As soon as she comes in, Kaz can read the shift in her. Of course he can. Kaz could read a book without words.

He could find out everything he wanted to know about a book by who owned it, where they kept it. How often they took it out and what pages their fingers lingered on.

He always kept his Wraith in the smallest room in the Slat so no one would ever notice how much he cherished her. He let her defend herself so no one would ever see how much he wanted to shield her. Instead, he simply bought her sharper knives and kept her close, where he could hear through the floor when she was safe and home.

The one time he slipped, the one time he looked at her in public the way he's looking at her now...was in front of Jan Van Eck. They both paid dearly for that. But then again, so had Van Eck.

"Miss me?" Inej smiles, perched in his window. Today, her eyes are as light as her body.

Three hundred lies rise to his practiced lips. He has to shove past them all and take firm hold of his own fears before he can nod. He had to learn how much it means to her to hear how he values her. It's one of the more expensive gifts he's given, but he gives it nonetheless.

"Intensely."

Her dark eyes flare, and she vaults in from his window. Lands soundless as a bird on his creaky wooden floor. He sheds his coat onto a chair.

She's reaching for him before the fabric has even settled under its own weight. His vest buttons sigh open for her as she kisses him, and her thumb flicks the catch on his belt.

"Careful." He guides her small fingers away from where they would have knicked themselves on the new blade he has hidden behind his buckle. She smiles to see it.

"Very nice."

He needs to carry more knives to keep his head on his shoulders, now that hers are all out to sea most days. Kaz does not tell her this. He's always been perfectly capable of doing his own stabbing, his own spying. She just does it so much more stylishly.

She tosses his vest on the floor and goes after his shirt buttons, pressing up on her toes to kiss the skin she's exposing. Her tongue is hot and quick and his pulse throbs in the center of his chest.

She's different, tonight. Maybe she missed him, too.

The thought snags in his mind and he gets lost in it as she melts against him. He's able to hold her the way they've practiced: her face tucked into his throat, his arms wrapped around her slender back. He knows the sight of her better than he knows himself and still, every time he embraces her it's a shock how small she truly is.

Her body flows liquid against his, and that seed of knowledge is still itching inside his mind. Something's different in her tonight. But he also knows how fast desire can be cracked apart by old fear so he begins the safest way. The easiest way, for her.

He lays a hand on one of the knives at her waist. A question.

She lets her hands fall open, a light in her eyes for him. She nods.

Sankta Petyr.

He whispers their names as she lets him take each one.

Her eyes glisten and grow soft as she watches him kneel painfully to reveal the blade in her boot. Sankta Vladimir. Sankta Alina.

When they're away from the Slat, and she has to take off her knives for anything, she never sets them down. Refuses to leave her Saints unguarded. She always, only, hands them to Kaz.

He's still not sure if she's guessed how much that affects him. Then again, some days, the Suli girl seems to know everything there is. So perhaps she knows precisely what she's doing, when she chooses him to hold her knives.

"I didn't think you knew them. Their names."

He shrugs. He hears everything, when it comes from those lips.

The last knife remaining is the one for her hair.

It is one he had custom-made for her, to be wound up in her hair until the blade is hidden and the hilt looks like nothing more than an ornament. Even if all her other weapons are gone, she'll always have this.

He had the knife made during a winter when every penny he could earn, counterfeit, or steal was going toward the last few payments on her indenture. He hadn't tasted vegetables in a year, because they were more expensive than plain oats.

It was after he'd sent her to ferret out the location of a stash the Dime Lions were sitting on. They'd caught her, taken every last hidden blade. She'd had to beat a man unconscious with a sock drawer to get away.

That was all she said about it, but that one detail snagged. For all the times Kaz had been roughed up by the Dime Lions himself, they'd never once dragged him off to a bedroom to do it.

So, he used the information Inej had obtained to rob and kill the Dime Lions who'd done it, and commissioned the hair-ornament dagger for her with the proceeds. It's the lightest, strongest metal on the market, the visible handle of it an artistic flourish that looks so lovely no one ever suspects that what is underneath was made to be a weapon.

It was another year yet before he could afford to taste a vegetable. When his teeth started to fall out, he just kidnapped a Grisha healer to put them back in, and kept on stealing.

Now, they're both rich enough to buy a thousand knives. A thousand vegetables. Now, they're rich enough to have choices.

Her hair whishes free down her back and he offers her the weapon. She lays it on the table, and takes him to bed.

She lays him down the way she laid down her knife. With reverence. Without hesitation. Her clothes fall to her own eager hands. Piece by piece, her eyes alight on his. He's afraid, always, that his eyes will betray him the way they did the one time she stopped him, slapped at him. But whatever she saw then, she hasn't seen it since, and his little spy watches him ever so closely.

They've never both been bare, not in his bed. She hesitates beside him, as if she doesn't know where her place is on this stage.

He doesn't know how much of this his bad leg will stand for. It's the only thing he's ever considered getting it healed for. So he draws her up and astride him, adapting.

"I got you something," he murmurs.

A shadow crosses behind her eyes, but she doesn't pull away. He flicks a hidden button, and a framework of sturdy bars slide out above his bed. She looks up, curious, the ends of her hair tickling his chest.

She smiles, slow. And she's gone, fast.

Her hands latch on to the bar over his head and her whole body curls up, flips over the bar and comes down in a controlled pounce to catch her toes on the other panel. She laughs, softly, turning to balance on one hand, then the other, pouring into an arch.

He saw her fight on her ship, once. She never let a battle remain level on the ground. On a boat, there was always a mast to leap to, a rope to swing from. The slavers fought in two dimensions, and she fought in three. They never had a chance. It was her world, not theirs.

Now, she flips up into a handstand, poising arrow-straight, and then tumbles down atop him in a soft landing. Her hair free and trusting as it settles around them like a breeze in a forest.

She's glowing even brighter than she was when she came in his window, her rare smile flashing bright, small teeth. "Don't think I don't see what you're doing, Kaz."

"Well, now the bars aren't just for you. I can also crack an assassin's head on them, in a pinch."

"Mm-hmm..." she murmurs, eyes twinkling. "You couldn't have me with my knives on, so you turned your bed into a playground for the Wraith."

"You're fooling yourself, Inej, if you think I wouldn't fuck you with your knives still on," he rasps. "I've always found them...interesting."

Her lashes flare. "You would."

She bends to taste his throat, the skim of her teeth drawing his pulse to throb wildly at the surface. But this new setting has woken her anew, the impossible acrobat's movements of her body as confident as they are when she's clothed. She dances over him, twirls and flips, bites and slowly tastes as she plays across the bars and the expanse of his skin. She's used her body for many things, but never this. Not for herself, for the pure joy of it.

He lets her flirt, and when he's standing hard as a man can be, she takes her whole weight into the strength of her arms, clinging to the bar as she lowers herself onto him, taking him inside. He chokes a breath, the hot clasp of her somehow different than what he'd expected, all these years. Her hands leave the bar and cup his throat, thumbs skimming his jaw.

"Kaz."

His hips are lifting, pain lancing through his knee as his heels dig into the mattress. He doesn't know precisely what more he wants but the need is yanking at him more strongly than it ever has any time they've played. He clutches at her back, unsteady and itching for the cold clasp of his crow's head cane. She comes down over him, and the scent of her is like clean metal and the sea. Softer, though. Warmer. Her hair curtains all the harsh lights from the room and when she kisses him, it's small and uncertain.

He catches the back of her neck, weaving his fingers into her hair and tipping his forehead against hers. Inside her, he flexes and drives an inch deeper. She gasps and he rocks against her, deeply. Enough to send something like a tide lapping higher within his chest. A small sound escapes her and she moves to roll him on top of her. He stops her.

"I don't move well," he says hoarsely. "Take your pleasure of me, Wraith."

"And you?"

"Well, I'll just suffer in teeth-gritted silence, of course."

A smile blossoms across her face and she swats at him.

"You're as horrible as everyone says."

"Mmm," he rumbles. "I should hope so."

But as he says it, he hooks his hips hard, a swivel move Nina had to explain three times, and Inej's eyes sigh shut.

She reaches for the bars above them like she's reaching for her gods, and the rhythm of her body atop him is perfect.

She's beautiful. But not in the sense that speaks only to the eyes. It's something deeper than that. The way Inej moves over him reminds him that there is more to be wrung from this life than kruge and power.

It speaks a new language to him, and Inej is its words.

Her body rolls like a tide, the most exquisite dance he's ever watched. Stroking him intimately, perfectly. So when something starts to flutter in him like panic, like the pleasure is going to crest and explode within him, he doesn't quite know what to make of the feeling, but he doesn't dare stop her.

She moves like a flame, burning at the heart of the world.

And for an instant, so does he.

#

He sleeps straight through until morning, for the first time since he was a child.

When he wakes, Inej is perched on the roof outside his window, feeding the crows. Her hair is long and loose, a breeze blowing the strands to flicker against the open windowpane. The sun has climbed high in the east and it glows in her face as she laughs at the ruffling feathers of one of the crows. At its upright posturing as it struts for her attention.

Kaz lies there, naked and still in bed with the sun already all the way up over the horizon. And he smiles.