It's the first night she says anything out loud.

She comes early, when he's still dressed and in the midst of crossing his room, his steps more hitched than usual. He straightens when she arrives, takes more of his weight deep into the pain of his bad leg. His cane balanced lightly in one hand like it's merely a droll choice. His gloves are starting to gather a white breath of dust, where they sit atop the mantle.

The fire pops, fierce with freshly fed flames, and her skin glows in its light.

"Your shirt," she says.

His lungs suck into themselves, shrink down to the size they were when he was a child, waiting for his big brother to tell him their next move. He arches his eyebrow at the beautiful woman in his room, her miles of hair wound up in knives. It's a dare.

Within himself, he's shrieking. This time he'll break and run, he knows it. The sweat glimmering across his collarbone knows it. This chest is the same one that was pressed down by a pile of corpses. His skin is the skin of the dead. She cannot touch it.

She steps closer.

He lets her.

He's never told her, but he can see the conviction of her saints in her eyes. Some things in this world are holy, though no one will ever hear him say it. Some are sacred.

None are him.

He affects a casual stance. Pain aching deep up into his hip joint where he's carrying too much of his weight. Her fingers are on his first shirt button.

The rakish dare cracks from his face and all that's beneath is hardness. The cold set to his face that's all his enemies see. He stares past her at the window. This, he can do. He's held his silence for torture before, probably will again.

"Don't look past me." Her voice is that of a woman who captains her own ship. Pirating the pirates. Murdering assassins. Ruling him, who is now the dirty underground king of an entire crooked kingdom. "Know it's me who does this, or don't do it at all."

Kaz is always careful of his face, knows every expression it's allowed to make. He has no idea what it's doing now. He watches firelight flickering in Inej's dark eyes as his buttons breathe open, her acrobat's fingers dancing down his chest without ever grazing his skin. His shirt sighs down off his shoulders and flickers to the floor. His tendons tighten and it's not from the chill of the air. He doesn't mind her looking, or anyone. His body is just like thousands, if a bit more scarred, a bit more twisted. What he minds is what comes after after the looking.

"Lie down," she says. "With your back to me."

His eyebrow quirks again. "Not many men have survived seeing my back."

Her eyes laugh, warmth creasing the edges of her eyes. "Your back and I are old friends, I've guarded it so many times."

He does what she asks, his heart jumping crazily in his chest, steps careful and austere so she won't see. It's hard not to curl his knees into his chest, seeking the warmth he never had enough of sleeping on the streets. His back pressed to his brother's for one small respite from all the cold. He leaves his cane leaned against the foot of the bed. The cold metal echoing into the hollow of his palm like a reminder of the hard clasp of his adulthood.

She's not dead, he tells himself. You're not dead.

The subtle sounds begin, and he breathes deep. Some nights, he thinks this is his favorite part. Listening to her disarm herself for him. Knowing she's going to touch him. Knowing she wants to.

He aches like a boy, in these moments. As eager as he can stand to be. Before the touch comes and he twists a thousand ways inside. With pleasure and longing and sickness and memories and fear, so many years and layers and textures of fear that it chokes him.

Some nights, her touch feels so good it unravels him within seconds. Some nights, it triggers something so deep and bad inside it's all he can do not to lash out against her. He did, once, and she caught his wrist hard before he could harm her. Held his trembling, still-gloved hand against her heart until his pulse slowed once again to match hers.

She came back the next night.

She's not afraid of him, his Wraith, no matter how afraid he is of her.

The whisper and clink of the knife unwinding from her hair is the last one. The sounds are so slight no normal person could track them. Inej's hands always move so softly, even over sharp and dangerous things.

Like him.

He's already pulled so tightly there's no room left to flinch when her knee dips the mattress. His shirt is off. It's the first step toward the pleasure she deserves and he's sick with how terrible it is. He should never have told her to wait for him. Never dared to promise her anything at all, this pirate assassin queen who deserves a thousand times what he could ever give her.

"Kaz." Her voice comforts. "I won't touch."

He needs to tell her she can. Needs to laugh and be sharp and unaffected, but the second she breathes over his back, he's lost. It's the air out of her lungs, and it's beautiful.

His heart spikes and begins to gallop. It's not its normal fists and spikes, knuckles crushed and bleeding into dark corners. It's light and speed and the warmth of the firelight flickering across his skin. He's listening so intensely he hears the difference when she purses her lips and blows a stream of sweet air to wash over his shoulders.

It's soft, and he feels held in a way he can't remember, that speaks of cottages and fires long ago and far away from the streets of Ketterdam. Her air whispers down the taut stretch of his waist. He can feel every bump of his spine, standing out clearly against his skin. His ribs are a cage and they want to leap free so his bones can feel her as strongly as the rest of him. Goosebumps prickle across his back and he's not shamed, for once, for her to see.

He rolls onto his back, eyes wide and so surprised at all the sensations he doesn't even think to hide it when they seek her face. Inej is sketched in warm shadows, her hair falling all around her as she kneels at the edge of his bed. She breathes in, and when she exhales, she's all over him in the safest of ways. It feels like the first time he saw her again, whole and alive. Like when he first glimpsed her in Heleen's halls. It feels like hands clasping, on a dock overlooking the sea.

He hardens in a rush, his stomach clenching along with the sudden need to thrust, to be inside her and all around her. His head falls back with the unfamiliarity of the feeling. For so many years, he thought—but perhaps there are things in him that aren't broken after all. Just asleep, waiting.

She leans a little forward and it's not her breath that touches him this time, but her hair. Sliding across his chest, across every goosebump and his flat nipples that are abruptly sensitive to the silk of her. He catches a handful of her hair and she stills, her dark eyes a gleam that watches, allows. He brings her hair to his face and his eyes fall closed as he inhales. The silk and the scent of her, sweet and tanged with the metal of what held it back all day. That hid the full beauty of her from all eyes but his.

"Can you—?" It's not getting easier. To ask her for anything that's not for a job, but she knows. Understands in an instant in that canny way of hers.

Her smile is glowing underneath her skin, even when her lips won't give it away. She slips across him with an acrobat's grace, never touching though his skin all tightens as she passes, yearning toward what it can't catch.

She settles on the pillow next to his, her miles of hair sprawled across his naked chest. It feels different, his skin.

He tries not to think the word corpses because he's so afraid it will chase away how alive he feels. Can it truly be like this?

The room grows cold because neither of them will move to feed the fire. But they sleep warm, all night.