Cross the Seas

|Chapter 6| - Kaz

What overcame the searing pain of the shot was the surprise of Inej's actions. Kaz had never thought she could reach such brutality but the wraith never failed to astound anyone. Her note still rang throughout her mind. "Gert Van Verent's mansion was paid for in bodies." it had read. Maybe he should feel pity for those slavers she had done away with.

"Now, what?" he questioned.

"My goal is to save the Grisha and I will," she responded, wiping the blood off her blades and tucking them in, one quick motion being all she required.

Kaz raised his sleeve to inspect the gunshot, but it was Inej who came forward and batted his hand away. The wound was so close to his shoulder she had to slice the fabric of his shirt to watch. His stomach lurched, and her breath hitched. The blood had soaked the top of his shirtsleeve in a blotch of red, and it had stroked the boundaries of his R tattoo.

She held the embedded bullet gingerly and the prickle started to make its way out of his skin. He bit back the urge to accept the pain. The snarl of pain might be loud and unyielding but the Wraith always knew how to silence livid fury from screaming.

Because her rage is the dagger of ice that will relentlessly kill someone, but in silence, as she savors it.

As she plucked the projection out of his bicep, Kaz finally came to the mortifying realization of how much blood he had lost. His arm buzzed with the collapsing pressure of the blood that drooped down the point. It was a surprise Inej was holding her ground from the gory sight. He tried to shrug her hands off, but she held him, and some miserable part of him approved clinging to her support. She raised her glance to his, with gleaming eyes of half concern and half regret.

"Don't." was all she said. His pulse raced, and it hurt to just regard her face and the bare, obstinate restraint she held. She would have been following the merch now and depending on her rage, perhaps even caught him and exposed him. In that stead, all she held now was him and his shattered mind.

She released her grip over him and Kaz would have given to the agony if she didn't give him the understanding look that seemed to say, leaving you is not an option I have.

She reached into her cloak and conjured a little roll of bandage and started unwrapping it. He assumed she had acquired it with the pen and paper she from the house she had broken into. Perhaps crows never stopped biting the hand that fed them.

She hesitantly placed one end over his wound and coiled it, her hands growing efficient and less trembling as she wrapped, until the white concealed the welling blood. Dirtyhands cringed at the care, stiffening at the fact that Inej was doing this for him, and even more that he had somwhow found a humiliating comfort in it.

"We should get going," he said in a curt tone, and pulled away. If only Inej hadn't held on so fiercely. She glared at him, simultaneously finishing with the knot without watch of the bandage.

"Don't you ever realize anything?" she replied, her voice excruciating. "With all that cunning and genius to form plans and tricks, do you ever see how, instead of why?" She was fuming, and all in that moment Kaz only saw himself in the Suli girl who had been invisible to everyone's eyes.

"You wanted me to stay," she continued after several moments of screaming silence. "But if I do, all I am to you is a spider, weaving webs across rooftops and alleys of this damned city-"

"You are not-"

"Then what am I, Kaz?" she shouted. He hadn't realized her voice had been trembling until it had broken at the end, and that he had been giving away to it, and the sharp edges that made him all too wary of what Inej could do. "What am I to you?" she echoed in words of cold wrath.