Kaz's kisses aren't anything like Inej would have expected.

Not hard or brutal like his voice. Not elusive, like his hands.

Kaz kisses fervently, like this is the one area in his life where he never had to learn caution. She hopes he never will, because when he does it like that, it's like a glimpse at how he'd be if he held anything sacred. Kaz, at worship. It's an arrow point of intensity, pouring into her soul. She quivers with it, and when he feels that, he stops.

"Go on," she whispers, and for once, her voice is as raw as his.

His hands skim beneath her shirt, the cloth catching on his rough knuckles as his palms breathe over the curve of her waist. Goosebumps thrill from her navel all the way up to her throat.

He kisses her again, and her lips burn.

Heat flexes through the roots of her hair, flushing out across the wings of her eyebrows, pooling color beneath her cheekbones. She feels alight.

She pulls her shirt up and off the long banner of her hair, weightless with courage as she perches atop him. Her elbow pops as she reaches back for the end of the binder that keeps her breasts pressed tight to her center of balance. Pressed into the shadows and away from prying eyes.

Kaz reaches, too, his fingers touching hers on the clasp of the binder in a quiet question. She relaxes, her hair tickling her back and curling around her hip as he flicks open the tie at the end and unwinds the binding. As he goes, it loosens around her ribs like a breath coming in.

Her legs tighten against his sides. He's all bare against the leather of her pants, and she can feel the hardness of his response, the way she often can these days. He's always ignored it, so she does, too. Today, she feels him flex thicker beneath her and her lashes flutter. The last of her binder unwinds into a heap on the bedspread, Kaz's clever hand smoothing it away so it never tangles with the strands of her hair.

He's never seen her this way, and his eyes ignite, their scrupulous focus gone hazy with desire.

She knows that look. She freezes and faces flash over the top of his, dozens, then hundreds. Men, all looking at her the same way. Taking the same thing from her. Leaving nothing behind but money that's whisked away and then the pain of the lash over her shoulders when Heleen—

"Don't look!" she gasps, the thin sound somehow still like a scream. "Don't look at me."

His eyes snap closed immediately and she doesn't realize she's slapping at him until the sharp crack of hand against flesh reaches her ears. His hands come up and she flinches badly, nearly coming off him entirely, but his hands only rise to the pillow to either side of his head. Held up, palms open, eyes closed. He lets her strike him. But she's not, now, her arms crossed over her bare breasts as she breathes in gulps.

On the pillow, his lock pick's fingers flex once. Precise, the way she's never seen anyone else's hands move but his. Whatever he does, he intends. His are not clumsy hands, though they're not always kind. When they're cruel, well...Kaz Brekker always has his reasons.

Those hands have spent his entire adult life used for nothing but scamming money and causing pain.

The thought digs claws into her brain now as she shudders, struggling for breath and stuck hard in something she doesn't know how to escape. She's still astride him, but every muscle is poised to leap.

She can't stand it, not with him. Not looking at her the way a thousand other men did. With lust clouding their eyes like she's naught else. A child to be stripped and bought and sold on a dock.

"Inej."

She knows Kaz's rock-salt rasp of a voice, in every mood, every situation. It does not shake.

It shakes now.

"I don't know how to not look at you the way they did."

He knows.

Shame curdles on the back of her tongue and the indignity of being known in this ugliest of moments threatens to bury her. Her arms are cold where she clasps them over exposed skin.

"But know this. No one on this earth will ever buy or sell you again. Not if they don't want me to rip their bones straight out of their bodies while they still breathe."

She exhales and it's the underside of a laugh. Unsteady, but almost fond. Something about hearing his old unbridled ruthlessness feels like home.

"Keep talking," she whispers. "Please."

She doesn't want to go. It aches in her, the pain of trying to be with him. The pain of what it would be like to leave this behind and never be seen by him. Never be touched by his fingers that somehow know how to coax goosebumps and tingles and thrills from her battered soldier's body.

He lifts a hand. Her teeth lock tight and she won't run. Kaz taught her never to show weakness and she played at ferocity until she learned how to back it up with blades and it became her new reality.

She can do this. She will face this the way he did, with a well of courage somehow as miles-deep as his pain. But every muscle is bound tight as stone as his hand moves toward her naked skin.

His eyes, he keeps closed.

He doesn't touch.

Instead, his fingers hover over her. He doesn't need to look to trace the exact line of the scar just to the left of her naval. It prickles as if he'd caressed it.

"You took this wound when you fought an Inferni on our mission to capture the Sun Summoner. You'd killed her brother in defense of me. She could have burned you to cinders with her bare hands, and I suspect you still tried to show her mercy rather than try to kill her. You stitched the wound yourself, when Jesper and I couldn't."

His voice aches.

The heat from his fingers touches her, but he still doesn't. Her arms loosen as he subscribes an arc in the air that's an exact match for the scar beneath her arm.

"Here is where Oomen's knife nearly took your life, when we were ambushed before the Ice Court job. We were badly outnumbered, and couldn't have fought our way off that dock if you hadn't cut us free. You sent us ahead and stayed behind." The anger and admiration in his voice rasp together like grit. "Against the combined gangs of the Barrel, you still came out on top. And with almost your last breath, you left Oomen bleeding on the dock."

Her arms slipped down, no longer shielding herself. The air feels a little warmer on her skin, now.

"Yes, but you're the one who killed them, and Oomen. Jesper told me."

His smile is like a slash—thin and hard. But he doesn't open his eyes. "Yes, because I don't have your mercy."

His fingers lift to ghost over a scar atop her shoulder. It is so new it's still pink, and she realizes with a tingle that he has somehow already memorized exactly where it is.

"This was the skim of an arrow from your first fight with slavers. You left their bodies at the bottom of the sea and sold their ship to split the money amongst the orphans they'd stolen." A smile flickers across his face. "It was almost better than the time you stole me a tank."

She laughs, and somehow while he was talking, his rusty steel rasp opened her lungs back up.

The message riding beneath his words is starting to sink in and she sits up straighter.

Her body isn't the same as it was at the Menagerie. Now, it has more muscles, more scars. It is more hers.

Her body isn't a thing to be used or possessed, not to him. She isn't the investment he once tried to pretend she was. When Kaz sees her, he sees her strength, and her history. He sees her victories, not her weaknesses, and he knows them even with his eyes closed. When Kaz Brekker looks at her, even when there is desire heating his gaze, he sees her.

"You can look," she breathes now. "Just you."