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In his fantasy, Kaz Brekker hasn’t blocked his window.
Most people in the Barrel can’t afford much in the way of locks. The sort Kaz could acquire are pathetically easy to crack by his standards, so he doesn’t bother. All it takes to secure a window is jamming the track with something the right size to keep the pane from sliding open. A dowel or a thick piece of board is the usual choice, and the broken-off chair arm he uses for the purpose hasn’t failed him yet.
Kaz never forgets to slot it in place, even when he’s injured or drunk. But in his fantasy, he forgets.
He is lying in bed, hard and palming himself idly. He freezes when she opens his window and slides into the small attic room.
“So,” Fantasy-Inej says, a hint of a smirk on her lips, “Kaz Brekker’s not made of stone after all.”
She is wearing the lighter clothing she wears on some summer days when she’s not on a job. It’s nothing out of place for the Barrel– a tunic and loose trousers– but they show hints of her shape when she moves in a way that her more functional sets of clothing don’t. Her breasts are small and perfect, her thighs dense with muscle. She is beautiful and she is looking at him. It’s not disgust or contempt in her eyes. It’s interest, and his heart starts pounding.
What he says in return is never the same. Sometimes he invents clever banter, retorts that have her laughing or barbs that make her eyes flash in anger. Other nights, when he is aching and exhausted and desperate for release, he says nothing, and she stalks towards him like the wraith he named her.
Then, so fast that he doesn’t have time to lash out or pull away, she is on him, straddling him, her hands pinning his arms, bruising strength digging into his muscles through the sleeves of his nightshirt. (Her hands and arms are strong. He has seen her climb to the top of the hand of Ghezen, seen her bend the cheap metal of a fork in her hand when someone mentioned visiting the Menagerie. The rest is fantasy, but her strength is real.)
He is paralyzed by her closeness, his body wracked with a dizzying mixture of panic and desire.
“You’re going to let me use you, Brekker,” she says, and he gulps air like a drowning man.
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” she tells him, slowly lowering her weight until he can feel the pressure of her body against his cock and he groans. “Other men always want to grab and touch. But you don’t. You can’t.”
“I–” he chokes out, but she laughs at him, a wicked, beautiful sound that makes his hands clench and heat curl through him.
“I’ve known for a while, Kaz. You can’t hide it from me.”
“If you tell–” his voice stops in his throat when she leans closer. He feels cold chills sweeping through him.
“What fun would that be?” She leans back and he can breathe again, even as he misses the heat of her breath on his cheek. “No, I’m not going to expose your little weakness. I’m going to use it and make you my toy.”
He is trapped and he doesn’t know how to pretend that he doesn’t want this. He can see in her dark eyes that she knows.
“I don’t– have to touch your skin– to hurt you–” he grits out desperately. He isn’t sure if it’s a warning or a challenge.
Quick as a flash, her hands are off his arms and there is cold steel pressing beneath his jaw. “Threaten me again,” she suggests– soft, deadly– and he bites back a moan.
“You could have anyone,” he manages, tilting his head further back to keep the point from his skin, hardly moving his jaw to speak. Baring his throat to her. She could kill him. She could move on him until he came, powerless under her body. He was defenseless. “Why me?”
“You can’t take more than you’re given,” Fantasy-Inej tells him simply. “I can do whatever I want to you, and you can’t even touch my skin. We both know it’s true. What, did you think I just trusted the Bastard of the Barrel? I’m untouchable to you, Kaz.” Slowly she rolls her hips and Kaz bites back a cry. “You wouldn’t kill a valuable investment,” she continues, and he swallows hard. She knows what he gambled to bring her to his side, as lightly as he’s tried to pass it off.
“Inej–”
“And you couldn’t fuck me even if you wanted to,” she tells him cruelly, tracing the tip of the blade feather-light up the side of his face. She rocks again. He can feel the steely muscles of her thighs tight around his hips and the hot softness between her legs as she presses herself mercilessly against his erection. “Do you know how appealing a boy who can’t ask for more is, to someone who’s always had to give everything? How good it feels to be the one who says what you can and can’t take?” She smiles and it tears through him. Genuine. Merciless. “And you’ll take whatever I give you so gratefully. My helpless, terrified, desperate virgin. This is the closest you’ve ever been to a woman, isn’t it?”
She is moving more quickly now, rubbing their bodies together, and Kaz is shaking so hard he feels a drop of blood run down his cheek as the knife presses just hard enough for its razor edge to break the skin. His heart is about to pound out of his chest.
“You can ask me to stop,” she says. “Go on, Kaz. Lie to me. Tell me you don’t want this. Ask me to leave.” She does something with her hips that makes his breath stutter and sends pleasure shooting through his spine.
The words burst from his lips before he can stop them. “Don’t leave. Don’t stop.”
Her teeth flash in a grin and Kaz thinks of barely-remembered stories from his childhood of deities that came before Ghezen– goddesses of harvest and fire and war who had walked among mortals and granted punishment and blessing alike.
Fantasy-Inej rocks harder now, and her eyelids flutter for a second, her breath coming faster. Her dark skin is flushed, little hairs clinging to her hairline with sweat the way they do on hot afternoons. “Maybe someday– ” she breathes– “if you’re good– I’ll teach you how to touch me with those gloves. Teach you to make yourself useful. But for now, you’re going to lie still– and I’m going to get myself off on you.”
His head swims. There is nothing but the closeness of her, the bliss of her body moving against his, and her dark, taunting words. The way her sweat-damp tunic clings to her breasts. The shamelessness of her moans– raw and real and intoxicating. He watches, transfixed, as her body arches and she gasps his name once, then again. She is grinding down on him so hard that it’s painful, but Kaz arches into it anyway and lets her use him for her pleasure. He bites his lip until he tastes blood, and Inej comes so hard he can feel her shaking. The light from the window traces the line of her throat, her shoulder, the sharp planes of her face, and she is no wraith. She is more alive than he has ever been.
She could eat his soul raw and he would offer her more.
Her breathing still uneven, she moves off of him. Kaz moans an incoherent protest, and she leans in and holds one finger a hair’s breadth from his mouth.
“Shhh,” she scolds him. “I told you I was here to take, not give. Use your own hands if you’re too weak to control yourself. Go on, show me how desperate you are.”
In the emptiness of his attic room, Kaz forces his hand from his cock and grips the sheet now. His eyes are still tightly shut as in his mind, he stares at Fantasy-Inej in defiance.
“I can control myself,” he whispers hoarsely. “I can take what I’m given.”
“Can you?” she asks skeptically, and she sits down at the foot of the bed and watches him as he forces his breaths even and his body under his command once more. He swallows his whimpers. With her eyes on him, he can’t quash his arousal, can’t make his throbbing erection go down, but he controls himself. He keeps his hands from reaching, stroking, abusing himself until he has to choke back his cry of her name as he comes. He wants to, he wants to so badly. But she is watching. She is waiting for him to give in, and so he won’t.
It feels like an eternity before Fantasy-Inej smiles at him in approval. “Oh, treasure,” she says quietly, the sweet Kerch endearment something that would never fall from her lips, not in reality and never to him. “Well done. I think you deserve a reward.”
And then she reaches back and unbinds her hair, and Kaz watches– open-mouthed, worshipful– as it cascades around her like the night she is a part of. She leans forward. He feels the cool-soft-lovely waves of it brush over his skin– his trembling hands, the strip of stomach bared beneath his rucked-up night shirt, his cock, oh yes fuck yes– and then her mouth closes over him.
Hot, soft, wonderful and terrible in its intensity, and the harbor has never been so far away. There is only heat and pleasure so sharp he can’t see or hear, and he comes as she swallows him down.
Kaz lies alone in his tangled sheets afterward, imagining her hair shifting like silk against his skin, her hand flat against his chest through his nightshirt, keeping his heart from beating out of his chest. Her voice, telling him that she’ll be back when she wants more. Saying he belongs to her now.
In other fantasies, she’s soft and yielding or wild and laughing with joy. They’re in a public room of the Slat and their pleasure is secret, lest someone hear or notice. They’re alone and she gets herself off with her fingers while he watches. He comes to her in the night and the terrors beneath his skin melt away until she can run her hands over his body and hold him. He wraps his body around hers from behind and grinds against the taut curve of her backside with his face buried in her hair. She fucks him and he learns what it’s like to push into the heat of a woman’s body. She is tender and sweet. She is sly and teasing. She is so hungry for him that she claws at his back and demands more.
He tries not to think too closely about what it means that he comes back to this one again and again. Comes back to being a toy for her to use, to proving the strength of his restraint, to facing her scorn and earning the pleasure of her touch.
But he is too much an observer of human nature not to know, deep down, what this says about him. What he wants, and what he would surrender to her if she asked.
After he’s indulged in this particular fantasy, he has to shore up his walls the next day. He’s brusquer and more imperious in his instructions to her. He barely looks up from his ledgers or the coins he runs between his gloved fingers to keep his hands from shaking. He doesn’t meet her gaze.
In his fantasy, she stares into his eyes and sees everything, and he lets her, again and again.