The first time Kaz reaches for Inej, the backs of his fingers skim her cheek. They touch the very corner of her eye and come to rest at the nape of her neck, where her knife hilt would be if she hadn't laid it on his table. His hand is buried under her hair, warm against her skin.
She ducks her head, just a little, and he feels goosebumps rise against his palm. She isn't just allowing this, he realizes with a zing of mental electricity like the one that accompanies all his best ideas.
She likes this. Wants this.
Maybe...was hoping for this. He shifts his thumb. Slow and light, against the softest part of her neck. Her lashes flutter and her head falls back a little.
She leans into his touch, but her clothes, she doesn't surrender. She's still dressed in leather and the few of her knives she always takes off last. Not a fold of extra fabric anywhere to catch on things when she's climbing. Everything tight to her skin. Kaz's internal temperature kicks up an extra couple of degrees. He's never minded being seen naked, not that it's often come up until lately. It's being touched that he couldn't swallow. For the first time in all their secret nights together, he feels the imbalance of the way she's folded away his clothes and left hers on.
He wonders now, if that was for him or for her.
For Inej, her body has always seemed like a refuge. The thing she could count on while living in a city of spies and liars, drunks and thieves. Gamblers' coins jingling and sharpshooters' pistols blasting all around. She can slip up the side of a building or out across a rope more easily than Kaz can descend stairs.
He never considered her body, in the past, might not have been a place of safety for her.
He wonders if he can make it so.
With her long lashes fluttering low, his palm isn't feeding him the signals it usually does. Of putrid flesh and repulsion, reminders to close and fist and fight for his life. No, instead his hand is open and curious about the way her head's tipped back.
He runs a thumb down the point of her throat. He's punched enough men here, with his cane and his knuckles, to know how vulnerable it is. She knows it, too. He's seen her bleed many a man from the veins here. Seen her cut just deep enough to make them fear her, like a sacrifice to whatever gods of mercy only Inej seems to believe in. This is a secret place, a dangerous place.
And still, his touch, she allows.
He's never imagined anything like this feeling that's unfurling in his chest. Like the strength that's thrumming in him, rising to her call. He's cagey as always, though, and he won't overplay his hand. Not tonight.
Instead, he lays back against his feather pillows, long since stolen from a dead merchant who should have known better than to try and cross him. Her eyes come open and slant his way and he invites her down, touching just the hint of her wrist. Guiding so when her cheek comes against his chest and her banner of hair combs out across his sheets, she's not on the far side of the mattress like they've both come to expect. She's alongside him chest to chest, belly to belly, knee to knee. Kaz pauses, but his stomach isn't pitching for once. It's far more interested in how heated her skin is, how she lifts her thigh to rest it across his. How her hand cups the hollow at his sternum.
She's happy, he realizes with a feather-flutter inside his chest. And he'd give more than a million of his precious kruge to know how he can make it happen again.
