He lets her undress him so easily now. Without a flinch or looking away from her face. She likes it so much, sometimes she forgets that it won't always be so easy, once they're in his bed.

She skims her hands across him. A wind, not a collision, the careful way she's learned causes him the least fallout. When it goes wrong, something twists behind his eyes. She doesn't know its source. She sees it in him nearly every night when they're together. The pain, the illness. It sickens him, turns him inside out of what he should be. She's searching, always, for how to draw the poison out of him, to leave the wound clean so it can heal.

She knows the stories, the laying on of healing hands.

Inej does not fancy herself a saint.

She knows what she's done. She knows she's tried her best to chart a straight course in a crooked world. When she's gone astray she's done it for love, and for what she knows to be the closest to right. She knows it was crooked still, and a better believer would have found a straighter course.

She also knows, for Kaz, no hands but hers will do. Maybe a true saint would sicken him all the more. She doesn't question, because deeply...

Secretly...

She wants it to be her.

Even if it's not righteous.

Even if it's pride, not kindness, that makes her yearn to see him ease just for her.

She cares, oh she cares if she's doing this for the wrong reasons. But she does it anyway, and her face holds no lines for it.

His face holds lines deep enough for both of them, and her fingertips tease them as if she could breathe them away. Like a tailor, those Grisha magicians. There are moments she thinks she feels... As if something like that magic exists just out of the corner of her eye but she can't quite reach it. With him, it feels like it comes home to her, but she does not name it.

Now, she turns her hand so it's palm up. In front of his pale, hard chest. Behind it, her eyes gleam. They hold all the heat of the firelight and her skin barely contains it. She's grateful she still has her clothes, if not her blades. Because when he sits up, it's to lay his face in her open hand. The hard rise of his cheekbone fitting the hollow of her palm. His breath bathing her wrist where her pulse rises.

His hair falling forward to tickle her skin. Her legs tense like she needs to climb, and she holds very still.

Just in case.

Like the first time.

His lashes graze her skin and she dips her head to try a kiss. He's fiery tonight, fearless, and heat licks inside her chest at how much she likes it. When her eyes come open again, his hand is on her buttons. Fingers long, and as agile as always, even more so without the gloves. But the first button holds against him when her lashes flutter and breath stops.

She almost disappears.

The window is a bound away and the edges of her feel as if they might tease away to smoke. Like she can do as Jesper has always accused and just exhale herself into nothing. Maybe she can. This blackness takes the simple clarity of her thoughts and blurs them.

She didn't think it would be this hard. Not for her. She didn't, truth be told, ever think they'd get this far. Kaz's knee bare and grazing the leather of her pants. His sheets folded back for her. His eyes steady in the firelight.

He's not in pain, not any more. If it was laying on of hands he needed, he's mostly healed and she has no excuse to keep going, not on his account. If they go farther, it's on hers.

Her button holds fast. His first finger is resting on it. As if he's holding it closed for her, as long as she needs it closed. She loves him for it, desperately. As much as she loved him when he bought her contract, and handed it back to her. As much as she did when she still lived in Heleen's halls. When he came into her room, and her lashes swept down, and he said, "Not that. I need you for more than that."

"I didn't think," he says now, "that there was anything that could make you hesitate. And I did not," he says softly, "want that thing to be me."

He withdraws his hand.

"Kaz." She tries to say it, but there's no air left in her lungs. A tear is couched at the corner of her lashes and she can't blink it back in before it falls free.

"There's work at the club for me. Someone cheating, no doubt." He shifts to leave the bed. "Sleep, Wraith. There will be time enough tomorrow for all the whispers you can hear."

She catches his wrist, and he doesn't flinch at her speed, or the strength of her hold. When she ducks her head, her hair falls to tickle his thigh. His hand is curled half closed and when she brushes her face against it, it mirrors that first touch when he reached for her. The backs of his fingers over her cheek, coming to rest at the place where a knife hilt would normally be hidden, at the nape of her neck. Like a salute to her power.

The flames flicker in the fireplace, and his fingers rest, still half-curled, at the nape of her neck. "You could tell me," he says, "what you need."

She shakes her head, her hair veiling her body as if she needs a second layer of clothes. She didn't expect this, didn't see it in her thoughts. Doesn't understand the knot that's still tied deep in her throat like a word—any word—will give her away.

Her contract is paid. She belongs to no one. She owns her own ship, her life, commands her crew. Has consigned to the depths of the sea so many men who would have made her world worse.

This should not still be happening to her.

Kaz's fingers soften, slip long and strong across the back of her neck. Where nothing usually supports her except pure air and her own strength. And just like that, the words find her head.

This should never have happened to her.

She looks up, and his eyes are dark and they know. They know all about things that should not be spoken, things that must be avenged. She tips her forehead against his and he lets her.

She swallows, the knot in her throat shrinking until she can speak, at least a little.

"Wait for me," she whispers, and his fingers tighten spasmodically. His answer comes swift.

"Always."