The Apple of My Eye -Kaz Brekker (Complete)

Chapter One

RELIEF

The cold world outside was nothing like the familiar white-winter in Ravka. There was snow, but Katterdam managed to even make something so comforting as the familiar ugly.

Perhaps, Laura thought, it wasn't even Katterdam's fault, maybe it was her writs' fault this time. She used to love winter with all her strength when she was younger, but ever since the year before when the syndic of the small room she had been staying at decided she had taken one day too long to pay rest and shattered her wrist with a hammer winter had been difficult to deal with. Katterdam was even harder to deal with in general, it was a cold city on itself and it ran day and day again, the humidity making it hard to have a day that she was not in constant pain even after she made a few favours for a Grisha Healer to deal with her bones.

Cradling her left wrist near her chest, trying to warm it up inside the room of the brothel she was in with Kaz Brekker, her co-worker and the closest thing to a friend she had. He had given her his spare gloves that were too big for her, but it was still not enough to warm the pain away.

Kaz had been picked by Per Haskell when he was young to be the closest thing to successor that lonely man could ever have in his life and was guided to be exactly what Per Haskell had raised him to be. He was the Right-Hand. He was her boss and direct supervisor; Laura would very rarely talk to Per Haskell himself. He was somewhat kind, or whatever was the closest thing to kind that existed on the Barrel, disguised under an umbrella term of need – if he needed her, then he would treat her well, but, apparently, he always needed her.

She groaned, the cold making her bones hurt even deeper.

Laura looked at Kaz then, wondering if his own injury was hurting.

A few months before he had fallen off a roof and managed to shatter his knee is a way much worse than Laura's wrist and, when he passed out and she dragged him to the Grisha Healer, she found out that the woman had passed away weeks prior, so normal non-grisha people had to try and heal the boy. The problem was that Kaz could only be healed while he was unconscious, because in the moment he would wake he would into a deeply wounded wild animal that would fight with teeth, nails and everything he could find in despair to not be touched.

The doctors had done their best, but the fifteen-year-old boy now had to limp around with a cane he made sure to have made under specific details to break people's bones.

She admired him. He had managed to get what most people would see as weakness and made it his armour more than once – first with the clear touch-aversion that made her receive a good punch on her jaw in his despair, then with his limp that he managed to transform the only thing most people would ignore (his cane) into a weapon.

"In pain as much as me?" she wondered out loud.

They had paid for the room furthest away from the rest of the people. Whores and clients were moaning loudly, the noises echoing around the corridor and slipping into the room. The two teenagers were doing their best to ignore it and push down their hormones, even if that made the silence awkward.

Under Per Haskell's direct orders, they had to keep an eye on a new mark, a famous singer from Ravka that was in the brothel on the other side of the street, on the room with the window just a bit away from theirs. So, the two were pretend lovers. They had a story ready in case someone asked them: she was daughter of a rich man and was running around with a canal rat, her father would kill them broth if they found out, so the room was paid with money, no cheque, and under a fake name.

"I'm fine," Kaz dismissed.

The truth was that Kaz was in a lot of pain, maybe even more than Laura. His knee had been bothering him for days and the pain was so constant that he couldn't sleep. All he wanted was so relief and some rest, but he couldn't say that... not to Laura, not to the only girl he had even looked twice.