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She earns the name Wraith after a kill. Not her first—but the first she doesn’t feel the need to cry after. The man she kills had been a client once. One of her first. Even so, she does not revel in his death.
Moreso as it is her fault it is necessary at all, his blood is on her hands in every meaning of the phrase.
She falters when she sees him, when she recognizes him in the way she has dreaded recognizing anyone. Going so far as to keep her gaze lowered, fixed on the cobblestones, whenever she isn’t flying over the heads of the cluttered masses below. Anywhere but their faces. Anywhere else.
She wouldn’t have known his name—but she remembers how red his face gets. How he glows, almost fluorescent, in her periphery as she tries to look anywhere else. Be anywhere else. She remembers the way he swipes sweat from his upper lip, drags the foully damp hand over her body.
Little things cling to her mind like burrs from long grass, embedding themselves deeper with every frantic attempt to be rid of them.
She knows his name now, even if she didn’t before. She wishes she didn’t.
Kaz always knows the names of the guards. Their every indiscretion, every secret. He may even have known that the wedding-band-touting man was cheating on his spouse with the Lynx of the Menagerie. The thought of Kaz ever connecting such a fact with her sends the world careening out of her grasp, her throat tightening, her head spinning sickly.
He can have no reason to connect Inej to this man—because she is not Inej. She isn’t even a she. He is Enez. Unbelieved ex–garden indenture. Current spindle-legged spider of the Dregs.
One movement by the guard, one by her, and he is a doomed man.
She watches from the shadows as an arm comes up—wiping condensation from an upper lip, dragging it down to smear on his trousers—and she is choking. It is stupid, the way her body reacts, the way it betrays her. There is no air in the room. Her lungs seize. Her vision blurs. Her ears ring.
She tries to sink deeper into the shadows of the mezzanine, to pull them over herself like a child clutching a blanket in the dark. She only has to stay hidden until Kaz retrieves the documents from the safe in the office off the library.
Her lungs contract painfully. Her vision tunnels. Her ears ring louder—and then she makes a sound. Her knees give beneath her; an arm shoots out in a reflex of self-preservation, sending a stack of thin novels thudding off the side table as a sharp, involuntary gasp tears from her, her mouth forcing itself open for air.
The noise startles the guard from his slacking—stooped in the corner instead of making his rounds. Unable—or more likely too lazy—to locate the source, he begins moving again.
Ambling straight toward the office.
Kaz has not signaled.
She is ashamed of the heartbeat she hesitates—fear locking her in the false safety of her shadows, limbs tingling as if long asleep.
She forces herself to move.
It is clumsy. Loud. The guard’s eyes snap up immediately, drawn to the commotion she can’t hear over the roar of blood in her ears.
She drops from the railing straight onto his shoulders, the force driving them both messily to the floor. In a rare stroke of luck, she is the one to land atop him.
Her weight alone won’t hold him for long.
She draws her knife, presses it to his throat, clamps her other hand over his mouth to silence him—the same way he once did when her breaths turned rapid and thin. When reality bled through the gauzy gold she hid Inej Ghafa behind. Translucent. Weak. A curtain caught in rough-palmed hands and torn away.
The takedown is a quiet scuffle—heavy bodies thumping, fabric whispering over mahogany boards. The only sounds left are her panting breaths and the wind aching against the windowpanes.
Inej finally looks him in the eyes.
Beyond fear and fury is something worse.
Recognition.
She feels his wormy lips move beneath her palm. The word vibrates against her skin, sends a chill racing down her spine, bile rising in her throat.
“Whore.”
Then Brekker is behind her.
The man struggles in earnest now. Her grip slips—her hand foully wet where it covers his mouth. He sucks in air, lips parting to repeat the word—
—but Inej is quicker.
With pressure and a sharp jerk of her wrist, the word collapses into a gurgle. Blood bubbles over his lips. She still hears it beneath his wet, choking gasps. A new word.
She shoves the man off and hauls herself to her feet, stumbling back as the fluids slicking her skin send bile crawling up the back of her throat. She keeps her face stony, lets nothing show. She won’t let Kaz see it. She cannot be weak now.
Unseen, her whole body fizzes with waning adrenaline and fresh, crashing waves of panic, nerves lighting like sparks beneath her skin. She needs to make sure Kaz made nothing of the man’s fatal mistake—that he didn’t hear the slimy word trickling out before the blood. Needs to know the meaning of the word that slipped fluidly out with it.
She drags in a breath through her nose and presses her wet, shaking hands to her thighs until they dry and still.
She doesn’t look at him until he holds out the change of clothes they stashed in the neighbor’s boat shed, the smell of wet wood and dust too light to cover that of the man’s blood drying itchy on her skin.
Her heart kicks harder. Each time she changes clothes is a risk. More so with him standing only two feet away—the bastard of the Barrel, the greatest threat to her assumed identity.
She turns her back to him in the darkness of the shed, and with all the haste her shaking hands can manage, she strips down to her undershirt. Beneath it, fabric is wound tight—tighter than comfort—to flatten what there is to flatten of her chest. Her undershorts stay on as well, though they cling too closely to the curve of her hips and thighs for her to feel anything but exposed.
She forces herself not to flinch at that thought.
Not to imagine his eyes scraping over all the soft parts of her.
She pulls on the new disguise—canal boat operator’s clothes, coarse fabric and oil, grit, grime, a shape meant to blend into the soot-speckled waters of Ketterdam. When she turns, Brekker is staring determinedly at his pocket watch, pretending he isn’t doing her a favor. Like he is the sort of man who would rather be flayed than plainly allow anyone the softness of privacy.
Always has to be the bastard.
As they guide the stolen goldel down the boat ramp and out onto the canal, Kaz’s chest begins to shake with silent laughter.
She shoots him a glare sharp as a blade.
Her blood runs equal parts ice and electricity. She is furious with the injustice of it all—with her situation, with what she has been made to do.
No.
By what she has chosen to do to live.
Her face grows hot, her limbs tight with anger, that he could laugh at a time like this.
Only later, when they coast close to the Slat and her anger and grief have faded into something numb and buzzing, does she finally ask what is so funny.
Kaz doesn’t look at her when he speaks.
“What did he say?”
She doesn’t answer. The question catches her wrong-footed. He is testing her somehow. She knows it.
“What did he call you?”
Her mind scrambles, trying to measure how much he heard—how much he thinks he heard. Her tongue feels too big for her mouth.
She repeats the last word she heard the guard say, hesitant, her face turned away as if she can keep it from being hers if she doesn’t look at him while she offers it.
She hopes it isn’t a synonym for the other words. The ones he spoke into her palm. She has never heard this one before.
“Wraith,” Kaz corrects her fumbled pronunciation, like it’s nothing. Never berating her for this, at least. “It’s the spirit you see just before violent death takes you.”
His mouth quirks.
“Fitting, don’t you think?”
She scowls at him—but secretly, somewhere deep inside, the name makes something in her surge upwards. Towards the light—or maybe the darkness. The part that feels helpless. The part that has been trained to be small.
She doesn’t revel in it. Refuses to.
Not worth it—tangled as it is in the taking of a life. In ending what was not hers to end.
“I don’t like it.”
“You will.” Kaz’s tone is maddeningly certain. “You will when you learn what the backing of a legend can bring. People might not give a second thought before messing with Enez Graaf.”
He lets the false name hang in a way that stops her heart and numbs fingertips, death grip on the hem of her shirt.
“But the Wraith?” His eyes cut to her at last. “That will give them pause. If you play your cards right.”
She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing how that thought snags sharp inside her.
Doesn’t want to admit—even to herself—how attractive it is.
A name that could keep her safer than Enez Graaf ever will. One that offers more protection than simply playing male.
They walk in silence to the edge of the Barrel.
And then Inej melts into the shadows.
As she scales the side of a building, fingers finding brick with familiar ease, she thinks she hears him hiss it under his breath like a child’s prayer—or a fable’s final warning.
“Wraith.”