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Kaz kept an eye on the clock and stroked Inej's hair with one hand. They had risen to that—touching with closed eyes, giving up completely to the sensation, and Kaz could only imagine that it was just as electrifying for her as it was for him. He was careful not to touch her scalp too much, not to pull on the hair and hurt her. Only to let it fall through his fingers like liquid gold.
He wouldn't even touch the gold so gently. Gold was to be coveted, to be possessed; Inej was to be worshipped.
Her eyelashes brushed against him when she shifted, moving her head and letting out a small sound, and her fingers flexed against his chest—all an equal exchange, her holding him holding her, skin touching skin only slightly, only where his shirt had been loosened and her forehead rested against the crack in his usual armor.
He had long since promised to be a safe haven for her. That Inej still saw him a such—Kaz stroked her shoulder with his other hand.
She kept this shirt here. Kept a few more up in his room, and a doubtless many at the mansion—this one, soft and sturdy, with wire in the ties in case of danger and small blades hidden in the buttons in case someone came too close, lived in his office.
They pressed against his own shirt, metal cold despite the heat between them.
Inej had come through the window. The first floor, hardly a challenge—and Kaz liked challenging her, liked seeing the woman she'd become, the woman he'd fallen in love with—yet she always smiled when she came in and met his eyes, as if she'd managed to scale a mountain.
Not that she'd have to. She'd walk up a mountain, vertically if she had to, hair pulled into a braid and eyes determinedly staring ahead, her footsteps light and soft, her knives at her side; she'd walk up a mountain and laugh from above, because she served no one, least of all gravity, and Kaz would look up from below and bask in her shadow.
She'd come in through the window, slipped out of her cloak and vest, and left her shoes on, perhaps forgetting about them as she settled on the couch, a small ratty thing that didn't belong in such an opulent office but made Kaz feel at home. His leadership of the Dregs was the one thing he'd gotten honestly, scheming and fighting and bleeding for it—his was not Haskell's office, he was not stuck in the clouds of glory but in the thick of battle; he had kept his attic room, too, with its creaky floor and sloped ceiling. Honest, like he wasn’t.
Inej liked the couch. Unlike Kaz, she could spread out on it fully, could even—like she had now, her breaths fluttering the fabric of his shirt—coax Kaz onto it: his legs on the floor in front of him, his elbow resting on a cushion, his chest a pillow for Inej, whose own legs were spread out over the couch itself, slippers touching the other end.
She’d slipped in and sat down, and Kaz hadn’t even finished the sentence he’d been writing before getting up to join her.
You look tired, he hadn’t said, hadn’t asked, Is this why you didn’t come upstairs?
Her legs gracelessly fell over the blanket Kaz kept on the sofa, and her breaths were heavy as if weighed down. It might have been the residual winter chill or the artificial over-pollenated flowers merchers kept in their homes at this time of year to show their prosperity—her hold on his shirt was light, but the tension in her forehead was heavy, and she rested her head firmly on his chest as if seeking something.
As if chasing something away.
Kaz ran his fingers through the strands of the braid he’d unwound, looking for any tangles he’d missed. He could get lost in her hair, and often had; he gathered it in his hand to keep it off her neck, and kept his other hand on her back as Inej breathed. Kaz wished to take the tension from the rest of her body with as simple a touch, but nothing was truly simple, not when it came to them.
He tugged at the back of her collar to get her attention, but when Inej cracked open an eye, squinting through the evening light, Kaz shook his head.
He wasn’t built for this, didn’t know how to say Does your head hurt? or Can I help? Not in a way that promised care rather than violence.
Inej let out a sigh and shut her eyes again; Kaz, never one for hoping, gritted his teeth and accepted that she’d taken his hesitation for ignorance.
Inej, he wanted to say—he didn’t know what else. He’d stitched her wounds and dragged her across the city when she was too injured to take herself, and she did the same for him, but this was too—there was a Suli word Inej used when the Kerch failed her, frustration etched into her features, to describe the daily and the mundane, all the while maintaining that it encompassed more. That it concerned routine, work, family—life. The concept of daily life or even the abstract everyday didn’t mean the same thing.
Just another thing she had to say about his language, laughing at its faults as her own voice curled over its harshness.
Kaz curled his fingers into the fabric of her shirt and stroked her skin through it.
Inej mirrored the motion against his chest, but quickly stilled; her fingers remained loosely curled in his shirt, and Kaz, had he not known that Inej preferred to be held when she felt like this, would have taken her hand in his and kissed each one of them.
He dropped a kiss on the top of her head instead, a wordless apology, a covert checking for fever; he didn’t know how to do it properly, how to hold her, how to help.
Inej shivered in his hold. Kaz threw a glance at the open window; the curtains were deceptively still, but night was falling, and in the dark, the chill from the harbor and canals easily spread through the streets. He tugged at the folded blanket trapped beneath Inej’s legs and awkwardly spread it over her with one hand, the other once again busy stroking her hair.
She breathed something against his chest, heavy, tired, perhaps forgiveness for his earlier lapse; Kaz shook his head to himself and did his best to make the blanket lie even, to be the comfort he did not know how to word.
“I’ll be back,” he said, and braced Inej as he stood, brushing her shoulder to keep her still, tucking the blanket into her hold when she made to say something, “soon.”
She tucked the blanket under her chin even as her eyebrows furrowed—in protest, in puzzlement—and he bent to kiss the lines from her brow. I promise, he wanted to say as he strode out of the office, locking the door behind him but not touching the window, but Inej’s soft sigh against the couch cushions stopped the words in his throat. He’d never baulked at promises, and this was hardly a challenge: he would always come for her, and from much more dangerous quests.
Perhaps it was the quiet. Perhaps Inej’s comfort around him, the way she sat close and buried her face in his chest to chase away her ills. Perhaps it was that he couldn’t threaten away a headache or a fever the same way he could a knife or bullet, which always had a hand behind them.
“Soup,” he said to the vendor on the corner of the street, a man taller and greyer than him whose face had the ruddy complexion of someone never far from the kitchen. He didn’t have a kitchen, just a stall and a few pots behind it, and a steady enough clientele of thugs that he was brave enough to charge Kaz but understanding enough of his patronage to offer a discount.
“And a spoon,” he added as he handed over several kruge notes. “Good.”
Inej would have told him to say Thank you, and the vendor would have hidden his smile until they left, but Inej wasn’t here. Kaz nodded and turned on his heel, soup and spoon in hand.
The man was Ravkan. Born on the border of Shu Han and raised in the north, having come to Ketterdam one day and blending into the Barrel’s cosmopolitan mix. Just another shadow with talents unique enough not to get itself killed.
He did not make Kerch soups. They still were hearty, yet thinner; he used Suli spices and Ravkan cabbages, and sometimes got creative in the Fjerdan way and used fish—the Kerch used fish, too, but differently, although Kaz didn’t know enough about cooking to truly comment.
He ladled in enough soup to be a meal, but not enough to slosh over the sides of the bowl, which remained fastidiously clean on stray drops and kept the soup in despite Kaz’s uneven gait.
Perhaps he should have thanked the man.
Kaz pushed into the Slat and made a note to himself to pay the man extra when he next saw him.
Inej was where he’d left her. She’d burrowed further into the pillow under her head, and the blanket had slid halfway down her body; her feet were uneven on the couch’s opposite arm, one tucked under the other; and her braid had unraveled even more, wild strands spreading over her head and the couch.
Kaz smiled, loathe to wake her.
They hadn’t shared a bed yet, not really—they’d napped in closets and on rooftops during stakeouts, had fallen asleep in a wagon on the way out of the city once, had squeezed onto a couch, but never in a bed, never properly. Not yet.
Inej scrunched her nose in her sleep. She was an early riser by habit and necessity, quickly alerted and awoken, but as Kaz stepped into the room, she didn’t stir further.
Bracing the bowl of soup against himself, and his own weight against his cane, Kaz lowered himself to the floor by the couch.
Inej, I brought soup. How easy it would be to say. Kaz exhaled and changed his grip on his cane, lifting it to Inej’s shoulder.
Tap—the crow’s beak against her shoulder, once, twice. “Inej.”
She furrowed her eyebrows, grimacing before sighing and opening bleary brown eyes. She squinted up at him. “Kaz?”
He smiled, lowered both the soup and cane to the floor, and held Inej’s shoulders as she pushed herself into a sitting position. When she didn’t protest, he tucked stray hairs behind her ears, and held her in place when she swayed, eventually leaning forward and resting her forehead against his shoulder.
“Inej.” He rubbed her back through her thin shirt. I brought soup. She hummed. “I brought soup.”
She lifted her head but allowed Kaz to keep cradling it as she met his eyes, hers turned up at the corners with a faint smile. “Soup?”
Kaz nodded and pushed her back onto the sofa, then scooped the bowl up from the floor. “Soup.”
Swirls of steam still rose above the soup as Inej inhaled its spiced scent. It was bright red; its origin was unknown, the same ambiguous mix of countries the man infused most of his cooking with and, seeing Kaz, always decided to bring Suli flavors to the foreground.
Kaz pushed up from the floor, unbalanced, keeping both himself and Inej upright for a moment, and sank down beside her, close enough to be a support and far enough to let her decide whether or not to use him.
She did. Inej leaned sideways, leaning her weight rest against his side, and tucked her feet under herself as Kaz gathered her hair in his hand once more, keeping it out of the way. She threw him a brief smile.
Kaz pressed a kiss to her hairline and tucked a stray corner of the blanket around her as she began to eat.