Crooked Kingdom (The Six of Crows Duology #2) - Leigh Bardugo Page 0,141

to the tether of her voice. “I live in fear that I’ll see one of her—one of my —clients on the street. For a long time, I thought I recognized them everywhere. But sometimes I think what they did to me wasn’t the worst of it.”

Kaz’s vision came back into focus. The water receded. He was standing in a hotel bathroom. His fingers were pressed against Inej’s shoulder. He could feel the fine muscles beneath her skin. A pulse beat furiously at her throat, in the soft hollow just beneath her jaw. He realized she had closed her eyes. Her lashes were black against her cheeks. As if in response to his shaking, she had gone even more still. He should say something, but his mouth could not make words.

“Tante Heleen wasn’t always cruel,” Inej continued. “She’d hug you, hold you close, then pinch you so hard, she broke skin. You never knew if a kiss was coming or a slap. One day you were her best girl, and the next day she’d bring you to her office and tell you she was selling you to a group of men she’d met on the street. She’d make you beg her to keep you.” Inej released a soft sound that was almost a laugh. “The first time Nina hugged me, I flinched .” Her eyes opened. She met his gaze. He could hear the drip of the faucet, see the curl of her braid over her shoulder where it had slipped free of its coil. “Go on,” she said quietly, as if she was asking him to continue a story.

He wasn’t sure he could. But if she could speak those words into the echo of this room, he could damn well try.

Carefully, he raised the shears. He lifted the bandage, creating a gap, feeling regret and release as he broke contact with her skin. He sliced through the bandage. He could feel the warmth of her on his fingers like fever.

The ruined bandage fell away.

He took up another long strip of towel in his right hand. He had to lean in to loop it behind her. He was so close now. His mind took in the shell of her ear, the hair tucked behind it, that rapid pulse fluttering in her throat. Alive, alive, alive.

It isn’t easy for me either.

He looped the bandage around again. The barest touches. Unavoidable. Shoulder, clavicle, once her knee. The water rose around him.

He secured the knot. Step back. He did not step back. He stood there, hearing his own breath, hers, the rhythm of them alone in this room.

The sickness was there, the need to run, the need for something else too. Kaz thought he knew the language of pain intimately, but this ache was new. It hurt to stand here like this, so close to the circle of her arms. It isn’t easy for me either. After all she’d endured, he was the weak one. But she would never know what it was like for him to see Nina pull her close, watch Jesper loop his arm through hers, what it was to stand in doorways and against walls and know he could never draw nearer. But I’m here now , he thought wildly. He had carried her, fought beside her, spent whole nights next to her, both of them on their bellies, peering through a long glass, watching some warehouse or merch’s mansion. This was nothing like that. He was sick and frightened, his body slick with sweat, but he was here. He watched that pulse, the evidence of her heart, matching his own beat for anxious beat. He saw the damp curve of her neck, the gleam of her brown skin. He wanted to … He wanted.

Before he even knew what he intended, he lowered his head. She drew in a sharp breath. His lips hovered just above the warm juncture between her shoulder and the column of her neck. He waited. Tell me to stop. Push me away.

She exhaled. “Go on,” she repeated. Finish the story.

The barest movement and his lips brushed her skin—warm, smooth, beaded with moisture. Desire coursed through him, a thousand images he’d hoarded, barely let himself imagine—the fall of her dark hair freed from its braid, his hand fitted to the lithe curve of her waist, her lips parted, whispering his name.

All of it there and then gone. He was drowning in the harbor. Her limbs were a corpse’s limbs. Her eyes were dead and staring. Disgust