#it's basically pekka rollins staging a murder (for now it's just a kidnapping)

[climb-inej]

🗡 So many names, he'd called her, now foreign to her ears, in one single conversation.

Inej. Tool. Wraith. Spider.

So many names, but in her eyes, he had only ever been Kaz. In all the complexities of his broken soul, he remained whole in that aspect. He was familiarity, potential, both promise and motivation for the achievement of something greater.

And though his face was one that she missed, she was now assured that she could never look upon the shape of it the same way again; His expression, hardened by age, moulded by the bloodied and bruised experiences of the Barrel streets, scarred by a fierce determination that would only bring him closer to his end. The harsh blue of his eyes, burning bright as hellish flames, they same way it had when the scrape of his voice had shamelessly announced the brutal murder of a little boy.

Inej searched for more. Some reminder of what once was. Some remnant of a guilt similar to what she had spotted in his gaze in that fleeting moment when their eyes had met as he watched her being led away from the Crow Club, her hope for freedom shattered at his feet; the moment that he had sworn to not ever welcome. The moment that he had done everything to prevent but nothing to stop.

And now she was back and he spouted curses and insults, daggers of his own.

And he mocked, both her and her Saints, and he seethed and he wanted her dead.

Had she still been the girl in the caravans, she would have cried. Had she still been his Wraith, she might have flinched at the force of such hatred.

But she was neither. She was nothing. So she only let his words sink in, let him take all the shame for them; if he had any left.

Being a Dime Lion was more than enough of a reason to deserve death.

"I see," she said, her mouth suddenly dry, "Is that why your office waits unchanged? A window that has stayed open; as good an invitation as any. To kill or to be killed."

At that, her gaze wavered. Her heartbeat faltered.

You wore those silks, painted your lips the brightest red. Don't act like you weren't practically inviting me in.

The smoothness of your legs, the silk of your hair; it's all as good an invitation as any.

Inej squared her shoulders, forced down the knot in her throat. She had become her own worst fear, and she awoke her every nightmare.

But though he seemed comfortable in assuming her role, shutting her out before her time had come, her job was not yet over.

"You also," she muttered, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, "wait unchanged."

She kicked him against the stomach, hopefully fast enough for the contact to not register to him, hard enough to shove him backwards, sending two knives flying before he could regain balance. They pierced into the fabric of his shirt, holding him securely pinned to the wall before the clatter of his dropped cane was even heard.

A moment spent in silence, as if granted mutual aknowledgement of a thing lost.

When Inej finally spoke, she found that it was the most difficult of challenges, to have him in front of her and speak in such a manner.

"Merchants talk," she said, "because they can not be as smart as we are. They talk, and so we knew. Surely you expected us to know."

Another pause, a few silent steps forward.

"About your deal with Marcell Volcov, the illegal cargo that he hired you to preserve, so as to not ruin his own reputation, as it traveled aboard a common schooner from Novyi Zem. The promised payment that you would receive on the condition that the cargo entered Fifth Harbour intact and unnoticed."

Of course she knew. Knowing had been all she could do for years on end.

"Merchants are foolish, Volcov even more so; for having trusted the Dregs, this gang of killers and thieves that, to no one else's surprise, proceeded to steal said cargo and kidnap the merchant himself from his own home, eager for more leverage than they were promised."

Inej still remembered the old man's terror as Rollins's men had dragged him into his office, tied up and gagged, tears running down his face and blood smudged across his jaw.

You poor Ravkan moron, Rollins had chuckled. Things are not as easy as you'd thought they'd be in the Barrel, eh?

It was a simple enough plan.

Steal the cargo, grab the merchant, make Kaz Brekker attend the parley by threatening to blame the merchant's death on him and have him chased down by the stadwatch for the murder of a public figure.

But Inej supposed that Kaz had deduced all of that already.

Though, of course, there was also the other thing.

"The great thing about discarded tools," she corrected, "however replaceable, is that one might think they are too filed down to inflict any more damage."

More silence. Enough to allow space for the distant screaming to be heard.

She dared not look away from him as he stood there, unmoving and wild-eyed. Her own guilt showed through the softest of bitter smiles.

"Kaz," Inej said, nodding towards the harbour, "look."

Even from this limited view that his open window could offer, the sight was clear; a schooner, just outside Ketterdam, ablaze.

It was almost like watching part of some distant dream burn, just like the ship was. Inej considered the idea of it, what could have once been, but it was all much too faint to delve on any longer.

She risked a few whispered words of prayer, a moment of mourning for her past self. The sight of ships trailing along the horizon used to make her so happy; now she turned away from even the faintest glimpses of raised sails, burning or otherwise.

She reached for his cane when she stepped away again, grabbing it from the floor and setting it down again, upright, propped up against the furthest corner of the room; Her first subconscious thought was just how much it would have hurt for him to bend down and pick it up himself, cold and damp as the Ketterdam was tonight, in an office with an open window. But then she tried to convince herself again; she had only done it to prevent him from attacking her with it as she turned to go.

"Kaz Brekker, Dirtyhands, bastard of the Barrel. Overstepping his boundaries. Testing the city's patience."

The potential headlines of Ketterdam newspapers if it came out that the Dregs really had been the ones behind this; if Pekka Rollins's lies prevailed yet again.

Inej reached into her pocket, pulling out a small pouch that she proceeded to pull open, spilling its contents onto Kaz's desk.

Five human teeth, most of them rotten, all of them covered in a thin layer of gold.

Five human teeth, just enough to garner a warning that the merchant was still alive but wouldn't stay so for too long, depending on the choice that would have to follow.

"Kaz Brekker, he did it," she continued. "Perhaps he couldn't help himself. Greed has always been his only God and," a pause, a second of eye contact, "it has stripped him of all shame."

Finally, she turned away.

"Tomorrow night, at ten bells," she said again. "This all could have been prevented had you replaced me sooner. Your new tool wouldn't even have to be any better. It would just have to exist."

🗡 The shadows seemed to breathe in this corner of Ketterdam. They shifted around the hands that scaled across the walls of the Slat, deeming her an intruder rather than welcoming her in.

The bastard still sat scowling at his desk, bad leg propped up and stiff; the pain had always seemed to be particularly bad during damp, cold nights.

The wind blew harsher, as if to shut her out again.

There was no longer a neatly folded blanket waiting for her at the windowsill.

A tool rather than a weapon, he'd said, the word dripping with irony.

Sharpened, used, discarded.

"A tool," spoke the shadows in Inej's voice, suppressing the bitterness of a small laugh. "A tool I might have been; the one most frequently drawn."

Saints forgive me for my pride, she thought, but I will not let you strip me of the lethality that you bestowed upon me yourself.

"Have you deprived yourself of the necessity of me yet? Does your hand feel lighter now that you no longer wield me?"

She was provoking him, she knew, and it was a response fueled by the lingering ache in her heart, something she could not hide or terminate; so she merely ignored it and moved on, for it was not part of tonight's plan.

Her skin crawled with shivers, disgust, familiarity, at the sound of her title as spoken by the seasalt rasp of his voice. Mockery. She narrowed her eyes back at him.

"The Dregs killled five of our own last night."

Five of our own.

The words still tasted stale, felt clumsy at the tip of her tongue.

With her hands clasped behind her back, Inej could feel the weight of what stung torturous beneath her sleeve. On her left forearm, right over the space where the peacock feather had long since faded, lay the symbol of a feral cat curled into a crown.

Inej still scratched at it, left her skin reddened and sore.

They had given her the tattoo the moment she had set foot in the Emerald Palace, eager to claim the loyalty of a prized spider, and Inej had felt like crying. But she hadn't. The Dime Lions were not like the Dregs. It took more than throwing a punch with steel across your knuckles to make them take you seriously, let alone see you as a potential threat.

One day, Inej had thrown a knife into a bruiser's shoulder.

She had expected a harshly-worded warning, some form of punishment, but Rollins had only squeezed her arm, the gesture secure and steady as a father's, and still the touch had sent her hurrying off into her small chamber, chest heaving, throat burning in a panic.

She had received nothing but reassurance with every act of damage that she inflicted upon Rollins's own men, but here she was now, threatening Kaz Brekker for having done the same.

"If this was your way to get our attention, you've earned it. It's clear that targeting those five men in particular was no coincidence. No, those kills were premeditated, and our profit has been reduced because of it. For now."

She breathed in, her face still devoid of all emotion. "Rollins still has to get his cut out of this."

Working for Rollins was luxury. It meant sleeping in a warm bed, waking up to Ravkan delicacies on her nightstand and Zemeni fabrics draped over her chair. But Inej cared not for treats; all she could think about was that her door was so close within reach that someone was able to leave them there in the first place.

Terror lingered, as it was supposed to. Inej had learned to sleep with her eyes half open.

"A parley," she said. "Tomorrow, at ten bells, at the Exchange. He says he is willing to hear about your intention behind all this, negotiate for some mutual gain now that you've risen above the ordinary thugs and thieves."

Their first conversation after months of distance, and it felt a hundred times more alienating.

There were no playful remarks, however rudely worded. No menacing smiles of mutually aknowledged wit.

But there had been a time when Inej really did enjoy Kaz Brekker's company.

Back when they were nothing short of scheming sixteen year olds, bent over maps of merchant estates and stealing paintings from museums after midnight and sharing much-too-bitter tea that they sipped from cracked porcelain cups.

The ache resumed.

"In his words," Inej said, "Some scraps fitting for a Barrel rat like you."