of snakes & crows || kaz brekker

─ 𝒆𝒍𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏

┏━━━✦❘༻༺❘✦━━━┓

[11|| chapter eleven]
the two heartrenders, &
one   wealthy  merchant

┗━━━✦❘༻༺❘✦━━━┛

━━━━ THEY WERE DEAD-ENDS.

All of them. Just as Ead expected them to be. The Shu woman who ran a skeezy brothel. The Zemini boy who performed street cons for a living. The illegal Fjerdan fighter with a thick accent and surprisingly good Kerch. None of them really knew a way through the Fold, so whatever leads Kaz seemed to have were all dead-ends. Their heads colliding with solid brick wall. A safety net in her case.

         During their escapades through the Barrel the scar on her arm had been itching like crazy and she had to hide it from them out of paranoia. She knew it was wrong, holding back information, but she never promised knowledge like that when she joined the Dregs.

Ead didn't owe them anything.

Now, as Kaz thought, she nursed a glass of whiskey back at the Crow Club, Inej and Jesper sitting with them at a free table along the wall. They'd been sitting in their own bubble of silence for a few minutes, Ead uncharacteristically silent on the matter, and she could feel Kaz's burning stare on her cheek, but refused to acknowledge it.

Jesper was the one to speak first. "Here's what I don't get."

"We're going to be here all night." Inej quipped.

"Rude." Jesper frowned. "Why haven't they tried going under it? Just dig a tunnel."

"Ooh, big thinker you are." Ead stared hard at the ice in her whiskey as she swirled her cup. "It's been done before."

"More than a century ago." Kaz finished for her when she refused to elaborate. "Something heard them digging."

"So it was made hundreds of years ago by that crazy Grisha..."

"The Black Heretic."

Ead felt like her stomach was turning on an axis. She chucked back the rest of her drink and left the table without another word for another. No one stopped her as she made her way to the bar. 

Talk of the Fold, she could handle, hell even the topic of trying to find safe passage through the blanket of hell, but talk of Kirigan? No, she couldn't do that without about ten buckets of alcohol down her gullet. She had to be piss drunk to even think of him without feeling something.

         Something as in everything. Betrayal, disgust, anger, but the worst was that longing. The wish that it would've all been a lie, some crazy dream she'd crafted in her brain because he drank a glass of Kvas without her and she was being petty. She missed him, as terrifying as that sounded, and she wanted to push all of that deep down inside of her so that it never came to surface again. Preferably with whiskey.

Saints, she wished she were as emotionless as the Viper. In the stories she didn't care who got in her way when that cloak was wrapped around her shoulders. Children, women, and animals alike—she ran through them like it was nothing. She had no weaknesses. Ead wished she could be what everyone thought her to be.

After a refill she made her way back to the table, where Bolliger was telling the Crows something that seemed of utter importance, by the way he was panting.

"—intercepted a note from Dreesen." He was saying.

Ead took a big gulp of her drink.