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There’s a stray lock of hair that keeps falling across Kaz’s eyes. Inej can’t look away.
He looks handsome. He always looks handsome, in fairness, but that’s because he was blessed with strong shoulders and bright eyes, and bone structure that her cousins back home would commit murder to own. His usual form of handsome plays into all the sharp angles that make up his face, the crisp seams of his jackets, the unflinching intensity of his gaze. Beautifully intimidating and remote, like a hawk wheeling through the sky above a cliff face.
This Kaz sitting before her is softer. In an odd twist, he’s actually dressed down for their date, forgoing his usual suit and tie for only a bottle green shirt beneath a black waistcoat, shot through with a web of subtle silver silk. When she’d commented on it he’d demurred that it was a nice spring evening, and even he doesn’t like heatstroke.
She wonders how she never realised he has freckles. Perhaps it’s the warm weather cajoling them to the surface of his skin. He has fourteen exactly, fourteen perfect little marks dotting the bridge of his nose and beneath his eyes. And his hair… she wonders if Jesper gave him styling advice, because it’s never looked as soft and wavy as tonight. It’s like it’s begging her to put her hand in it.
He looks…
He looks like a tree you want to climb. Nina’s voice in her mind, sly and wicked.
Pay attention, Inej. And Inej winces, because that little voice sounds like her mother scolding her.
It’s late in the evening. They watched the sun dip beneath Ketterdam’s skyline a while back, splashing a blaze of orange up the tall buildings only moments before it disappeared, leaving the dusky purple sky of the evening behind. Their dinner has come and gone. Their desert arrived minutes ago, because Inej had insisted that their night wasn’t complete without a true desert. And after that, they’ll… well, she doesn’t quite know what. Neither of them have done anything like this before.
She’s eating dinner in a nice restaurant with a handsome boy seated across from her. There are candles on the polished wood between them, sending flickering light over the planes of his face, and a tiny three piece band is playing music in the background. For once in her life, she feels entirely and utterly normal.
When they’d arrived at the restaurant, the first thing Kaz had done was draw attention to both the music and the candles. His jaw had been tight, and she’d heard the underlying subtext. This is what you asked for. Tell me it makes you happy.
She’d told him, because it was the balm he’d needed to work the tight knots out of his tense shoulders. It had made her sad, but she knew he wouldn’t listen if she told him, You, Kaz. You. That his presence is all she needs. If he needs to know that he’s done good, that he’s pleased her, well…
At the beginning of the meal, he’d been hunched and quiet, his words stilted. She’d watched his eyes dart from corner to corner, filing away each entry and exit, the ventilation shafts, the open windows allowing the warm breeze to carry chatter from the street inside.
But over the course of the meal, his shoulders had dropped little by little as he seemed to realise - slow and stubborn, like dragging a mule through mud - that she has absolutely no intention of letting this night turn to rot. To Inej, it all seems quite simple. He is who she wants, ill advised as many tell her that is. She intends to fight for their right to figure out how to be together.
All Inej has to do is convince Kaz a relationship together is possible. Then, she expects he’ll approach the issue of their relationship with the same unflinching drive that he tackles every other problem in his life. Kaz Brekker gets what he wants, after all, and he wants her.
This night is a major step forward. Kaz has a creme brulee in front of him, Inej has finished her sweetened tea, and the restaurant remains, remarkably, intact. Not a hint of blood in sight.
It really is the nicest restaurant either of them have ever been in. During her childhood her family had avoided settlements like this more often than not, preferring hearty meals cooked over a crackling fire, especially when the alternative was to be met with suspicious gazes and curled upper lips. When she’d joined the Dregs, she’d quickly found herself in their habit of grabbing street food on the go, rarely in one place long enough to sit down for a meal.
This place is lavish. The ceiling is encrusted with chandeliers.
(When the waiter had laid plates and cutlery in front of them, Kaz had held the plate between two gloved fingers, inspecting it with his critical eye. “Could hock these for fifty kruge a piece,” he’d muttered.
“No business tonight,” Inej had reminded him.
“I’d share the profits with you,” he’d defended with the tug of a grin, and it was the first time that night he’d seemed more like the Kaz she knows, and less like a sack of anxious cats squeezed into human form.)
Full and content, she and Kaz have spent the past twenty minutes estimating the costs of every ridiculous display of wealth surrounding them.
Kaz points at the watch wrapped around the meaty wrist of a man seated at a table to their left. “True gold,” he tells her out of the corner of his mouth. “Terrible idea. It’s going to scratch.”
Inej wrinkles her nose. “And it’s tacky.”
She reaches under the table with her foot and nudges his leg in the direction of a woman dressed in a dowdy black gown, puffy in the sleeves and shoulders, with a truly offensive bell-shaped skirt. “She looks like a gothic birthday cake.”
Kaz smirks. “All that money and still no stylist.” He points at the chandeliers overhead. “What is the bet,” he says, “that those things are actually glass masquerading as crystal?”
Inej raises her eyebrows. “And risk being caught out in such a heinous lie?” she says. “Scandalous.”
She’s having fun. The happiness is a well-spring bubbling in her chest.
Of course, the Saints can be capricious tricksters. The moment she dares to acknowledge her own joy is the same moment that the night takes a sharp turn.
It’s the smell of burning oil that tips her off first. She turns her nose to the air, sniffing, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Kaz tilt his head.
Then he stiffens. Years spent in the Barrel have honed both of their senses for impending chaos.
She half rises from her chair, and Kaz picks up his cane from where it rests against the table. Neither of them have a chance to move, however, before someone hidden behind the kitchen door shrieks, “Fire! ”
At the same time, the restaurant’s open windows slam shut as someone outside - or possibly several someones - bang them closed with a reverberating shudder.
The door to the kitchen richochets open and a collection of white-suited chefs topple through as smoke billows out behind them, black and acrid and reeking of oil. “Fire,” stammers the chef with grey stains all up the front of his uniform, grabbing for the arm of his nearest colleague for balance as he begins coughing helplessly, leaving a smear of charcoal across the other man’s pristine clothing.
The patrons, frozen in silence at the first outburst, erupt into action. The symphony of chairs screeching back against the hardware floors harmonises with brain-splintering clatter of metal against porcelain as the crowd drops their cutlery to their plates and shoves themselves to their feet.
Smoke continues to fill the air, drifting to mingle up between those chandeliers as the sounds of panic from the kitchen get louder.
The woman closest to the outside door yanks at the handle, then bangs at it when it doesn’t open. “We’re locked in,” she gasps.
For a moment, the fear binds all their mouths shut. Then people begin yelling, pushing at the doors, demanding and pleading to be let out as clouds of black smoke roil above them. Inej can’t even be surprised that this is what became of their evening.
Kaz grabs her wrist suddenly and releases it just as fast. “Look,” he orders, and she follows where he’s pointing.
There’s a man rushing from the back doors through the room. He’s dressed in the bright clashing colours of Barrel flash and he looks familiar, like Inej has seen his face before. There’s a dark mark tattooed onto one of his arms, but he’s moving too fast for her to catch what it is.
He’s running directly for the man with the tacky gold watch, an expression of intense concentration on his face. The man has no idea, too busy shoving his belongings into his companion’s arms to notice his own surroundings.
Inej doesn’t know whether he plans to murder or kidnap this guy, but it doesn’t matter. She acts without thinking; hidden beneath her dress on her upper thigh is her favourite knife, the bone-handled Sankt Petyr, and she yanks it from its thigh holster and flings it as hard as possible. She’s not aiming to kill, but she wouldn’t mind if she did. This waste of space just ruined her date.
The knife thuds home in the Barrel man’s bicep and he careens off to the side, howling in pain as the knife quivers but sticks, secured in his arm. The man with the gold watch jerks to look over at him, finally aware that his life is in danger. He looks petrified.
The Barrel man’s eyes roll wildly in their direction, and his eyes land first on Inej, then Kaz. His eyes go so wide the panicked whites are visible right around his iris. He yells, “Sprung! We been sprung!”
Then he turns on his tail and bounds out through the kitchen doors, the same way he’d come in. The chefs scatter out of his way.
The slimy bastard stole Inej’s favourite knife.
Through the pandemonium, Inej can hear someone yelling that the fire is out. “Don’t panic!” they keep saying, to little effect. She can see someone preparing to slam a statue bust into one of the locked doors.
Kaz hasn’t even left his seat. His expression is stony, eyebrows thunderously low over his brow.
The man with the gold watch is shaking with what could be anything from fear to fury. His chest expands like a bullfrog and he bellows, “Everybody quiet!”
The room drops into sudden and scared silence. Every face turns towards him, and that one guy reluctantly drops his statue bust. Inej finds herself reluctantly impressed at his ability to control the room.
The man has a moustache that quivers violently as he stares over the room. Inej watches it move and wonders if it might just crawl off the side of his face like a grotesquely hairy caterpillar. “Someone,” the man declares in a voice that vibrates with indignation, “just tried to kidnap the new Chief Officer of the Staadwatch.”
From the way he gestures, he’s talking about himself. She frowns. She’d heard nothing about a new staadwatch in town.
Inej knows the moment his gaze alights on Kaz because he sucks in a dramatic gasp, his chest billowing up like a balloon. He points a shaking hand in their direction and declares with all the portentous weight of a soldier entering battle, “Brekker!”
The whispers around the room alight again, racing from person to person like a grassfire hopping from seed to seed. The Chief Officer booms, “Now why am I not surprised to see you here, Dirtyhands?”
Every pair of eyes in the room turn to them. She sees recognition on some of their faces - an older lady’s mouth pops wide open, her hand going to her chest, and in the back there are two suited men shaking their heads disapprovingly. A group of younger people are leaning forward, craning their heads to get a better glimpse. Truthfully Inej didn’t expect to be recognised so far from the Barrel - it was one of the reasons they’d chosen this place - but then, their faces were plastered on wanted posters all over the city not two months ago.
The Chief Officer looks around himself, at his companions, at the waiters watching the scene, stunned and motionless. “You are witnessing the downfall of a great criminal, ladies and gentlemen,” he announces, but he sounds breathless and flustered.
Inej almost feels sorry for him. He’s shaking terribly; his shivering moustache looks like it might just fly away. She supposes attempted kidnappings are probably not a daily occurrence this side of the canals.
Kaz has one hand on his crow’s cane, his opposite foot tapping in irritation. His face portrays nothing but flat disinterest. “Nonsense,” he says. “If I wanted to kidnap you, I would have succeeded.”
The man splutters and sucks in several quick breaths, which does nothing to calm his breathing. “How rich!” he blusters. “Everyone knows you’re threatened by me because I won’t be bought by bribes. So you resort to violence - as typical!”
Inej raises an eyebrow. She likes to think that Kaz would keep her abreast of any wily plots he’s devised, but she supposes she could be wrong. She’s not his spider anymore, after all.
A mean little smile plays around Kaz’s mouth. “Sir,” he mocks, “I don’t even know who you are.”
The Chief Officer’s face goes curiously puce, like rotten plums sit beneath his skin. He looks at the closest waiter, who is surreptitiously trying to wipe the grit of smoke off his forehead. “Arrest him!”
The waiter looks startled. “Ain’t that your job?” he says.
The Chief Officer growls. “Grab him so I can arrest him, then!”
“But he’s a paying customer,” the waiter says, dumbfounded.
The scenario seems farcical beyond belief, but Inej can sense the shifting attitude of the crowd surrounding them. In the Barrel, a man like this so-called new Chief Officer would be laughed out of a restaurant at best, tied up and possibly murdered at worse. Men like this only hold power for as long as they let every other crime go unnoticed along the Staves and the Harbours.
But they’re a very long way from the Barrel, and the people in this room hold no love for the likes of canal rats like them. In this room, the Chief Officer is no cartoonish figure deserving of ridicule; he’s a man of authority. Even as she watches, she can see faces hardening and souring as people realise with whom they’ve been sharing their dinner space. Criminals. Vagrants. Low life thieves and thugs. She hears the words tossed into the air, and they feel dangerous.
The Chief Officer is expanding again, getting ready to roar his next command, and Inej says quietly, “Kaz.”
Kaz finally pulls himself to his feet.
His cane strikes sharply against the pane of glass stretching over the window closest to them and it shatters, the entire pane falling away in a single efficient crack. He offers his hand to her. “Time to climb?”
The Chief Officer lunges for them as they scramble out the window, but he’s too far to be effectual. Inej’s dress catches on a lingering triangle of glass and for a moment she thinks it’s going to yank her back into the room, but then - it rips, and tears, and the two of them are free and climbing up and up and up, scaling the wall as they hear chaos explode in the room beneath them once more.
Kaz is surprisingly good at climbing - it’s mostly arm strength, really - but Inej is still better and she climbs quickly, nimbly, digging her impractical sparkly gold ballet flats into the cracks of the wall so she can beat him to the top of the building. He hauls himself up by exposed bricks and the rain gutter, and by the time he’s reached the top, she’s already holding out an arm to pull him up.
He stares at the hand for a second, and when he reaches out, the glove he was wearing only moments ago is nowhere to be found. Her hand slides into his warm palm, and she pulls him up.
Down below she can hear a commotion, which probably means that that stupid man with his tacky gold watch and ridiculous mustache is trying to give chase, but she’s not worried. These rooftops are her homeground. She knows their layout, their own unique alleys and shortcuts, the way they breathe and change. It’s more familiar to her than the cobblestoned streets below.
Let the staadwatch come and embarrass themselves if they like, she thinks. The confidence thrums through her veins, hot and sparking like lightning branching through her blood. This is her arena. And Kaz Brekker is holding her hand.
She starts picking her along the rooftops, leading Kaz carefully, aware that his cane prods ahead of him on every step, his feet not half as sure as her own. They can hear clattering behind them and they move fast at first, but it's not long before it fades away. His hand feels so much bigger than her own, enveloping her fist, and the feel of it affects the racing rate of her heart almost as much as the escape itself.
She leads him from roof to roof, picking the flattest routes she knows, and for a time neither of them say anything. The noise along the streets fades away as they head out from the affluent commercial districts and into the quieter residential areas. It’s darker here, and cooler, and she lifts her head into the night sky, enjoying the playful springtime breeze that dances over her nose and snatches at the ends of her hair like a cheeky child.
These rooftops feel a whole world away from the rest of Ketterdam, and for a long time she’d thought of them as hers alone. Her reprieve, her safety. She finds that none of that changes with Kaz beside her.
It’s Kaz who breaks the silence. “I’m sorry,” he says.
She looks back at him. Frowns. “For what?”
His brows lower again, and he looks much like he’d done back in the restaurant; a little angry, a little sad.
That strand of hair has fallen in front of his eyes again.
“I didn’t organise that kidnapping,” he says instead of answering her question directly. “Swear it, Inej.”
She turns to face him fully. When she places her thumb against the inside of his wrist, she can feel his heart beating very fast. “I know you didn’t,” she says. “You’d never stand for such sloppiness. It wasn’t your fault.”
His nose wrinkles a little, a cute gesture. She thinks he agrees that the whole plan, whoever had devised it, was terribly executed. Kaz would never.
It’s just their luck, really, that some upstart Barrel boss would attempt a kidnapping on a major staadwatch officer while they were at the same restaurant. The Saints have a strange sense of humour sometimes.
Kaz is staring at the rip in her dress, still looking vaguely upset in that way that displays itself as anger, so she places a finger under his chin and raises it until he’s watching her eyes. Under the silver moonlight, his own eyes look black. “Everything is fine,” she tells him. “Kaz? Everything is fine. ”
She gazes at him for a moment longer, lets her eyes flick from his eyes to his lips to that damn hair strand. She reluctantly releases his hand and nudges at his shoulders, directing him to sit. “Don’t move,” she instructs him, and holds up a hand when she sees his natural argumentativeness rise, that drive that tells him to push back on any order. “I’ll tie you up if I have to. Stay.”
“I’m not a dog,” he says drily.
“Dogs are better behaved,” she snipes, even as she swings her leg over the side of the rooftop. She begins shimmying down the white garden lattice of the home they’re standing on and calls, “Just stay!”
They’re not far from the Staves, so it doesn’t take her long to track down a streetside kiosk selling hutspot. It smells filling and rich - so different from the spiced soups her family would make back in Ravka but, she considers as the seller dollops the stew into two flimsy bowls, they serve rather the same comfort.
Bowls in hand, she jogs back to the quiet street she’d deposited her boy. The lattice poses a little challenge, what with both her hands full, but she wasn’t the best spider Ketterdam had ever seen for nothing. She makes it to the top of the lattice and onto the roof without spilling a single drop.
Kaz has lowered himself to the shingles, so he has to look up at her when she appears. The moment she pushes herself over the ledge he says, “We didn’t pay for dinner.”
She blinks. “No, we didn’t.”
He takes the bowl of hutspot she proffers and, as she’d hoped, some of that damned tension in his shoulders bleeds away as the smell of slow-cooked vegetables fills his nose. “Candles and music and we pay for the meal at the end,” he mutters. “We didn’t pay for the meal.”
She wants to ask why anyone would care about that, but she knows he does, very much. She sighs. “It wasn’t supposed to be literal - “ she begins but he interrupts.
“And your dress is ripped, and you lost Sankt Petyr,” he says.
“And,” Inej argues right back, “we had a wonderful meal where we got to judge stuffy rich people, with candles and music.” She nudges at his bowl until he takes a resentful bite. “And I paid for these anyway, so it still counts. And we will get my knife back, because it's not like whoever he is can hide from us.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Finally, he says in a tone so tentative she almost wouldn’t have believed him capable of it, “And I got to hold your hand.”
She settles comfortably next to him and lays her palm flat upward so he can place his hand over hers. “I’m happy, Kaz,” she says truthfully. “And besides,” she teases, “don’t you think running from the staadwatch is kind of romantic?”
He smiles slowly. “It has its charms.”
They quiet down as they eat their hutspot, and Inej stares up at the sky and thinks about stars, and about Kaz, and about nothing much at all other than how content she feels.
Kaz says through a mouthful of stew, “Going to skin Roeder for not catching onto a new Chief Officer - “
“No business, Kaz,” Inej interrupts.
Hutspot always makes her feel sleepy and warm, and she finds herself half dozing as they sit there on that little rooftop, watching the clouds drift over the moon. Her head is already level with Kaz’s shoulder, so it feels natural to let it rest there properly. His shirt is made of the softest fabric in the world.
At some point, Kaz asks quietly, “What are you thinking about?”
She blinks her eyes open. ”Hmm?”
“I - I asked what you were thinking about,” Kaz says, and then even quieter, “That’s something I saw in a play about romance once.”
Oh, her affection for this boy is deeper than the ocean itself.
“Dirtyhands watches the romantic plays,” she murmurs with a little laugh. “I’m thinking about stars. That I would like to see them again soon.”
Kaz is watching her. She can feel it in the turn of his neck and the bare breaths that stir the hairs over her forehead. He doesn’t say anything for a long time, but it’s a comfortable silence. When he does eventually speak, he says, “Back home on the farm, the stars are so vivid you can see the shape of the solar system.”
She raises her head to look at him. Unlike every other time he’s mentioned his childhood to her, he looks content. There’s no edge of self-directed derision to his words. At least right now, this memory doesn’t hurt.
She takes a breath. “Maybe you could show me some time.”
He just nods, once.
She reaches out and puts a hand against his jaw, running a thumb along his cheekbone gently. He freezes so dramatically it’s like the cells in his body stop moving. Carefully, she reaches out with her other hand and pushes his stubborn lock of hair away from his eyes, running her hand over the soft waves of his hair. “Been wanting to do that all night,” she hums.
And before she loses her nerve, she takes his palm in her own and presses a kiss to the back of his hand, holding eye contact as she does.
His eyes blow wide and his lips open just a little. When she releases his hand, he’s utterly still until he runs a thumb over the back of it, eyes unfocused.
“Okay?” she checks.
“Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah.”
“Okay,” she repeats.
Inej falls asleep there on the rooftop. Beside her, Kaz runs a thumb over his hand, again and again. They don’t make it back to the Slat until the pink and yellow rays over the harbour sky herald morning. And when she drops him off at her attic window she thinks that maybe, potentially, probably they really do have a future together after all.