her talents, and plenty more who are willing to fake it for a quick coin, and so Suli fortune telling has become a booming business, even here across the True Sea. She’s always been disgusted by the people in the jackal masks down on the Staves, even remembers an argument with Kaz about it clear as day. But some silly part of her—giddy on Kaz’s hand cradled in her palm—finds it hard to cling to her moral stance on fake fortune telling in this moment.

Forgive me, Elder Nereli, she thinks silently as she traces one of the lines on Kaz’s palm. “Did you know that this is your life line?” she asks, making her voice playfully mysterious.

He raises an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

“It corresponds to the length of your life.” He frowns, and she teases, “For someone who takes such foolish risks, this one is promising.”

He rolls his eyes at her, and she continues, tracing another line on his palm. “This is your heart line. It tells whether you’ll be lucky in love.”

“Oh?” When she darts a look at him, he’s attempting a coolly raised eyebrow, but there’s the faintest hint of pink spreading over his cheeks.

“Mmhmm. I’m no expert, but the outcome looks good.”

She has no idea how to read palms, isn’t even sure which line is which, but the way he ducks his head when she says this is worth it. She bites her lip to keep from grinning too wide, but it tries valiantly to escape the cage of her teeth. Her fingers still on his hand, too preoccupied with watching his face as he pulls composure on like a mask.

“What, uh,” he says, clearing his throat. “What’s that one?” He jerks his chin toward another line on his hand.

“This one?” She traces the line along the center of his palm with a fingernail. He nods, swallowing audibly. “That’s your audacity line. Yours is abnormally long.”

He lets out a delighted guffaw, and she adds the sound of it to all the other little intricacies she’s cataloged about him over the years.

iv.

Inej slides into the seat across from Kaz’s desk in Per Haskell’s old office and sets a small box wrapped in paper on the ledger he’s writing in. He looks at it, then up at her, and then pokes at it with the end of his pen.

“Nachtspel was four days ago,” he says. “And I recall you already gave me something.”

“I know. This is for a different holiday.”

He snorts. “Some obscure saint I’ve never heard of?”

She pushes the box a little closer to him. “Happy birthday, Kaz.”

The self-satisfied grin on his face slips, and he looks for a moment like a thief who has been caught unawares by the early arrival of the master of the house he was robbing. Well, it’s nice to know her source was reliable.

It was two months ago, when she was last in port. Wylan, who had initially set his father up with a mediocre defense attorney and then attempted to steadfastly ignore everything having to do with the upcoming trial, had been gripped by a sudden and intense anxiety of the unknown and asked her to break into the law offices and find out what kind of evidence was going to be presented. She’d obliged him, of course, and had been happy to report back that his lawyer seemed to be going for an insanity defense—against Van Eck’s wishes—and that nothing terribly personal about Wylan was likely to come up.

In the gloom cast by her bone light in the lawyer’s office well past midnight, she’d happened upon a yellowing folder that made her heart leap up into her throat when she saw it.

Brekker, Kaz was written in no-nonsense hand along the label, and she’d flung it open without thinking, ready to destroy any evidence, if need be.

There was nothing in the folder linking him to Van Eck’s various crimes—neither real nor forged. Instead, she found an arrest intake record dated nearly eight years ago. Her eyes had taken in the fields, all filled out in that steady hand, a strange sinking feeling in her gut the further she read.

Name listed the one she’d always known him as, but suspected was not quite the truth. Height and weight (approx) were both shockingly sad in how small the numbers were. There was a terribly clinical N/A written in the current residence section, and the spot for the names of parents or guardians was left blank. Comparing the date of birth to the date on the intake form had told her he was only weeks past his tenth birthday.

There was a part of her that had known that this was an invasion of his privacy, that she wasn’t entitled to this horribly sad information about his past. Another part of her simply needed to know, and she’d flipped through a release of custody form dated twelve days after the first one, another arrest record, and a transfer of custody to the refuge for criminal boys for a sentence of sixty days before she’d forced herself to shut the file and put it back where she’d found it.

Since then, she’s been wracked with guilt for snooping and for not telling him about said snooping, on top of being horribly sad about the realities she’d found in that folder. All in all, it’s made for a miserable few weeks.

The one saving grace of her ill-informed snooping was that the folder did reveal a tidbit of information that she’s been trying to work out for years now, in the form of Kaz’s birthday.

“How do you know that?” he asks her now, looking at her the way he looks at a particularly difficult safe to crack.

“You always said that when you were rich I’d be allowed to steal your secrets.” He narrows his eyes at her, and she sighs. “I found your arrest records. In the office of Van Eck’s lawyer.”

“Oh,” he says, not as bothered as she’d have thought he would be. In fact, his eyebrows are unknitting themselves now that she’s revealed she didn’t divine this information from his coffee grounds or something. “Yeah, I knew he had those.”

Inej chews on her lip. “I also may have read through a few of them,” she admits.

He shrugs. “Technically it’s a matter of public record.” He picks up the box she’s laid in front of him and turns it over in his hands, inspecting it.

“I know, but…you didn’t give me permission to know those things. I should have respected your privacy.”

His eyes find hers, his hands stilling on the gift. “I don’t mind.”

“It’s okay if you do.” She can’t believe he’s taking this so well. Jesper once asked him when his birthday was and he’d said he’d have to read that information off his gravestone. When Jesper had pointed out that Ketterdam paupers don’t have gravestones, Kaz had said, well, then you’d better make peace with the mystery, oughtn’t you?

“Well, I don’t. Can I open my present now?”

She blinks at him. “Sure.”

He tears into the paper and unearths a new fancy locking mechanism from the Shu Han that doesn’t make use of a key. It takes a moment for him to register what it is, and then his eyes light up, just like she hoped they would when she found it. He shoves his ledgers off to the side and holds the mechanism up at eye level, scrutinizing it from every angle.

She should have finished the conversation before she let him open it. He’ll be hopeless to try to reach until he figures out how it works. She has to try to head him off before he builds up too full a head of steam. “Kaz,” she says, then has to repeat herself when he doesn’t acknowledge her. “Kaz.”

He tears his eyes away and finds her gaze. “Oh, right,” he says and points a finger at her. “Thank you.”

She can’t help but laugh. He’s learning.

She reaches out to put a hand on his arm before she loses his attention again. “I know you don’t mind, but I’m sorry I looked through something that should have been private. I won’t do it again.”

He looks at her for a long time, and she can tell that this kind of apology is utterly foreign to him. “I really don’t mind, Inej,” he says eventually. “I want you to know things about me and I’m…I know I’m not the best at saying them out loud. So you really did me a favor.” He gives her a grin.

It warms her heart, that he wants her to know things about him. It makes her think that maybe he really does want to pull down the walls around his heart for her, but they’ve just been up for so long that he doesn’t even know where to start. But she’s not going to come across a folder labeled Kaz Brekker’s Issues or Kaz Brekker’s Rich Internal Life or Kaz Brekker’s Most Intimate Desires. She needs him to tell her.

“I want to know things about you, too,” she says, and his eyes get soft. Really, how can anyone think him unfeeling when his eyes know how to do that? “But I want to hear them from you, when you’re ready to tell me.”

He swallows, and his eyes drop to the lock in his hands. “I’ll…I’ll try,” he admits eventually. “It might take a while.”

“I’ll be here,” she says. Then, feeling bad for bringing such a serious mood between them on what she’s certain is the first birthday he’s celebrated in more than eight years, she teases, “How’d you get charged with four counts of assault of a stadwatch officer at the age of ten, anyway?”

He gives her a grin full of teeth. “I was a biter.”

She laughs, and his grin softens just a bit as he turns his attention back to her gift. He told her she could steal his secrets, but she finds them all the more precious when he gives them to her willingly.

v.

“It stands for Rietveld,” he says into the quiet of his room one evening. They’re sitting on his bed, both of them cross-legged, him half out of his shirt with his hand planted on top of his head so she can focus on removing the stitches she’d placed in his side after a dust up with the Black Tips last week. The position puts the tattoo on his inner bicep right next to his eyes, and when she looks up from her work at his voice, she can see his gaze tracing the black lines intently. He swallows uncomfortably. “It was my family name, before I changed it.”

It’s not exactly news. She’s suspected as much since the alias he gave Colm Fahey for the auction scheme. Maybe not every spider in the Barrel would be able to connect the dots between Johannus Rietveld and two boys from Lij and black ink on pale skin, but Inej had never been just any spider. She’s not sure if Johannus Rietveld was ever a real person, or if he is an amalgamation of ghosts from Kaz’s past, but this she’s always been quite certain of.

Still, her heart gives a tug at Kaz’s volunteering of this information unprompted. His eyes slide from his own arm to meet hers, and she gives him a solemn nod. He returns it with a sharp jerk of his head, and doesn’t say anything else as she removes the remaining stitches.

When she’s done, she takes his shirt between two fingers and delicately drapes it back over his shoulder before leaning forward to press a kiss through the fabric. Your secret is safe with me, she thinks as she does so. You are safe with me.

vi.

Years spent in Ketterdam have given Inej a particular affinity for black coffee. The Suli are generally a tea-drinking people, but in the Barrel, coffee is king, and she’d learned to make due with what she had. In those years with the Dregs, tea had always made her melancholy and homesick anyway.

The coffee made in the Slat’s kitchen certainly wasn’t particularly high quality, but there’s something about it that Inej came to love anyway. She likes the bitterness, the earthy taste, the way it wakes up her senses. Nina had caught her drinking it without gagging once and promptly dragged her to a coffeeshop in the Zelver District and shoved a cup of something frothy and caramelly into her hands. Inej had sipped it, given a shrug and an “Eh,” and weathered Nina’s horrified and betrayed looks all the way back to the Barrel.

“It’s like that story of all those people in the cave,” Nina had moaned. “The ones who only ever saw shadows and thought they were the real thing.”

Maybe. Maybe Inej got used to something subpar and came to love it in some bizarre way, but she refuses to feel bad about it. If she felt bad about loving things that are hard to love, she’d lose most of what she holds dear.

She’s always assumed she and Kaz were of one mind when it came to the coffee thing, until one day they are working in silence at his attic desk, filtering through fishy shipping invoices, when she catches sight of something she doesn’t think she’s supposed to see.

Kaz lifts his mug to his lips, eyes not leaving the invoice in his hand, and takes a sip. Afterwards he sticks his tongue out and shudders a bit, placing the mug back down on the only corner of the desk not covered by papers.

“Is it cold?” she asks, gesturing toward the mug with her chin. She lifts her own to her lips, but finds it still pleasantly warm.

“What?” he asks, then seems to register what she asked. “No.”

“Then why’d you make that face?”

“What face?” He picks up another invoice and squints at it as if it’ll give up slaving secrets if he stares hard enough.

“You know,” she says. “The face.” She imitates it.

He shakes his head, bewildered. “It tastes like shit.”

Inej is stymied. She takes another sip, as if a new taste will reveal itself, but it’s just the same as always. She reaches for Kaz’s cup and takes a sip from his instead, even though she knows they came from the same brew. “It tastes like it always does.”

“Yeah. Like shit.”

They stare at each other for a while, uncomprehending. “Kaz,” she says eventually, her voice slow in wonderment. “Do you not like black coffee?”

“Does anyone?” he asks, matching her tone.

“I do.” He squints at her skeptically. “I do.”

“Well, in that case,” he gestures toward his mug as if to say all yours, darling. “I’m awake enough, anyway.”

They return to their work, and Inej polishes off her own mug and his, trying to tamp down the fizzy excitement she feels about putting her lips on the rim where his were mere moments ago, and all talk of coffee is abandoned.

But the next day, she intercepts him in the Slat’s kitchen before he reaches for the grounds, and tells him they’re going on a mission, grinning up at him in a way that she knows he’s going to indulge.

She brings him to the Zelver District, to that Saints-forsaken place Nina had once taken her, and orders a cup of everything on the menu.

They’re tucked into a booth in the corner, away from prying eyes, and he looks at her over a field of little porcelain mugs with rose etchings as if she’s gone mad. “What is this?” he asks as if he’s not sure he wants to know but feels that he ought to, on the off chance it will be relevant to the breakdown he likely suspects she’s having.

“We’re finding you a coffee that you like,” she says, pushing a mug with a heart drawn in milk toward him with a pointer finger. “Take a sip.”

“You don’t drink coffee for the taste,” he protests.

“You do if you’re not a miserable, joy-hating freak,” she says with a pointed glance at the mug in front of him.

It takes some cajoling and several furtive glances at the other patrons to ensure they’re not being watched, but eventually he gives in to her taste test. He gives wrinkled noses and noncommittal bobbles of the head, dismissive grunts and even a gag or two, until eventually there’s a miniscule upward twitch of his left eyebrow.

Jackpot, she thinks, leaning forward to look into his cup. The liquid inside is the palest brown from a generous helping of milk, and there’s a sprinkle of cinnamon in the foam on top. It’s exactly the kind of sweet, frothy monstrosity that Nina would adore.

He catches her knowing look and gives a helpless, “Don’t,” before taking another sip. Inej bites back a grin and mimes locking her lips.

He swears her to secrecy as they leave, his voice urgent and pleading, and she gives him her vow of silence. She sincerely doubts he’ll ever stop choking down the black coffee in the Slat, unwilling to compromise his time or his pride, but she’s content in the simple fact that they’ve found something he enjoys.

And if, whenever they go out together, she orders that frothy monstrosity herself while letting him order his black, always with the intention that they will switch drinks while nobody is looking, well. That’s a secret she’s certainly willing to keep.

vii.

“Inej Ghafa,” Jesper says one morning when she takes a seat next to him in the morning room at the Van Eck mansion, a cup of black coffee in hand. He adopts a chastising, fatherly tone. “Care to explain where you were last night, little lady?”

She pauses with her mug to her lips and raises an eyebrow, not offering an explanation. Jesper is happy to fill the silence.

“You see,” he continues theatrically. “At around three bells last night, I was struck by a mighty need to eat every single one of the deviled eggs in the icebox—the ones left over from your return dinner, of course—and as I was on my way to answer this particular call of nature, I passed by your room. Only to find the door open—” Here he slams his hand down on the table like a lawyer putting the final nail in the defendant’s coffin. “—and your bed completely untouched. The little towel swan Liese left on your pillow was still intact, looking lonely and forlorn.”

Inej sips her coffee and sets the mug down in the little porcelain saucer. “I stayed at the Slat.”

“I see. And how long has this been going on, exactly?” He crosses his arms on the table and leans over them toward her.

“A while.” She imitates his position. “I figured you knew.”

“You assumed Kaz Brekker would tell me? The man who denied any accusations of relationshippery between the two of you for two full years?”

“Of course not,” she says. Kaz’s particular affinity for keeping all cards to his chest—even those that would mean very little to anyone but him—is well known among the four of them. He’s getting better at letting her see what’s in his hand, and he’ll reveal a three of clubs or a five of hearts to Jesper or Wylan on occasion, though he hasn’t yet learned to trust them with the more high stakes cards in his deck. But all in all, secrecy is his modus operandi, and they all allow him to cling to it like a child with a security blanket most of the time. “But I did assume you would notice when I walked out the front door after bidding you goodnight.”

Jesper furrows his eyebrows, as if trying to remember if that actually happened (it did). After a moment, he waves it off. “So you’ve decided to give up our five-star hospitality for a little humble Bed and Brekkerfast, hm?” She rolls her eyes hugely at the pun. “And what could you possibly be getting out of that arrangement?” His grin is huge and teasing.

Inej squints at him. “Use your imagination.”

“Oh, I am.” He closes his eyes and Inej looks down at her coffee, feeling a creeping sense of discomfort coming over her at the idea of what, exactly he might be imagining. She knows he takes the suggestive route any time a phrase is open to interpretation, and she’s learned to accept that about him, but her heart still clenches into a fist at the idea of anyone imagining her doing anything sexual.

He catches the look on her face when he opens his eyes and the grin fades to seriousness. “I’m not really,” he reassures her, and she gives him a strained smile and tries to shove the feeling away. “Are you, though?” he asks, making a nothing gesture with one hand, leaning his chin on the other. “I mean, do you two…”

“That’s not really any of your business.” The answer is no, but for some reason she doesn’t want to admit it. They don’t do anything but sleep next to each other, and occasionally kiss, which is different lying down than it is standing up, more thrilling but also more terrifying. She simply can’t see herself discussing that with Jesper, who doesn’t have half the context he’d need to understand it. She sympathizes with Kaz’s cards to the chest strategy on this one.

He raises his hands in surrender. “Okay, fair. But please, tell me this—does the man sleep like a human being? You know, in a horizontal position, and not upside down like a bat?”

Kaz is surprisingly human when he sleeps, she’s come to realize now that she’s privy to it whenever she’s in town. He rolls from his back to his side to his front and back around again until he finally gets comfortable, like one of those sausages on a spit sold on East Stave, and when she wakes before him in the mornings, she’ll often find him on his stomach, face buried so deeply in a pillow that she finds herself watching his back to check for breathing. When he emerges, sometimes there are creases on his face that she finds unbearably adorable, and he’ll scrub at them with his hands in frustration, grumbling about how he can’t show his face around the Dregs like this. His voice is always rougher in the mornings, but the rest of him is softer, as if to make up the difference.

“Well?” Jesper asks.

Nothing she has discovered is particularly damning evidence, and would only be fodder for mild teasing, but she knows Kaz, and so she simply says, “I’m not at liberty to say.”

Jesper gives her an incredulous look, and she shakes her head decisively.

Kaz has trusted her enough to let her see him during the time of day when he is most vulnerable. He lets his guard down and bares his back to any potential intruders because he knows she is there to watch over him. His boundaries on what constitutes private personal information are often counterintuitive—he has no shame about the details of his prepubescent criminal record, nor does he mind telling anyone with the guts to ask exactly why he needs a cane, but Saints forbid anyone know he likes a bit of sugar in his coffee—but she will defend them with her life, even if she doesn’t always understand them.

She knows how deeply it costs him to trust her, to trust anyone. It’s a side effect of the intense isolation of a childhood in the Barrel, where anything in the world could be used against him. And she is not in the business of punishing him for things he really can’t help, especially not when he’s trying so hard to let her in, little by little.

“It’s no wonder he likes you so much,” Jesper groans, flicking a tea cake her way. “The man loves an uncrackable safe more than anything.”

viii.

They’re making their way back to the Slat from the harbor when the sky opens up in a torrential downpour. Ketterdam is generally a rainy city, and years of acquaintance with its moods tell her it’s not the kind of rain to grit your teeth against and keep walking, not unless you want to walk blindly into one of the rapidly filling canals.

Kaz grabs onto her hand so as not to lose her and pulls her into an alley and around the back of a building where he hauls open a window well set low to the ground. She squeezes in, expecting to drop into a kind of subterranean basement, but she finds that the floor is only about two feet below the cobblestone street outside. She retrieves a bone light and shakes it to illuminate the space as Kaz squeezes in behind her.

It’s small, the ceiling too low for either of them to stand all the way up and too narrow for Kaz to fully extend his legs when they sit themselves on the dusty floor. The brick wall at their back is a different shade than the facade of the building. “What is this place?” she asks him over the sound of the rain pummelling the window.

“It’s a half-room,” he says into her ear. “Part of one, anyway. There’s a false floor above us.” He taps his gloved fingers on the ceiling. “Whoever built this place had secrets they wanted to keep hidden under the floorboards. Contraband, probably. Then eventually, someone must have gotten the bright idea to brick up a portion of it. No idea why—maybe they were subletting.” She gives a snort of laughter and he grins at her. “I don’t think the current owners know about this part. They probably think the other side of this wall is as far as the half-room goes.”

He pauses for a moment, casting a glance at her out of the corner of his eye in a way that makes her sit up straighter. “I used to squat here. The winter I turned eleven. Before I got pinched and spent the rest of it enjoying the luxurious stylings of the Vluchtheuvel. By the time I got out, someone else had claimed it.”

When she’d first joined the Dregs, she’d been given a pair of boots that belonged to Dirix, the only resident of the Slat with feet as small as her. Won’t he need them? she’d asked Kaz when he handed them to her.

Not for a while, he’d shrugged. He’s summering at the Vluchtheuvel.

Off her confused look, he’d explained to her about the refuge for criminal boys who weren’t old enough for Hellgate. He’d seemed strangely delighted by her dismay that such a place even existed, and had gone on to explain how it was common for street kids to orchestrate getting sent there for the winter months just to get a roof over their head. Dirix, he assured her, was playing no such game, as he had a roof already in the Slat, and was instead simply a dumbass for getting caught.

Over the years, he’s told her more about the refuge—about the guards who shaved the boys’ heads upon booking, about the awful slop that passed for food, even about the solitary confinement he’d been thrown in occasionally for fighting. She’d been horrified to hear all of these things, heartbroken to know he’d been going through them while she was across the True Sea pestering her father to let her try ever more daring tricks on the wire, but he’d been strangely blase about it all. He’d grown up around other Barrel boys who had been through all the same things. Trips to the Vluchtheuvel were a strange sort of street currency to them—the more you’d been, the younger you’d been, the tougher it made you, and toughness was gold to boys like them who had nothing else.

The only time he’d faltered in telling her these stories, the only time she’d sensed his walls coming up, was when he’d told her how he’d been unable to stand the sleeping situation—packed in like sardines—and had been exiled to sleeping on the floor in the corner after waking the other boys up with his screaming nightmares one too many times.

Now, her shoulder pressed against his as they sit squeezed into this tiny space, she feels a similar kind of heartbreak, imagining him small enough to be able to lay down in this space, curled up against the bitter winter chill, no roof provided for him unless he caused enough trouble. He must see the look on her face, because he nudges her with his shoulder.

“It wasn’t bad, really,” he says, looking around the place with a strange kind of nostalgia. “This was one of my better hideouts. I was pissed when I found out someone took it while I was gone.”

“That is not the comfort you think it is,” she says, leaning her head against his shoulder. He drops his cheek atop hers, and for a while they just watch the rain against the old warped glass.

“Actually,” he says after a moment, as if remembering something. “I think…” He moves suddenly, jostling her head off him as he leans across her to touch a brick in the wall near her face. He pulls at it, and it moves a bit. “I’d forgotten about this one!” There’s excitement in his voice as he pulls the loose brick from its setting, like a boy on Nachtspel salivating over his presents.

Inej holds the bone light aloft. The brick is hollowed out, and filled with little treasures. Kaz pulls them out one by one. Fifteen kruge, then a Komedie Brute playbill folded into the shape of a bird. “I saw a street performer do this,” he says, holding the bird aloft and squeezing it so its wings give a half-hearted flap. “Spent days trying to recreate it, never quite got it.” He puts the kruge in his wallet and hands the bird to her. She holds it like he’s just given her precious rubies.

Next, he unearths six dice. “Weighted,” he explains, rolling them on the floor between them so that each one shows a different number. “I used to keep them up my sleeve and use whichever ones I needed to pull a fast one.”

There’s a moldy deck of cards that he fans through, probably reminiscing about all the games of three card monte he used to run. There’s a disgusting rocky substance that he hazards a guess is old bread, and black feather that he twirls between his fingers, then tucks beneath the tie holding her braid together. Lastly, he pulls out a little tin soldier, which he lays on the flat of his palm and observes with brows furrowed.

“Where’d you get that?” she asks, reaching out to touch a finger to it.

“There was a kid,” he says slowly, recalling the memory as he speaks. “He was with his mother, doing some shopping down on the Wijnstraat. I was following them because the ma had a purse that looked easy to swipe. He was carrying this, but then in one of the shop windows he saw a little carriage, with working wheels and everything, and he begged her for it.” His voice is reverent, and Inej finds herself staring rapt at his face, hardly daring to breathe, all sounds of the rain drowned out by his story. “She gave in, and as soon as he had the carriage in his hands, he dropped this like it didn’t mean a thing in the world.” His brow furrows. “And I just—picked it up. I don’t know why.”

I do, Inej thinks. It’s because you were a little boy and all you had to your name was fifteen kruge and the forgotten back room of someone’s basement. And even though you were running cons on tourists and getting arrested, you wanted a toy. You deserved a toy, like any little boy does.

He looks about to put the toy soldier back in the brick, but she reaches out and folds his fingers over it instead. “Keep it,” she says, and in the privacy of her own head she adds, for the little boy who’s still in there, who still deserves something good, no matter how small it is.

He nods, then settles next to her again, dropping his arm over her shoulders while they wait out the storm.

ix.

At a market stall in Shriftport, Inej had found a puzzle cube where each face was carved into a different picture made up of nine smaller squares. These squares could be moved and mixed up, and it was up to the solver to get them back in the right order. It’s been a smash hit with Kaz since she presented it to him early this afternoon.

She’d had to stop him from breaking the thing open to find out the mechanics of the moving squares, but he’s solved it now three times, and seems determined to keep at it until he can do it in under a minute, or one handed, or possibly blindfolded.

Despite his preoccupation, she’s content enough. They’re curled up together in his attic office chair, Inej sitting sideways across his lap, absentmindedly reading a book while he fiddles with the cube, arms around her. The rhythmic click of the wooden pieces moving is causing her mind to drift and the words to blur in front of her eyes, and eventually she gives up and drops her head onto his shoulder.

Her eyes trace the column of his neck—it’s really a very nice neck—until they come to rest on a scar in the soft flesh beneath his chin, only visible because of this angle. She’d seen it like this once before, when she’d been stabbed and he carried her all the way to the Ferolind. Now, without being in danger of bleeding out, she can study it with more intent than she did back then.

It’s vaguely round, indented like old acne scars. Which it could be, although she knew him throughout a good portion of his teenage years and had always known him to have clearer skin than someone with his diet and sleep schedule should really be allowed to have. She presses the tip of her finger to it absentmindedly, then drags it slowly along the line of his jaw. The movement of the cube falters for a moment, then picks back up.

He’s got a very nice jaw, a steady throughline from his nice arms to his nice shoulders to his nice neck and up to his nice face. She’d be worried about cutting herself on it if she didn’t have such an affinity for sharp things.

Her finger follows the line of it to the hinge, and then she traces a line along the soft, warm flesh behind his ear. There, she finds another divot, similar in shape and size to the one beneath his chin. It’s then that she realizes where she’s seen these kinds of scars before—when she was a child, her caravan once brought what aid they could to another caravan that had been afflicted with a pox and had lost many of their members before the sickness ran its course.

Of course. These are scars from the firepox that had burned through Ketterdam and taken Jordie with it. He’s such a tapestry of old wounds that she aches for him. She leans forward and presses her lips to the scar behind his ear, snaking her arms around his neck as if that will hold him together.

He makes a contented noise in the back of his throat, and she pulls back enough to see his face—gaze still on the cube in his hands, no worries in mind beyond solving this puzzle she’s brought him. He’s content—he’s happy, and isn’t that a miracle, considering everything. They ought to celebrate.

She tightens her grip on him and puts her lips back to the skin behind his ear, then slowly works her way along his jaw until she reaches his lips. He’s happy to oblige her in this new endeavor, giving her his tongue without protest. Warmth settles in her belly and she maneuvers herself so she’s got one knee on either side of his hips, straddling him so she can really kiss him properly.

They continue in this fashion for a while before Inej notices that he’s only got one arm wrapped around her waist, and the other hand isn’t even in her hair like it normally would be. When she pulls away and opens her eyes just a bit, she can see he’s got one cracked and focused on something over her shoulder.

The cube breaks into pieces when it hits the wall, which is a shame because it was expensive, but it’s an unfortunate necessity. Kaz, properly chastened, promises he won’t get distracted again, and applies himself to her with every bit of dedication he’d given to her gift earlier that afternoon.

x.

They’re in Kaz’s bedroom, readying for bed when she spots it. It’s her first shore leave in months, and so she’s perched on the dresser, taking her time brushing out her hair. The hair is a secondary mission; priority number one is ogling him shirtless, which is a pastime of hers that predates their relationship. As he lifts his left hand to run it through his hair—he knows what he’s doing with a move like that, but she’s not complaining—she spots a bit of black that wasn’t there before.

“What’s that?” she asks, gesturing toward him with her brush. He gives her a sly grin and saunters over, leaning his hip against the dresser next to her and extending his arm so she can have a look.

It’s a new tattoo. Inked along his inner bicep is a line stretching between two anchor points, a small figure perched atop it, balance pole in hand. A wire walker.

She touches her fingers to it in reverence, as if it might smudge. Which of course it won’t—Kaz does nothing halfway, and she knows this is here to stay.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

“I love it,” she says, emotion choking up her voice. He leans down to kiss her and she grips his arm tightly, thumb digging into the slightly raised skin where the ink is.

Later, when they’re lying in bed, her eyes drift to it again. He’s on his back, hands behind his head, and she’s half on top of him, propping her chin on her own arms, folded across his chest. She traces the black lines of the wire walker with her eyes in the dim, marvelling at how he’s gotten the exact right angle of tension between the anchor points—just the slightest dip of the walker’s weight, but not enough to destabilize her. He’s only seen her walk a wire a few times in their lives, all while she was still with the Dregs, but he must have been paying more attention than she’d thought, even back then.

Her eyes drift across to his other arm, where the R is inked in much the same spot, and then down to the crow and cup on his forearm. His family, his gang, and her. Her heart swells, and she has to lean up to kiss him once more.

xi.

On a late summer afternoon, Inej discovers what Kaz Brekker looks like when he’s been kissed within an inch of his life. On an ordinary overcast evening in what passes for spring, she knows what his eyes look like when he tells her he loves her. On a stormy midnight a decade after she meets him in the Menagerie, she becomes the only person in the world who can say she knows how Kaz Brekker makes love.

She’ll take it to her grave, in the same way kings demand to be buried with all their riches.

xii.

Afternoons are the quietest the Barrel ever gets, and Inej uses every opportunity to steal Kaz away during them, knowing that the business of shadows will claim both of them once the sun goes down.

Today, with a rare bit of winter sunshine streaming through the window, she’s managed to coerce him into bed in hopes he’ll get a little sleep and rest his leg before tonight’s parley with the Razorgulls. She’s reclining back against his headboard, his head pillowed against her chest and his waist between her thighs, the warmth of him chasing out any semblance of winter chill.

His eyes are closed, breathing deep, and she grins privately at the flawless execution of her evil plan. She has a book held in one hand, the other buried in his hair, and she thinks this is probably what heaven looks like.

The book is one of Kaz’s, a mystery novel. She’s tried to get him to read for pleasure with very little success over the years, and the only compromise he’s made is almost more infuriating than his previous refusal to read anything other than a contract or blackmail material.

He will read only mystery novels, and he makes it a point to try to solve them as quickly as possible, rather than simply enjoying the story. Even more insane, he writes down his guesses for the killer, method, and motives in the margins, then comes back and circles them when he’s right. She’s trying very hard to wipe the circled note she’d seen earlier—only seventeen pages into the book, which he has helpfully marked as a new record—from her brain, but she’s having very little success, and knowing that the daughter conspired with her wealthy mother’s new young husband to murder her and collect the inheritance is putting a damper on her enjoyment.

Eventually, she abandons the book entirely and dedicates her time to combing through Kaz’s hair with her fingers, which is time well spent. As she pulls his hair back from the temples, a strand catches the light in a strange way. She looks closer, and there, tangled in among the black, is a single strand of silver.

“Why’d you stop?” Kaz murmurs into her sternum, alerting her to the fact that he’s awake.

“It’s nothing,” she says. And then, contradicting herself, “I found a gray hair.”

“Really?” He pushes himself onto his elbows and furrows his brow.

“Really.” She takes hold of it and brings it around to his line of sight. He frowns at it, then reaches up to pull it out. “No!” She bats his hand away. “I like it.”

He stares at her blankly for a moment. “I didn’t realize you had a thing for old men.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’re not even thirty, you’re not old. And it doesn’t make you look old, either,” she says, anticipating his retort. “I think it makes you look distinguished.”

Now it’s his turn to roll his eyes, but he lays his head back down without protest. She runs her nails across his scalp, content to bask in the silence. Until eventually, he speaks again, his voice a bit distorted by the way his cheek is pressed against her. “I didn’t think I’d ever make it this far.”

She pauses in her ministrations, and he lets the declaration hang in the air, though she can feel the tension in his body as he awaits her verdict. “Far enough to get gray hairs, you mean?” she asks gently after a moment. He nods. “Well, I for one am glad you did,” she says soothingly, brushing his hair back from his temples. “I want to see you when there’s not a speck of black left anymore.”

“This fetish of yours is getting concerning,” he jokes. She flicks him gently in the back of the head but doesn’t say anything, waiting for him to settle on what it is he really wants to say.

When he finally does, his voice is quiet enough that she’s glad she’s so close and that her hearing is so good. “It doesn’t seem fair,” he whispers. “That I should have this.”

She wraps her arms around him and holds him tightly. “You deserve it as much as anyone. More than most.”

“Not more than Jordie.”

Her face crumples and her heart squeezes at the sadness in his voice. “No,” she agrees sadly. “Not more than Jordie. But as much as. And I think he’d want you to have it, even if he couldn’t, don’t you?”

He gives as much of a shrug as he can in this position. “I don’t know. He could be petty sometimes.”

“Kaz.”

He flips a hand in a way that shows he relents. He falls silent again for a long time. “I don’t think I remember what he looked like anymore.”

It sucks all the air out of the room for a moment, and she squeezes her eyes shut. In pain for him, and unable to ease it. She’s never met Jordie, doesn’t have any idea what he could have looked like, can’t jog his memory by supplying her own. In her head, he looks like Kaz, just a little more innocent, a little less jaded, but she’s got no idea if that’s even remotely true.

“All that’s left is the—the thing he became. In the water. I don’t—I wish I didn’t remember him at all, rather than remembering him like that.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. She just leans forward and presses her lips to the top of his head, gripping the back of his shirt tightly as if that will keep him here with her. Neither of them say anything for a long time, just breathing in tandem.

“I wish I could do something,” she says hoarsely. “To make it better. To take this pain away from you.”

“I know.” He tilts his head so his chin is propped against her sternum and he can make eye contact with her. “That’s enough.”

“It doesn’t feel like enough.”

“I’ve gotten good at making do.” The melancholy isn’t gone from his eyes, but he seems to not want to make either one of them any more miserable this afternoon, so he shifts to his elbows instead. “Maybe you can distract me by telling me how sexy you think I’ll be when I’m really old.”

She rolls her eyes at him, not wanting to simply bury the feelings he’s unearthed, but understanding that maybe this is simply one of those things he’d like for her to know. Knowing it can’t be made better, but the burden can be lightened just a bit by sharing the load. They’ll have to make do with that, just as they always have.

She scoots down so she’s lying more properly beneath him and places her hands on either side of his face, running her thumbs along his cheekbones. “You’re aging like a fine wine, Kaz Brekker,” she says indulgently. “Promise you’ll get old with me?”

He grins, and it’s only couched in a little sadness. “Promise,” he says, and leans down to kiss her.

xiii.

Kaz Brekker dies just weeks before his forty-ninth birthday, which in Barrel years makes him a geriatric.

He’s older than both Jan Van Eck and Pekka Rollins were when they lost their grip on their little kingdoms, older than his father had been when he met the plow, twice the age of his mother when she died bringing him into this world, and nearly four times as old as poor Jordie Rietveld when the plague came for him.

In the aftermath, Inej sells berth twenty-two back to the city, opening it up for public use for the first time in over thirty years. She’s sure she’ll come back to Ketterdam occasionally, to see Jesper and Wylan and their family, but its days as a home base for her are in the past.

She aches to say goodbye to it, this place that raised the man she loves, that did its part in raising her as well. It’s an ugly, corrupt, awful city, but it’s also undeniably home, as much as the caravans of West Ravka or the tidy little warship named the Wraith. Over the years, she’d managed to make good memories here to rival and outweigh the bad, and she wants to keep it that way. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to bear the sight of the Crow Club in ashes, or the crows alighting on an attic windowsill that will never again beckon like home.

She heads for the Port of Daan, in the Southern Colonies, where she plans to set up a new sort of home base for this new chapter of her life. In thirty years as captain of the Wraith, she’s managed to deal devastating—but not fatal—blows to the international human trade. Kaz had warned her once that she wouldn’t be able to stop them all, and he was right. Evil has a way of rooting in and adapting whenever something good comes around to threaten it.

But with Wylan’s influence on the Council and all the work Kaz had done behind the scenes, Ketterdam isn’t the hotbed that it used to be. And as if the city knew it would not get away with its old sins under more watchful eyes, evil picked up and moved.

Injustice has sunk its teeth deep into the Southern Colonies for generations, its native people beaten down and oppressed by the large foreign powers that had carved it up for its resources. That unstable, corrupt foundation has allowed the human trade to thrive here, and so it is here that Inej has now set her sights. The Wraith will still patrol the seas, and she will surely spend time upon it now and again, but she’s not as young as she used to be, and some part of her craves the challenge of staying in one place, at least for a while.

In a dusty little tavern in the port city, Inej finds a familiar newspaper at the front desk, and she chuckles as she purchases it. She scans the headline and the photographs that take up most of the space above the fold.

Brekker’s Barrel: A Retrospective on Ketterdam’s Most Notorious Son

She settles into a table in the breakfast room and orders a cup of disgustingly sweet coffee out of habit. It sits at her elbow, cooling, as she reads.

The article strikes a strange tone, sometimes scathing, while at others surprisingly reverent. It reads to her like the childish hero worship of a charming outlaw being furiously edited over by a stuffy schoolteacher. It tells the tale of Brekker’s appearance from nowhere shortly after the Queen’s Lady Plague, enumerates his many childhood arrests, as well as later run-ins with the stadwatch. In true Kerch fashion, it gives loving page time to his sprawling business portfolio, though it strikes a disappointed tone when discussing his encouragement of the unionization of his workers. Like a child telling a ghost story, it catalogs his many alleged crooked deeds, then discusses his elevation as something of a folk hero among the working classes with bafflement.

All in all, it’s not a bad eulogy from the city that raised him.

“Anything interesting in there?” a voice asks from over her shoulder.

“Nothing I didn’t already know,” she says mildly, folding the paper back up and tossing it onto the table.

Hardly any of her vast wealth of knowledge pertaining to Kaz Brekker had made it into this so-called ‘exhaustive profile’ of the legendary Dirtyhands. The author had even boldly claimed that no one ever did find out why exactly he wore those leather gloves all his life, though they’d been happy to speculate wildly.

Nothing would be found in those pages about his true origins, about a farm near Lij or a name wiped clean but never forgotten. Nothing said about years of abject loneliness on the streets of Ketterdam, slipped through the cracks of a city that refused to care about those without the power and security wealth provides. Nothing said about his brilliant mind or the blessing and curse of never being able to let a thing go once it wormed its way in. Nothing, of course, about the softness of his skin or the tenderness with which he touches the things most precious to him. Nothing about years of hard-won intimacy, the way he kissed, the way he laughed, or the way he loved.

She could say that this author simply hadn’t done their research, but the truth is, even if they’d come asking, she never would have told them a thing. She holds innumerable secrets of his inside her head and in her heart, and that is where they will stay. No one else needs ever be privy to the most intimate parts of him the way she has been.

No one needs to know about this secret either, she thinks as she takes a sip from the mug of black coffee that’s been deposited by her elbow, watching Kaz pull the paper toward himself and shake it out with amused self-importance, settling back into the seat across from her to have himself a good laugh.

She’ll take this one to the grave with her, one way or another.

If it’s not God, it’s fate
If it’s not fate, it’s chance
If it’s my chance I’m gonna take it
‘Cause who gets the chance like the one I have
To catch the most wanted man in west Tennessee

If you let me write the book
Open the hood and take a look
I promise anything you give to me is something I will keep
We can burn it when it’s done
Soot and cinder in the sun
Nothing left for anyone to read and weep
—Lucy Dacus, Most Wanted Man