She leaves, sometimes. Ketterdam is the center of all commerce and trade and it turns out she doesn't have to go far to find slavers, because most of them are already coming to her. She just has to go far enough out not to clog the harbor with bodies.
Often, she's home before suppertime. Sometimes, The Wraith is away for a few days or a week at a time before it slips back into Berth 22.
It's after one of these absences that she appears in Kaz's room, her chin lifted and tension around her eyes. He marks the changes. Her shoulders back as if she's about to perform. She can't look at the bed, and she stares him right in the eye. Perhaps she thinks he won't notice.
"I'm ready," she says.
His eyes gleam like the thief he is. "Ah."
He catches her hand and tugs her the other way, crossing the room away from the bed. She resists for a step, looking confused, and then she laughs, her shoulders coming down a notch.
"You know the easiest way to steal a man's wallet, Kaz?"
He takes a chair and smooths her right into his lap. "Why don't you tell me, Wraith?"
"Tell him you're going to steal his watch."
He blinks innocently at her. "Sounds like good advice. I suppose that's how you ended up with my wallet."
"Now who's speaking in metaphors and proverbs?" she teases.
He folds back her quilted vest, revealing a his own purse full of coins wrapped in worn black leather. "Not a metaphor. Just cold hard cash."
She inhales in surprise, but only for an instant. Then she smiles and rolls her eyes at him. "You can't flirt me with your magician's flash like I'm some dock girl, Kaz. I know all your tricks."
She does. For instance, she knows the coins he keeps in the bag are always counterfeits, and that he keeps his real money in the boot of his bad leg. It's the real reason his limp is as bad as it is, but it gives him an advantage, because when he takes it out, he can keep up with the others just fine.
He smirks. "If you know them all, are they still tricks?"
"Next, you'll be plucking a flower from behind my ear."
"You think me so cliché?" He flicks his wrist in a flourish and the purse falls open to reveal it's filled to bursting with blossoms. Geraniums.
She catches her breath. "I never told you."
"Just that they were your mother's favorite." He shrugs. "It was your father. When we first met, he asked if I'd found your geraniums."
She searches his eyes. "But he knows. That you were the one who tracked them down, brought them here."
"I think it was a test. To see if you'd told me."
Inej looks away.
"It's all right. I wouldn't have told me, either," Kaz says. "It was easy enough to guess. I told him a smart man doesn't only give a woman what she already knows she wants. He riddles out what she would want, so he can offer her favorable terms on her future."
Inej's eyes come back to him. "My knives. My ship." Her finger caress his scarred knuckles, climbing each one as if it is its own mountain. "I hear another pleasure house went out of business this week. The last one that still used indentures."
He waves his hand, and beneath it, the purse is gone.
"The invisible hand of the free market does what it will."
"The free market was fond enough of indentures before." Her voice is soft, knowing.
"It's not hard to find people eager to fornicate for money, Inej. It's hardly a heist on the Ice Palace."
"And the staggering new taxes on household indentures, so people find it cheaper to hire for a wage? I suppose Councilman Hoede has also felt the...invisible hand of the market."
"The poor Councilman has found that people are not so eager to clean houses freely as they are to fornicate." Kaz shrugs. "His problem, not mine, but like any good politician, he seems to think more tax is the answer."
"I heard Heleen didn't make her rent on the Menagerie again. That she's having to turn tricks alongside her girls to try to make up the difference."
"Strange. When she switched from indentures with everyone else, you'd think she would have seen the same improvements in customer satisfaction. Perhaps she should pay her girls more." He shrugged. "Her landlord must be a pitiless soul, if he didn't simply evict her. Letting her attempt to make up the debt with her own efforts will only prolong the inevitable. She's still going to end up in the streets."
Her tiny smile is growing, like the light of her Saints glows beneath her skin. "All this, for me?"
"I'm hardly a philanthropist, Inej, and I rarely do anything for just one reason. My pockets are growing plenty fat under my enthusiastic fleet of pleasure houses."
She only smiles and he changes the subject. "What of you? You've always had the patience of a...what's the Suli proverb?"
"Patience requires no patience."
"It's always a circle with you people. Always give with your take, unlike me." His eyes bore into hers. "It's how I know ultimatums are not your style."
He'd been too busy ruining Van Eck to think it fully through, but one of the many nights her words were replaying through his head, he realized it wasn't something she'd ever demand. Not like that.
I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.
"When you were teaching Rotty to read, it took years to get him up to See Spot Run, and you barely sliced his knuckles when he grew fond and tried to get handsy. Didn't even take a finger. And yet for me..."
"The gloves were a clue to your enemies. I couldn't go to sea and leave you behind with a bullseye on you. Something you needed that could be taken from you, something that couldn't defend itself the way Jesper and I can." She shrugs. "You've always done well with a challenge."
He doesn't care for that, but he sees the logic of it. "I commend you on your choice of lures."
Behind her, his gloves still lay on the mantel.
"A smart woman rarely does things for only one reason, Kaz."
"Come then. Enjoy the fruits of your investment."
Her lashes flicker wider and she glances back at the bed. He thinks of the thousand times she's told him she was fine before risking herself on another impossible job for him. He shouldn't have listened to her then, either.
He doesn't follow her gaze. Just sets his agile, lock pick fingers to work on her shoulders, unwinding every muscle that's grown tight from years of climbing with no release. So long, she's been carrying her own weight with no rope, no net.
She gives a choked little moan, and melts in his lap. His fingers dance down her spine, unlocking everything as they go as he listens to her breathing deepen. For the first time, he thinks he understands one of her Suli proverbs.
Patience requires no patience.
He could live the rest of his life in this chair, with his bad leg aching eagerly to support her slight weight, the warmth of her hips cradled against his belly. Smoothing the tension of a hard life out of her beautiful back.
She's all but asleep by the time his hands slow, one bent knuckle following the inside seam of her pants down to her knee. He knows when her awareness changes, even when she makes no sound. He crosses to the other side, and his touch begins to rise. He can feel the heat of her through supple leather. Her eyes follow him, dark and liquid.
"When you came in tonight, what you said..." A wry smile tips the edge of his lips. "You should leave the gritted teeth suffering to me. It suits me better."
She laughs, her belly fluttering against his palm.
"Oh? And what suits me?"
"Grace." His voice is velvet under gravel and all the laughter vanishes from her eyes into surprise. "You've a dancer's body, but it's been a long time since you've danced for the joy of it."
The amusement's back. "And are you going to show me how to dance, Kaz Brekker?"
"No. You're going to teach me."
His long fingers trace the line of her waistband and her head falls back a little.
"But there's something I wanted to show you first," he says.
Her eyes are wide, luminous, and he holds them as the zipper of her pants melts open under his fingers, and then those long lashes are fluttering for a whole new reason.
He has a con man's pacing. Advance and retreat for just enough satisfaction to keep the subject desperate for the final payoff. Never pressing too hard.
When she would have reached for him, too, he smooths her hands away. "Only for you. Feel what it's like when it's just for you."
He's as patient as a sun-warmed stone. So that by the time she lays splayed out across his lap, the moon has already risen and she's left gasping. "What...how—"
"That," Kaz says, "is why I'm given to understand that people will do this for free."
And she laughs herself breathless, still cradled in his arms.
It's not until he's fallen asleep beside her, in the bed at last but both still fully clothed, that she finds the flower tucked just behind her ear.