Archive of Our Own

“Pijette is arrogant enough to only use dogs and locks on his bottom floor and think it’s enough, so you’ll need to scale the first floor but I trust getting in and out won’t be an issue. The De Kompt is mounted in the study, the furthest right from the street. Once you mark it - do I not hold your attention, Wraith?”

Kaz snaps two fingers in front of Inej’s face and she jumps. The shroud of distraction fogging her features slides away like condensation wiped from a glass and she sits straighter, squaring her shoulders as she meets his eyes. “Scale the wall, get into the back right room. I’ve got it,” she says.

Kaz takes a spare few seconds to catalogue Inej as she appears to him now: the grey smudges beneath her eyes, the dull sheen to her typically luminous hair, the exhausted droop to her shoulders the moment his eyes leave her. 

He wants to snarl in frustration, but there are others in the room. Jesper, lolling in the chair by the bookcase, is looking between them with undisguised interest, and Nina has both eyebrows raised to the heavens, arms crossed over her chest. Inej has begun glowering in a way that dares him to push further. 

“Once you mark it, add the corrosive to the base. The base only,” he stresses. “We need it to be subtle enough to not cause suspicion and we can’t do that if you’re splashing this stuff over the statue like it’s your great grandmother’s perfume, yes? Be smart about it and Wylan assures me it will look like recent but significant termite damage. And that’s where our illustrious art restorator comes in.” Jesper performs a jaunty salute.

There’s more to the plan, a lot more, but Kaz can see Inej’s attention drifting again, her eyes pulling towards the windows instead of him, a compass with a warped magnetic field. It’s unlike her. His irritation is acute. He points at Jesper, Nina, and Anika by the attic doorway. “You three, get out of my room. I’ll follow up with your roles individually later on. Wraith, stay.”

Nina snorts, which sends fishhooks of foul temper through his skull. She opens her mouth to say something - probably intolerably lewd - before Anika grabs her by the scruff of her shirt and yanks her through the doorway. He hears her indignant squawking as they disappear down the stairs of the Slat. Jesper disentangles his long legs from the armchair, climbing to his feet. He too looks like he might brave a comment, but thinks the better of it when Kaz levels the full weight of his glare on him. The door slams behind him.

Kaz crosses to the doorway, checks Jesper hasn’t had the bright idea to eavesdrop, and slides the bolt through the lock. Then he turns back to Inej.

She’s still where she was, on the windowsill next to his desk, but her shoulders are around her ears. She’s glaring a hole through her knees.

He settles back into his chair and she says, “You shouldn’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Send them all away except for me.”

“Why not?”

Her frown deepens and he knows she wants to throw a sharp retort back in his face, but she also knows if she does that then he’ll keep being deliberately obtuse. She hates that about him, which makes it a tool he utilises frequently. “Because people talk. Nina and Jesper more than most.”

He throws one leg over the other and taps a finger along the head of his cane. “They talk about a boss giving instructions to his worker?”

She finally meets his eyes, needing him to experience the full unimpressed nature of her glare, and he flicks his hand. “Let them talk. It hardly matters, and gossip helps team morale.”

In truth, he doesn’t like them talking anymore than Inej does, but trying to stop them is like upturning a bag of coins in a crowded street and then trying to snatch them all back. They’ve been talking ever since he took Inej from the Menagerie four years ago. They call them a pair of monsters; made for one another. They say it’s Inej’s vampirism which allows her to walk the rooftops without footsteps, to move unseen even by reflection. They say she was still human when she was in the Menagerie, and it was Kaz that turned her. 

Kaz knows enough about leadership to know trying to quash personal chatter would be both fruitless and damaging, and he tries to view it from the angle of benefit and gain, as he does all things. It’s good for both of their reputations. And anyway, the sideways looks when Inej started spending more and more time in his room after debriefings were one thing; the whispers that he bought her from the Menagerie to make her his personal vampire whore were quite another. He hasn’t heard that one in a while, which means his people have learnt their lesson.

He opens his mouth to speak when she cuts him off, saying, “Were you in a fight earlier today?”

He pauses. Frowns. “I released Makko from table service today. He was displeased.”

She nods absent-mindedly, and her tongue flickers out to lick over the sharp point of her canine. Kaz feels something tight contract in his gut as he watches the movement. “Your knuckles have started bleeding again,” she says.

Kaz glances down at his gloved hands and realises that yes, the leather feels sticky and unpleasant.

Limping his way to the washbasin on the other side of the room, he tugs at each finger of his gloves until they slide off, revealing the bleeding cracks along his knuckles. Even in the low light of the evening, he can’t miss the way Inej’s nostrils flare and her pupils dilate. He watches her take in a long, slow breath. 

To anyone else, she would look like she normally does: Inej Ghafa, the Wraith, ever poised, ever balanced. She dons her restraint and austerity with the control she mastered as a child walking the tightropes. People may whisper they’re a pair of ghoulish oddities, but the truth is many of the Dregs are happy to forget she’s not human, just as they forget Kaz is, and he knows Inej prefers it that way. But Kaz made his career through his ability to read people, and more than that, he knows her.

“You haven’t been feeding,” he says. A declaration, not a question.

She’s staring him down as he runs his cloth over his hands. Her predatory eyes track the rivulets of red running over his wrists and into the basin. She’s still stubborn enough to say, “Don’t speak on things you don’t understand.”

“So it’s normal for small cuts to drive you to utter inattention?” Kaz asks. 

“When it’s you,” Inej says, and they both freeze.

Inej’s mouth opens and closes, and Kaz suspects if her veins still flowed she’d be flushing red under the bronze of her skin. For once, he’s not sure how to respond. “I only mean,” she clarifies stiffly, “that I am more attuned to the scents of those I know best.”

“Ah,” Kaz says quietly. 

He has no idea how to handle all the implications of that statement. They don’t talk about all the tangled, thorny, utterly hopeless ways they know each other that nobody else does.

In the dip of silence, he watches Inej and wonders if she knows what she looks like in that moment. With her frame tensed and curled towards him, utterly still but for her heated gaze tracking the flexes of his body, she looks like a hunter. 

All her deadly grace is honed on him, and the heady intent feels like a physical weight demanding he bend his knees and his neck. 

If she decided she wanted to hunt and have him, there’s not much he could do to stop her. Her speed and agility is unearthly; the only person he knows who could go toe to toe with Inej is Matthias, and he sprouts fur and smells like wet dog most of the time.

It’s a thought he’s only imagined on the darkest nights, too tired to resist the urge. What it would be like to let her have him. She could overpower him so easily. An idea that should terrify him, but instead it triggers a pit of shame and want deep in his lower belly. He feels it again now. 

The expression on her face is so hungry.

No, it’s starved.

“Why haven’t you been feeding?”

She frowns at him. “I didn’t say I haven’t been feeding.”

Kaz allows himself a single exasperated breath. “Your skin is pallid, your hair is dry, and I’d bet real kruge your gums have receded right up if you showed me your teeth. Your eyes flashed red when they caught the lantern earlier. And - “ He nods at the space between them. “You’re halfway out of your seat because I scratched up my knuckles a little.”

She looks down at herself, visibly assesses her own position, and slumps backwards with her arms crossed, disgruntled.

“I do hate to show off my cleverness,” Kaz says to her disbelieving huff, “so let’s not force my hand, hmm?”

Inej sighs and drops the act like a set of ill-fitting clothes, leaving her exhaustion naked in a way that does uncomfortable things to Kaz’s heart. She says, “They closed the blood banks.”

For all Ketterdam’s many and varied faults, it’s one of the few places in the known world which caters to vampiric needs. Where other nations hunt vampires for sport, or fear, or sport masquerading as fear, Ketterdam uses blood banks to advertise itself as a bastion of safety - clinics which collect blood donations and allow vampires to feed safely, nullifying their instincts to hunt and kill. The banks turn vampires docile, like smoke sending wasps lazily adrift. The offer is a play on guilt and fear, but Kaz has watched Inej and the torment she puts herself through enough to know just how well it works. It attracts vampires across the world in the hundreds. It’s also expensive; like all things Kerch, the profit makes it virtuous.

It happens to be one of the few areas of ever-simmering tension between the Council and the Church of Barter, who disdain vampires as an unholy drain on resources after their natural time has passed. Every so often the Church sees fit to flex the Hand of Ghezen and bend the Council into closing the banks for a day or two while they assert their stringent requirements and regulations, and inevitably find something - anything - not to their satisfaction. It’s rumoured they perform cleansing rituals in there, which Kaz finds farcical even beyond the usual religious histrionics. Afterwards, power reassured, the Church retreats and the banks reopen.

Now, he asks the obvious question, the only outlying factor in this tedious situation. “How long have the banks been closed?”

“Two weeks,” Inej replies. “No news articles. No announcement.” She swallows. “They think they may have found a way to shut them down.”

And Kaz hasn’t heard about it, because his Wraith chose not to tell him. 

“And you refuse to hunt,” he finishes, because this, if nothing else, is a familiar refrain. 

Her eyes flash red again as they catch the light when she turns her face to his. “I won’t,” she says, voice a snarl. Her teeth are bared, fangs extending down past her lip.

She wields the grace of a big cat, the keen-eyed bloodlust of a raptor, and the unfortunate morality of a Saint.

His pious Wraith, who begs forgiveness from the Saints that condemn her existence. She refuses to tell him anything about it, but he knows it’s what she thinks about when she goes to sleep at night, when she runs her hands over her knives and mouths their names, when she talks about leaving to find her parents without knowing if they’ll accept her back. She’s killed a dozen times over - for silence, for safety, for revenge. She’s killed for him. She’s never killed for her hunger. 

It’s not a question of can’t, only won’t. 

Inej is still watching him with dark eyes that turn his mouth dry. He decides she mustn’t realise what she looks like when she stares at him like that, can’t know what it does to him. 

For no good reason he can think of, Kaz unbuttons his shirt. Button by button, until he can pull the linen from his shoulders and deposit it with his gloves. He listens for the sharp intake of her breath, feels the satisfied thump in his belly when he receives it. “Makko hurt my shoulder as well,” he says by way of explanation.

She says, “You probably deserved it.” Her voice is more thready than usual, which confirms his suspicion, because she’s two weeks starved and a handful of steps away from the fresh blood of the person who - who - 

Kaz’s brain stutters, falters, unable to complete the thought. He can’t bring himself to say what he is to her, because he doesn’t know. Perhaps that familiarity she spoke of is born only by forced proximity.

“I told him he was a half-rate bartender better suited to the backwaters in Zierfoort,” he says and glances over his shoulder at her. She’s tracing the contours of his back with half-lidded eyes that jump away the moment his head turns. “Only the truth,” he adds, unable to prevent the pleased smirk from playing over his lips.

As he runs the cloth over the wound in his shoulder - a shallow graze, already scabbing - he says, “You can’t run the job in this condition.”

“What?” she snaps.

“You heard me.”

“I’m fine,” she insists, but her mouth is twisting back into that snarl, more animal than human.

“Yes, and I’m sure you’ll be fine when you drain a guard after the plan inevitably blows up and someone draws blood,” he says, and she recoils at the whiplash of his acerbic tone. He drops the cloth and turns to face her fully. “Inej. You don’t have the control left for this job and you know you don’t.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” she argues. “Let Roeder take the job while I sit sorry in my sick bed and watch him screw everything - “

“You can drink from me.”

Inej doesn’t need to breathe, he knows that, but she still catches and freezes in her shock. She repeats, “What?”

His heart is thumping but he ignores it. It’s a logical solution. For the job. “You can drink from me.” She blinks as though confirming that yes, he did in fact say what she thought he did. He goes on, “Or Jesper, or Nina, or whoever you choose that will agree to it.”

“Not them,” Inej says, bullet shot fast. “They can’t see me so…”

There are a thousand words which could fill that blank, each less deserving than the last. Uncontrolled. Needy. Weak. Monstrous.

It’s okay for Kaz to see her like this, because he will always be worse than anyone he interacts with and they all know it. He is every self-ruinous criteria she can think of and more. There is no room for shame when he already owns it all. 

Inej stands and the long rope of her dark hair swings over her arm, catching the light. “I can’t drink from you. It would be… unseemly.”

“Unseemly,” he mimics, one eyebrow rising, unimpressed.

“I’ve never fed from anyone before,” she continues. He could be contrary and point out that she’s drunk from everyone who ever donated to her blood bags, but that’s not what she means. “It’s - my control - I would be - “ The graceful line of her throat bobs as she swallows. “Like a newborn.”

Even as she says it, her eyes consume him. They linger on the shadowed hollows of his clavicle, and he watches the temptation coil around her, her basest instincts fighting to surface as desire. He can see the images pantomimed through her mind.

There’s an urge in him, a wild desire to ask what makes this so different from the banks. Is it any person that scares you, he wants to say, or is it me?

Any answer she could give him is too dangerous to consider.

Unbidden, his mind conjures the image of the two of them pressed close in the shadows, the striking contrast of her skin against his. He imagines her eyes locked onto his, bleeding red. He imagines winding those long locks of sinuous hair around his fist.

Just as harshly as the images arrived, he forces them away. Unseemly indeed.

He says, “It would be dangerous.” 

She bites her lip, the sharp point of her fang leaving a clear imprint behind. Her gaze slows over the graze on his shoulder. “When most vampires drink from…” She trails off, runs her eyes over him in that infernal wanting way, and decides on the term, “Live prey, they’re not thinking about you. They just hunt and feed.”

Kaz considers idly that it’s an indicator of his own brokenness that he likes when she calls him prey. 

To him, her danger has never been a deterrent.

He takes a step back from his washbasin, closer to the door, and Inej jerks forward like she intends to stop him, a snarl lifting her lips and a possessive growl filtering up through her throat. A moment later she blinks and her mouth drops open in horror, but it’s clear to him she can’t keep going like this. He doesn’t care that somebody will inevitably end up killed - it’s that when she does kill someone, she’ll never recover. 

He says, unable to stamp out the ironic mockery completely, “No conversation about consent before they murder you?”

Inej’s eyes flash fierce red again. “It’s not funny, Kaz,” she says, low and serious.

“We’re having that conversation anyway,” he points out. “You have the consent.”

Still she shakes her head, even as her face twists in needy misery and her body sways like a willow branch in the wind, bending towards him. “You don’t understand what you’re offering,” she whispers. And it’s true. He’s never been invited into this most private sphere of her life. Nobody has. “I might - "

“You won’t.”

Her eyes narrow. Still stubborn; that she’s still upright is a testament to that. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

He waves a hand. It looks oddly pale with the raw red skin around his knuckles. “Hurt me. Maim me. Kill me. You won’t do any of those things.” He can’t admit that he trusts her, but she trusts herself, has reinforced the boundaries of her personhood over and over again, unwavering and unshakeable despite all the ways he’s pushed her too far in the past. To remind her of her own steel-forged goodness is enough. 

She says, reedy and breathless, “You don’t like touch.” He can hear in her voice that it’s her last argument.

He takes a breath. It’s not about him. “No,” he agrees. He tilts his head, watches the way she shudders as it exposes his neck, eyes closing against whatever scent she picks up from the movement.

Kaz knows he can never say, You look frail and it scares me. I’ll gladly give my own health to fix it. Instead he orders, “Take the solution or you’re off the job, Inej.”

From one heartbeat to the next Inej has him slammed up against the wall, hard enough the door shudders in its frame. The impact sends pain arcing through his spine and into his bad leg and with both her hands shoving up against his shoulders, he’s pinned against the old wood as easy as a cat traps a mouse. And he’s comfortable in his own strength, but he could no more break her grip than a mouse escapes a cat. It scares him. It makes him want her beyond thought.

Her hands are cool and dry against his skin, lacking pulse, feeling like death and unlike skin at all, and his mind feels curiously blank as though the impact knocked the balance from his head. She doesn’t sweat or have a scent of her own, and he finds himself grateful for that. His heart beats a rapid snare drum patter, but it feels far enough away it could be another body entirely. 

He’s spent his whole life trapped by his own restless mind, that damned mouse in a maze with no exit, and this odd weightlessness in his brain is - foreign. Terrifying. Enticing. He tries to think and plan, to push, his destructive need for control grappling for recalibration, but it’s a useless panicked reflex, no more effective than the instinctive jerk of his hips against her. Inej doesn’t seem to register it.

There’s no choice to be made; she has Kaz trapped and whether or not she lets him go is her decision alone. Kaz tracked down her inhibitions and he teased them away with his pickpocket fingers, and now he watches the lazy blink of her eyelids as she drinks in the flutter of his pulse along his throat, and he knows there is no reasoning that could drain her sudden bloodhaze. Isn’t that what he wanted?

There’s a curious release in it all.

Inej presses closer to him, a solid weight against his clothed legs and hips. She takes in his warmth, the blood rushing heated through his veins, and her lip twists up. Her bared fangs have pulled right down. Her eyes are blown out black, ringed red. She looks wild. She looks feral. She looks entirely unlike his Inej.

Her fangs touch his neck, pin pricks of pain, and his breathing stops along with his thoughts. 

And then she holds there frozen, while Kaz tries to breathe and feels the ache in his knee and the backs of his shoulders, tries to form thoughts through the swimming dizziness in his brain. He waits and feels the clock-wound energy vibrating through her hands which brand his shoulders and feel more unbearable by the moment. He can only see the gleam of light over the dark strands of the top of her head. He manages to quip, “Do I not smell edible enough?”

She shoves at him again, forcing his back up against the rough grain of the wood. “Tell me I can,” she demands, and she’s trembling. “Kaz, please. Tell me I can.”

He should have known not to underestimate his Wraith. Her control is not gone until she says so.

His, on the other hand…

“Inej,” he rasps, “fucking bite me.”

And she does.

Her fangs puncture the skin of his neck and for a long moment, it is immediate and all consuming agony. Flares of clean, fire-bright pain race through his veins. They travel up through his neck into his skull, along his spine, into the ends of his fingers. He feels as though his body is tinder put to flame, and every one of his nerves is a live spark spitting beneath his skin. He feels like he’s on a pyre, and her hands are his bindings. He feels as though her fangs in his neck are the only thing he knows to be real, even while the rest of his body is alight.

He thinks he makes a noise, a groaning rasp, and he knows his legs have gone out from beneath him when her hands move from his shoulders to his biceps, holding him upright with a grip that feels like manacles. There will be purple marks on his arms come morning. His dumb primitive hindbrain scrambles, panics, demands he run, screams at him that he’s the deer tugged to its knees with the wolf’s jaws clamped over his neck. He doesn’t run. He can’t run, and again it’s that realisation that there is no decision to be made which makes his stubborn surviving strain of logic splinter. His hands scrabble along Inej’s back.

She’s so close. It’s the first thing he thinks when the pain begins to abate. She’s so close and she doesn’t have warmth, she doesn’t have a scent, but he can feel the softness of her hair and the press of her skin against his. He can feel the slick pressure of her mouth over his neck. He doesn’t have the brainspace to panic about that when every nerve in his body is under siege, attention forced elsewhere. She’s so close to him, and he can’t claim to be lucid, but it still feels like a victory.

He can feel the blood pulled through his veins into her mouth. It’s an odd feeling; if his whole being has been ignited, his veins feel as though Inej has drawn lines of oil through the depths of his body and dropped a torch directly on top of them. It drags as she takes his blood, tugging up from behind his abdomen and his sternum. There’s a command in that tug, a demand to relinquish his strength. It orders that he push his head back, expose his neck to her, let her take as much as she needs to be content. 

He lets her take and take and take. He lets her make him weak.

Inej retreats to look at him, her fangs retracting from his body, and his first thought is he wants them back. She’s panting heavily, hair falling in a curtain obscuring her face. There’s blood smeared right across the lower half of her jaw, gory crimson shining on her skin. His blood, he thinks dumbly, at the same time as he feels the punctures in his neck start to bleed freely, thick warm liquid sliding down to collect in the dip of his collarbone. Inej catches her breath as she stares at him with arresting red eyes, all of their usual warm brown fled and gone, and her tongue flicks out to lick at the blood coating her lips. He groans again.

He can’t think. His thoughts move slow, confused, singular dust particles winding directionless through the air. His idiot hindbrain is silenced in its submission. Without the dangerous heat of her bite, his body might as well be frozen, and that feels - it feels - wrong. 

His voice is hoarse when he says, “More.”

She doesn’t bite him again, not immediately; instead, she holds his gaze. It’s as though the insistent nature of her bite has imbued itself in her bones and now it’s rising to the surface as cool, confident control. Kaz feels a chill of fear as he stares at her and thinks of her brown eyes, washed away. It feels oddly like the pain in the first moments of her bite; inexorable, beckoning him in. Terrifying, unearthly. A whisper in his mind to give in.

Her fingers run across the contours of his biceps, blunt nails scratching over the occasional raised scar. Then she lifts a hand and runs it over the line of his jaw. He can feel her trembling.

The touch is enough to break through the daze strangling Kaz’s mind, even if only momentarily. One thought after the other, a linear direction more than puzzle pieces falling into place, he thinks She’s touching me. Then he thinks, I want her to keep touching me. Then, How could I want that?

A question, a beat, and then the logical conclusion. Her bite altered something in the fabric of his brain more than any wish ill-defined at the edges could achieve. His self-beration was always hopeless, but her bite - oh. Her bite is a drug, filling in the broken dirty cracks of his brain. The heat wasn’t his imagination. There’s something in his veins, quite literally, which makes him feel languid and greedy and whole, smoothed over and in one piece again. That makes her touch safe to him. He’s shaking beneath her hands. 

And this is dangerous and reckless, and there is no conclusion where this ends well. He will emerge from this blood soaked fever dream wrecked and ruined, with even more jagged edges than before. 

But he can’t see the point in thinking about that when he has her hands on his face, and he can have more. It’s the sort of thing he’d be on his knees begging for in any other situation, and the temptation to break himself apart is the dark smoke gateway he’s yet to reject.

At the corner of his jaw, Inej’s fingertips crook to hold him in her grasp. Her thumb is on his chin. She tilts her head, mildly curious and so unlike her, but then her eyes shift a little, maroon instead of scarlet. She says in those low tones that sound like addiction, “More?”

It’s not just him. Inej isn’t right either. She must feel the mirror of the pressure he feels at the base of his skull, that dull ache of pain and fear which is somehow also desire. Does she want to make him bend his neck to her? Can she think about anything other than making him hers? 

Of course she can, because she’s always been stronger than him. To take him without knowing what he wants is a boundary the Saints would not forgive of her. Choice and need: to her, the two are polar magnets, one repelling the other. It’s what haunts her, what makes hunting so repulsive to her. To take cannot also be to give. Nevermind the Saints; Inej would never forgive herself.

But he’s not himself, and isn’t that the best gift he could be given?

Kaz isn’t right, but that’s his everyday, and her bite has rewired his brain so he doesn’t know who he is anymore when she has her hands on him and all he wants is more. He remembers, fogged and blurry like it was a long time ago, asserting that she would never hurt him. Would she do it if he asked?

He wants her to dismantle him, piece by blackened piece.

Her serious gaze is more brown than red now. She’s waiting for his answer. He lifts a hand to cover hers at his jaw and feels tension holding her still, the proof of her restraint in the corded strain of her fingers. It’s obvious in the tension of that grip that she knows what happens next if the two of them topple over this cliff’s edge together. She wants him. So his voice cracks when he says, “Please.”

The brown leeches from her eyes so fast it’s like one of his magician’s tricks.

Inej yanks him away from the wall and hooks her foot around his ankle, disarms him in the same way that she would an opponent in a shootout, neat enough to almost be clinical. She sends him to the floor, a soft oof escaping as the impact forces the air from his lungs. His shoulders will be bruised come morning, but there’s something attractive about the raw hurt. 

Inej swings her leg over his hips so she’s kneeling across his body, a hand on either side of his head as she leans over him. The curl of her body cages him in, with his hands trapped at his side and his face turned up to hers. Her mouth is stained red and she’s panting, not from exertion but something altogether more visceral. It’s the wolf scenting the air for its wounded prey. Her eyes flick between his, then down to his bleeding neck, then lower. 

The light of the lantern catches in her hair like pieces of glassfire, shadowing her face and forming a halo behind her. Others would call it ironic. Kaz thinks it is fitting.

When she lowers her weight onto him, he realises that he’s hard. The surprise is dull, shot through with shame and the delayed knowledge that he’s been hard for some time now, probably since she first bit him, and he’d been too distracted to notice. His attention was pulled towards Inej. Even in all the ways he needs her, his own crude pleasure is still inconsequential. This is about her.

And she’s wet. He can feel the damp heat of her pressing into his stomach where she’s settled her weight. 

Feeding from him made her wet. He moans, low in the back of his throat.

“You look so pretty like this,” Inej tells him. Her hand trails from his jaw into his hair, where she grips and pulls, forcing his neck up and towards her. Her tongue darts out to lick along her canine again and Kaz feels the dense muscles of her thighs flex down over his abdomen as she stares at him. Greed, he wants to tell her, suits her beautifully. 

The other hand runs down the length of his neck, taking her time, her thumb resting for a long moment over the frantic pulse of his carotid artery. “Do you know what I like about the Kerch, Kaz?” she asks softly.

“Fat wallets?” he breathes. Her hand in his hair tightens in gentle punishment, the sting forcing another soft sound from his mouth.

“You are all so pale. You mark so easily.” Her hand resumes its exploration of his neck, palm cool and dry. “You’re already bruising,” she observes. More quietly, “Gorgeous.”

Her thumb dips into the blood pooled into his collarbone. She pauses, letting her thumb caress the delicate line of his exposed collarbone, dragging red across that long line. Her eyes dilate. Her hips push down against him at the sight, and the nails of the hand in his hair scratch a little along his scalp. 

Her hand returns to his neck with more intent, collecting blood and drawing back so he can see it - the glistening red coating her fingers to match the blood on her face. He watches with hazy eyes as she runs the hand over his bicep and along the top of his chest, almost lazy, almost soothing, if not for the fact that she’s using his own blood to paint his skin. The trails are blessedly cool against his heated body. For long, dreamy moments, Inej takes his blood and draws aimless patterns over his chest, his neck, even over the crook of his jaw, and he just watches her, mesmerised. 

She’s hot and wet where she’s pressed against his stomach, shifting unconsciously. She’s getting off on the sight of him covered in his own blood. At another time, he might have the mind to use that to his advantage. 

When she presses her fingers against the puncture wounds, Kaz curses and his hips jerk at the sudden burn. Inej stops, and a predatory smile curls across her blood-stained mouth. “Oh?” she says.

She does it again, and her hips roll into his shudder, firm and confident. The sharp pain at his neck transitions into the ache of a deep bruise, cycling back and forth as Inej does it again and again, her smile deadly and feral. He can’t control the jolt of his hips.

The pain is a drug just like her bite, and he has to fight to keep his eyes open against the alluring waves rocking his body. Gazing at her through half-closed eyes he mutters breathlessly, “It’s cruel to play with your food.” 

Inej considers him for a long moment. “More?” she says, and then she bites him again. 

Lightning fast, she rips into the tender skin at the junction of his collarbone and his shoulder, pulling his blood from him with a sort of brutal efficiency which is new and terrifying. Kaz grunts as his body sets ablaze once again, back arching, an instinctual attempt to get away from her that only puts himself further at the beautiful mercy of this creature over him.

Inej pulls her head back and her fangs tear a little along the puncture wounds, sending up twin spirals of pain. Kaz stares at the ceiling spinning above him, half lidded, mouth open. He can feel the uncomfortable press of the hardwood floors against his shoulder blades, the rub at the back of his skull, and that’s because his neck is still bared to her.

She bites him again, this time on the other side of his neck. His hands scrabble along the floorboards, clumsy and desperate for purchase that they can’t find. His abdomen spasms beneath the warm press of her hips. She’s grinding down into him as she drinks from him. She’s using his blood and his body for her pleasure. There is a longing he feels in that knowledge, clean through his cotton-filled mind, in the knowing that he’s servicing her like this.

The roll of her hips settles into a rhythm as she feeds, shifting back to sit directly on top of his cock where he’s hard and desperate, and he makes a sound that’s mostly a whimper, pressing back up into her. A need begins to build, liquid heat beneath his skin, a reckless urge driven by the live-wire pull of the blood in his veins. She doesn’t stop drinking and he thinks he’s making sounds, inelegant and keening. He doesn’t feel quite human anymore. 

Kaz loses time. Have they been here all night? Perhaps it’s only been minutes. How long has Inej been on top of him? Every thought is like traipsing through dense-packed mud. He realises he doesn’t care, and the realisation is accompanied by a sensation too soft to be euphoria, too strong to be contentedness. A sense of rightness.

When Inej finally pulls back the new wounds bleed copiously, not yet coagulating like he’s heard vampire bites do. The blood slides in sheets down the back of his neck onto his hardwood floor, collecting in a growing pool. He can feel it catching in his hair. 

Inej’s gaze is dark, only a ring of crimson visible in her irises. She drags her fingers through the blood, then puts her hand on the side of his cheek, turning his head to make him look at her and leaving the clear imprint of her fingers behind. Her hips push down onto him hard. It’s messy, borderline feral, and he can’t be breathing because he feels lightheaded.

“You like it, don’t you?” Inej purrs. 

He says, “Mmm?”

Inej strokes a hand down the side of his cheek, leaving a sticky trail of red beneath her thumb. Then she scratches her nail into the newest wounds in his neck and his head bangs back into the floor reflexively. It’s so good. It’s so good.  

Her slow, dangerous smile is back.

“You like the pain,” she says. “Don’t you?”

He doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t know how to form words in that moment, doesn’t know how to draw breath into his lungs. With her head bent over his, her braid falls forward, curled on his chest like a black cat’s tail. He’s distracted enough to reach out and take the end of it. In the time Inej has fed from him, it’s transformed from dry to luxurious, brittle to shiny. In a sudden moment of soberness, he remembers how often he’s wanted to run his hands through that hair. 

Inej puts her hand over his as he twists the braid over his palm, halting the movement. Her hand is sticky with his blood, but her fingers entwined through his are oddly… tender. He stares at their hands and thinks, I couldn’t do this without her bite.

“Kaz, look at me,” Inej directs him. His eyes flick from the braid to her face. She looks almost amused.

“Answer my question,” she tells him, and stops her slow languid grind into his cock.

He makes a noise in the back of his throat, something high and breathless, and tries to thrust up against her, but she plants a hand against his chest to stop him. A reproval. “Answer me,” she says, and he feels her order, physical like the hand pulling his hair. “You,” she repeats, each word slow, “like the pain. Don’t you?”

“I do,” he says, because he does. It’s the sting of her nails over his skin, the deep ache of the punctures littering his neck, the rough press of his back against the unforgiving floor, jagged points of focus, like rocks skipped over the deep currents of pleasure that is her body rolling onto his cock. 

Inej releases a soft approving noise and starts up her rhythm again, faster this time. Harder. Her head bends so that he can’t see her face. She chases her own pleasure, and his body is her accessory.

“I could hurt you like this,” she says, voice a little higher, a little tighter.

He sucks in a sharp breath. “Yes,” he rasps.

“Should have known you’d get off on danger,” she says breathlessly. She expels a little laugh, a sound written on his memory more clearly than his own name, and for a moment she’s his Inej again. 

Her hand on his shoulder curls inward, hard enough to leave indents beneath her nails. “So sweet like this,” she hums. “So pliant.”

“Yes,” he murmurs again.

She pulls back so that she’s sitting on top of him properly, staring down at him with her back straight. There’s a sense of powerlessness with her over him, fully clothed and in control, pulling him apart with her hands and her hips, and perhaps he should feel scared but he doesn’t, not when it’s her. He wants to be what she needs. That’s what this is about. She could take everything from him, and he would give her more.

“Tell me what you want,” Inej instructs with quiet confidence.

The bite makes him too honest. He says, “To please you.”

And then Inej is kissing him. It’s a hard kiss, her fangs nipping at his bottom lip, a kiss that speaks of ownership. He can taste his own blood on her tongue, her mouth.

She separates from him long enough to croon against his lips, “Do you know what, Kaz? They’re all going to see what you let me do to you. Have you thought about that?” She kisses him again, and then pulls back to start pressing lazy kisses along his neck. “Does it bother you?”

His throat will look like he was ravaged by a wild animal. There’s no way to hide the bloom of bruising he knows is rising in a florid ring around his neck. 

He replies, “As if they don’t know I’m yours already.”

Inej growls and claims his mouth again.

Her rocking turns unsteady, and he knows she’s on the edge. In a sudden rush of desperation, Kaz realises that he, too, is tipped onto the precipice with no idea how he got there. He hasn’t been thinking about his own pleasure, too consumed by the thought of what he can do for her. Even now it feels incidental. An afterthought.  

Kaz closes his eyes and submits himself to her, unable and unwilling to do anything but exactly what she wants. He feels the white hot licks of pleasure netting through his stomach, reeling him in like fishermen trawling in their catch; lets himself feel the weight of her on top of him and her braid wound around his palm, the blood painted over his chest, the burn radiating through his neck, the murky unintelligibility of his thoughts. 

“You’re mine,” Inej tells him. Her voice is fierce and sure. How much of it is the blood in her veins, some predatory instinct telling her to claim him, and how much of it is her? Will he still be hers come morning?

“I am,” he says, because he is whether or not he’s bitten. His breaths come in pained little hitches and half-breaths. He thrusts back up into her, just trying to keep up. 

“You are so good,” she tells him. “Do you want to come?”

He moans a little but says through his next hissed out breath, “I want you to come.”

“Oh,” Inej says. “You are such a good boy.”

It unravels him entirely to hear her call him that. 

How much is her bloodhaze putting thoughts in her head that aren’t hers? Or has it only loosened her tongue, spilling thoughts she thinks at nighttime when he’s not there? It has done for him. She must know what it does to him, when she calls him that. He would plead to her. He would beg.

“I’m yours,” he echoes back.

Inej stiffens, shudders, her head bending, her back arching, her thighs clamping around his hips hard enough to hurt. She moans long and low as she comes. “Saints, Kaz,” she says, voice high and twisted. 

The uneven jerk of her hips is enough to send him over the edge as well, a rush of heady pleasure sweeping through his whole body as his cock spills in his pants. “Saints,” he says again. “Inej - fuck - please.”

She works him, rocking him through it as his shoulders come up off the floor and his good knee bends out of his control. “Good boy,” she murmurs. 

The edges of his vision are black, dots crowding in on his conscience. It’s the last thing he knows before he drops out of consciousness.

...

Kaz wakes to a splitting headache and sharp sunbursts of heat ringing the bottom of his neck like a collar. He cracks his eyes open warily but the light is low, only a single lantern lit in the corner of the room. He’s in his bedroom, over the covers of his worn bed. 

Inej is in the corner of his room, almost hidden in the deep shadows where she’s curled up in his armchair with the most padding still in it. Her eyes are closed, but even in her fitful doze there’s a worried furrow between her brows. She has her braid curled between both hands, holding onto it like a comfort toy.

It takes the sight of her to remember in a flash of rapid cascading sensation - the luminous red of her eyes, the brush of her braid over his bare chest, the feeling of her thighs pinning down his hips. He remembers the feel of her hand on his chest and her mouth on his neck.

He takes quick survey of himself. Still shirtless, no longer slick with his own blood. How long was he out?

Settling his head back against his pillow, he waits for those familiar feelings of disgust and nausea to rise within him, his oldest companion to memories of touch, and it’s only after several moments that he takes another catalogue of himself and feels nothing but weary, bone-deep satisfaction. Exhausted, weighed down like his bones are made of sandbags, certainly, but in a similar - if not identical - sense to how he feels after winning a difficult fight. If this is how people feel after sex then he thinks he might understand the appeal.

The whole escapade wasn’t about him though. He looks back at Inej, and every muscle in his neck shrieks in protest as he turns his head.

“You look better,” he says, and she’s awake and alert like she’d never been asleep.

“Kaz,” she says as she comes up on a gasp. She makes a sign in the air. “Oh, thank the Saints. Oh Saints, I thought - I thought - "

He blinks. His brow crooks. She’s upset, flustered and unfiltered like she never is. Why is she upset? With an embarrassed tinge, potent like rosewater, he finds himself thinking, But wasn’t I good?

Inej seems to sense his confusion because she swallows a number of times before she says, forcibly calm, “You passed out because I took too much blood. I lost control. I… like a newborn, remember?”

Kaz considers this, and comes to the conclusion that he probably shouldn’t stand up for a while. Otherwise, though - 

“Do you feel better?” he asks. He shifts his head against the thin pillow, because he can feel a bruise that’s formed on the back of his skull, presumably from the friction of his head boring a hole through his floorboards.  

“I do,” Inej says after a moment, but her hands are still fiddling with her braid anxiously.

“Then I see no problem,” he says.

“The problem,” Inej snaps, and pauses to collect herself so her tone is more measured when she continues, “is that I lost control utterly and I could have killed you.”

It wouldn’t have been the worst way to go, and Kaz sees less issue than he should with the idea. 

“I didn’t know it would feel like - that,” Inej adds quietly, and that’s no small part of it, Kaz knows. It’s not just that she lost control, it’s the how. He wonders if it’s better, that she was in charge even if she wasn’t in control of herself, or if it all just feels like reliving a memory. 

Almost like she’s reading his thoughts, she goes on, “And it’s worse because I liked being in charge of what was done to you. It felt addictive.”

He wonders if this is it - the moment where their fragile truce crumbles. Their relationship was always made of gnarled twists, but now it’s turned into knotted matts. They crossed a line they’d been avoiding for years, the two of them, they’d been stupid and careless, and Kaz can’t even pretend it’s about the job. He can’t even remember what the damned job is. Inej, though. He does remember watching her starve herself, and the gnawing need to fix it. She always finds a way to creep beneath his skin and make him reckless. Now, they can’t go back to what they had.

The idea of losing her feels unpleasantly like panic. He can’t. No matter what they have to rebuild, he can’t.

Addiction is what she’d said. Addiction, the need for more. He can relate to that even now. He feels the tips of his ears turn hot as he forces himself to ask, “Is it worse because you like what happened, even now?” 

Inej meets his eyes, looking utterly tortured, and he has his answer. She feels she’s done wrong in a way that she can’t repent to her Saints, and yet… maybe part of her wants to do it again. There’s a complicated set of emotions Kaz feels in that, heavy and uncontrolled as a rockslide. Fear, always fear, at the thought of her close. Stunned surprise, at the idea she’d reciprocate. Smug satisfaction, knowing that he’d been good for her. And then surprise again, at the realisation that even with the effects of her bite drained from his blood, he still wants to please her.  

In the low light of her corner her eyes flash iridescent red and his stomach flips over in response.

“I don’t regret it,” he says bluntly, and finds it’s the truth. “I can’t tell you not to. But I don’t.”

Inej sits in silence for a long time. Finally, she says, “That does make it a little better.”

Kaz imagines reaching out to touch her now and the nausea is so sudden it’s shocking, bile rising in his throat. He misses the dreamy pleasant nothingness of her bite, the odd peace that came with being hers. Addiction, he muses, and wonders how soon would be too soon to do it again. Would she oblige him if he begged her to take him out of the cage of his mind? 

He runs a hand over the raised punctures along his neck, luxuriating in the pain it brings. It is like winning a hard fight - he even has trophies. There are six punctures total. 

Inej tracks the movement of his hand. “You look hungry,” Kaz murmurs, smirking and unable to stop himself. Inej startles and scowls, her gaze dropping to her lap.

“I iced them while you were asleep,” she says. She bites her lip. “I had to go downstairs to get the ice. People have questions.”

“Brilliant,” he mutters, because as much as he doesn’t regret a single thing that happened, it’s still the business of nobody but himself and Inej. Jesper and Nina will be writing their own comedy show full of innuendo. 

“You look like you were mauled,” Inej adds.

“And whose fault is that?” Kaz says pointedly, and he doesn’t miss her split second look of possessive pride. 

A moment later, and he can see the shame in her again. And he’s already thinking of ways he can break her out of it, so he says, “How do you feel about a trip to the blood banks tomorrow night? Perhaps we could liberate some of those bags. For the good of the people, of course.”

And finally she smiles, fangs sliding over her bottom lip. “I think that’s a fine idea,” she replies.