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It’s a peculiar thing, touch.
Months go by with no alarm and then one day the errant brush of a strange hand across Inej’s back incites a shrill ringing in her ears. An entire week passes in which the menagerie never once crosses her mind, and then a friendly hug lasts just one moment too long and she is left gasping in fear, struggling not to vanish into thin air.
Sometimes Inej thinks that she’ll never get used to touch.
But the years blur together, and its been so long that she can barely remember a time when Kaz wouldn’t reach for her with ungloved hands, when he couldn’t hold her or soothe her or kiss sweetly without drowning. Now, even on bad nights, Kaz lets her tender hands work the pain from his legs, starting at his feet, then his calves, and on upward to the toned muscle of his strong, pale thighs. On the good nights, he returns the favor, and they both let their hands wander further up.
And always, Inej prays that she never gets used to his touch.
They grow older together, and while they’re not the most conventional of couples – she often spends months at sea; he runs a gang of barely legal runts plucked from the streets of Ketterdam – they certainly get married in the traditional way.
Inej wears her mother’s wedding silks, carries a bouquet of purple geraniums picked fresh from the nearest window box (courtesy of Jesper), and she walks down the aisle of the only Church of Saints in all of Kerch to where the rest of her life patiently awaits.
Kaz starts his vows by thanking Inej for the tax benefits their marriage will bring, and slides a ring made from the retired blade of Sankt Petyr onto her finger to match his own. Then he takes her face in both of his beautiful bare hands and kisses her with all the passion that they never shared in their youth.
Nina and Jesper cry, Wylan wretches in the background, and Matthias remains immovable at the altar even though a faint flush tinges his snowy Fjerdan cheeks pink at the display.
When they fall into bed together, legs tangled in the sheets, arms damp with sweat wrapped around one another, Kaz doesn’t drown, and Inej doesn’t vanish. She doesn’t even fear the possibility of it anymore, not for the voracious way he holds onto her, but because she feels so big and bold and alive in his arms. Never small, never invisible, and never a ghost.
And still every time he asks, “is this okay?” breathing heavily, pausing the trail of his open mouthed kisses down the long line of her throat, hands tangled reverently in her hair. And every time she laughs, watery and giddy and suffuse with bliss, “that’s my line,” for it had been hers to ask him once upon a time. Now he shakes his head, messy raven hair falling into his bitter coffee eyes, and tells her, “it’s our line now.”
And always, her skin tingles with the excitement of holding someone you love for the first time, every time.
For years she basks in his touch, the boyish way he holds her and loves her and worships her. He’s so different from the Kaz of their youth, and yet she thinks he is more of himself than he ever was back then. Just the thought that he has allowed himself to become so free with her is enough to make her heart beat in triplet.
For years she revels in his touch, and then one night, after Kaz has long begun to snore into the crook of her neck, and Inej is still bathing in the midnight glow of the moon that casts soft shadows of light through the window above their bed, Kaz’s wandering hand comes to rest on the smooth skin of her belly – bared by the rucked up edge of his shirt she wears to sleep – and Inej is sick.
A cold sweat breaks out across her chest, the back of her neck, and her hands shake with clamminess. Her mouth tastes sour and she swallows repeatedly before the roiling in her stomach becomes too unbearable and she shoves her husband’s limp body off, stumbling out of bed and rushing to the basin across their room.
Inej doesn’t make it, and she ends up sick down her front and on the floor. Now she shakes with anger, that her body could betray his touch after having been so long in bliss. Embarrassment, that she lost control in such a wretched way. And in fear, that this is the beginning of the end. When she prayed not to become used to Kaz’s touch, this is not what she meant.
She pulls the ruined shirt off and vomits twice more into the basin before she hears the rustle of sheets behind her. Hears Kaz’s bare feet pad gently across the wooden floor, and feels the heat of his palm hovering over her bare back.
She turns to face him over her shoulder with tears in her eyes, and steadily as ever, he asks, “is this okay?”
Inej has to know.
She nods even as fresh tears fall and braces herself for the worst, but the soft sweep of his hand across her upper back has never felt like more of a balm.
In an instant, the nausea disappears, and warmth suffuses Inej’s entire body, emanating from the spot at which Kaz rubs lazy circles into the skin of her back. She shudders, once, twice, and then turns around fully and melts into the broad surface of his chest, tears spilling anew, although this time in relief.
He says nothing, but gently presses a kiss into the hair atop her head and guides her back to bed, sour mouth and sticky skin and all.
In the morning, she goes to see a healer, and within one bell she is whispering soft promises – vows, and prayers – into the flat, scarred surface of her belly. By the next bell, Kaz has gone through an astonishingly wide array of emotions, ranging from disbelief to elation to despair and back. He has already whisked her away from the danger of open spaces and has moved on to baby-proofing all of the corners in their home and lamenting over the sheer number of knives they own.
Inej gently reminds him that she is less than two months pregnant, and not in immediate danger of collapsing from sheer exposure to other people, then not-so-gently requests that he fetch her hot chocolate and waffles if he wishes to sleep in their bed that night – a mission he embarks upon with worrisome vigor.
As the days and weeks pass, it becomes increasingly clear to Inej that she was sorely mistaken if she ever thought that Kaz was touchy before now. Of course, touchiness is a relative term and for her husband the simple desire to hold her hand more than once a day once seemed touchy for him. Now, deliriously, Inej thinks her pregnancy has unleashed a fiend in the form of Kaz Brekker’s body.
It’s like his hands have become permanently glued to her body.
They have dinner at the Van Eck mansion with Wylan, Jesper, and Marya, and – under the guise of an appropriate display of affection among friends – Kaz keeps one arm draped across her shoulder the entire time. Only Inej understands the reason her back is squished against his chest and his forearm is nestled uncomfortably close between the valley of her breasts is because his fingertips are dancing across the top of her non-existent bump under the table all night.
It energizes her at first, and they wear each other out every night trying to get as close as humanly possible, until finally they fall asleep with their limbs tangled and one of his hands always, always spread wide across her belly, rising and falling with each breath she takes.
On business, Kaz appears outwardly as cold, calculating, and terrifying as ever, and yet the hand pressed firmly into her lower back sends an entirely different message to which Inej is the only recipient of. And when business ends, Kaz wraps her in his arms and breathes a sigh of relief into the crook of her neck that makes Inej laugh at how soft the Bastard of the Barrel has truly become. If only their enemies knew.
And then, because Inej is the size of a small mouse, they very quickly do know. Her rapidly growing bump is hard to hide beneath the tight fitting clothes she wears for spying, and soon, news that the Wraith is with child spreads through the Barrel like the Queen’s Lady Plague. It’s not ideal, of course, but they both agreed she would stop seafaring for the time being, which means there’s no hiding it now.
So Kaz becomes more ruthless, if that was even possible, and Inej more dangerous in order to protect what is theirs. Scum who would have bet a few kruge on a street fight with the Bastard of the Barrel months before now scurry into open store fronts and dark alleys when Kaz walks down the street. A single sneer from Dirtyhands becomes enough of a warning that no one even dares look at Inej when she becomes so heavy that she has to join him on the cobbled streets rather than trailing above by rooftop.
But she is still a spider at heart after all, and just because she feels like a melon most days doesn’t mean she misses the whispers of the Barrel:
Did you hear? Brekker’s Wraith is knocked up!
Dirtyhands and the Wraith? That demon child’s bad news if I ever heard it.
She rubs a hand over the swell of her belly and thinks, let them be afraid, there is nothing we wouldn’t do to protect you.
At home, Inej perches. On the kitchen table and counters, on the desk in his office, and to his dismay even the window above their bed. One time, a few months in, Kaz spotted her scaling the rafters in the Slat and nearly fainted at the sight. It was at this point that Inej agreed to stop scaling buildings if Kaz promised to stop hovering every time she so much as looked at a knife.
During the final few months, Inej thinks one more touch will send her crawling out of her own skin. Once the baby starts kicking its like a constant pressure, touching her from the inside out. And then there’s Kaz. Always a hand on the taut skin of her protruding belly, always porcelain fingers rubbing soothing circles into her lower back, always lips pressed to her forehead, her cheek, her lips, her neck. He eases himself to the floor of their country home despite the pain in his leg and kisses her stomach sweetly, whispering long lost tales of Saints and performing slight of hand tricks that make the baby stir and push against the front of her belly, as if reaching for the shiny coin that slipped through his fingers. Inej loves him so much it hurts, and at the same time she wants to throttle Kaz Brekker for daring to be so good and kind and merciless in his affection.
She thinks each touch will be the last before she finally breaks and cannot bear him any longer, and every time he proves her wrong.
In the final month, Inej feels so big and so heavy that it becomes a struggle for her to leave the house most days, and so the Crows come to her.
Nina bustles around their kitchen, making waffles and warm hutspot and calming ginger lemon tea. Kaz and Jesper bicker over the best way to make the baby’s furniture while Matthias looms silently in the corner, resolutely ignoring their squabbling, and builds an entire cradle in the time it takes for them to debate the merits of fabrication over hand carving. Wylan essentially becomes her midwife, having taken care of Alys during the final months of her pregnancy after Van Eck senior went to prison. He massages her sore feet and nods solemnly when she cries because the skillet bread Kaz tried to make to satisfy her late pregnancy cravings made her sick instead.
She gives birth at home, on the bed that she and Kaz have shared for so long, with the help of two Healers and Wylan coaxing her through the worst of the pain, and one of Kaz’s hands crushed in her death grip while the other rests in her hair, damp with sweat. Never once does he complain about the pain even though she essentially grinds the bones in his beautiful fingers to dust.
She cries in relief when the Healers place her tiny, squirmy, sticky, daughter on her chest, and thinks she has never heard anything as beautiful and strong as the sound of her shrill wailing. She has never felt anything so purely good as her touch.
Go ahead, she thinks, scream, shout. Let the world know that you’re finally here.
She turns to Kaz with a question in her eyes, and he reaches for their daughter with quivering hands and pupils blown wide with awe. Kaz climbs onto the bed and molds himself to her side. He breathes shakily into her neck, “so beautiful,” and Inej knows that he means the both of them.
She has a thatch of thick black hair atop her head already, and light bronze skin. A perfect combination of them both. She has Inej’s eyelashes and Kaz’s upturned nose, and two perfect moles near the corner of her eyes just like her mother.
Matthias is the first to hold their daughter after Kaz and Wylan, and his big Fjerdan hands dwarf her tiny body. She is clean now, although still wailing, but Matthias just grunts approvingly and says, “strong lungs,” before reluctantly passing her to Nina, who has been making grabby hands since she stepped in the room.
All the while, Kaz follows their daughter through the crowd, his finger grasped tightly in her perfect little fist.
When the baby finally makes it to Jesper – disgruntled at being the last – tears are blurring Inej’s vision, and she almost misses the way Jes mouths, so proud, at both her and Kaz.
There is so much love in this room, and Inej feels like she’s floating on air. Her daughter will know so much love, so much honor and kindness and respect. Her family will be plentiful, and she will never know the despair that is loneliness and the ache it brings.
She will never know what it is like to fear being touched. To flinch away from her friends and long for them all the same. She will never know that drowning feeling, and if Kaz and Inej have any say, she will never fear love they way they once did.
Eventually, Kaz shoos everyone out of their room and rejoins her in bed, returning their daughter to her arms. He looks at her the way he used too when she perched on his window in the Slat: enraptured and afraid of all the ways he could possibly mess this up. So she kisses him deeply, the way she dreamed of kissing him back then, and it says everything she cannot convey with words.
Their daughter sleeps soundly on her chest, a strand of Inej’s hair clasped tightly in her tiny fist, and one of Kaz’s hand rests lightly on her back, moving in time with her deep baby breaths. His other hand searches for Inej’s in the dark, and the feeling of his fingers entwined with hers feels so new and so familiar all at once.
The combination of their touches alights something terrifyingly happy inside her, and laughter bubbles up her throat when Kaz presses a soft kiss to her neck.
She doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to this.