Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)

by Leigh Bardugo

Everyone is fine except for me because I’m stuck with a gang of hand-wringing nursemaids.

Dang. That's cold but true

“A proper thief is like a proper poison, merchling. He leaves no trace.”

“I’ll tell you a secret, Hanna. The really bad monsters never look like monsters.”

He had often wondered how people survived this city, but it was possible Ketterdam would not survive Kaz Brekker.

If I were cruel, I’d give him a eulogy instead of a conversation.

Jesper tapped his fingers restlessly on his thighs. “Has anyone noticed this whole city is looking for us, mad at us, or wants to kill us?” “So?” said Kaz. “Well, usually it’s just half the city.”

Long ago, after a bad fall, her father had explained that only fools were fearless. We meet fear, he’d said. We greet the unexpected visitor and listen to what he has to tell us. When fear arrives, something is about to happen.

Better terrible truths than kind lies.

Colm bristled. “You doubt my son’s word?” “It isn’t personal, Da,” said Jesper. “He doubts everyone’s word.”

He really does. Lol

You lay a finger on me and Kaz Brekker will cut the baby from your pretty wife’s stomach and hang its body from a balcony at the Exchange.”

He would too.

“Is this a play?”

Dang, dude. How stupid can you be?

Jesper’s existence had been a string of close calls and near disasters, but he’d never been so sure he was running for his life.

“Isn’t that how things are done around here?” asked Wylan. “We all tell Kaz we’re fine and then do something stupid?”

Yes, why the net? Why something that would complicate the assault he’d planned on the silos and leave them twice as open to exposure? I couldn’t bear to watch you fall. “I just went to a lot of trouble to get my spider back. I didn’t do it so you could crack your skull open the next day.”

That's so frickin sweet!!!!

“This is my gang, Brekker. She doesn’t belong to you.” “She doesn’t belong to anyone,” Kaz said, feeling the singe of that angry white flame.

Thank you!

“I would come for you,” he said, and when he saw the wary look she shot him, he said it again. “I would come for you. And if I couldn’t walk, I’d crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we’d fight our way out together—knives drawn, pistols blazing. Because that’s what we do. We never stop fighting.”

I might actually cry now, thank you.

Nina rested her chin atop Inej’s silky hair. “Zoya used to say that fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.”

“My mother is Ketterdam. She birthed me in the harbor. And my father is profit. I honor him daily.

That's so sad to me...

This happened because your father is a monster dressed up in a quality suit.”

Absolutely. I can relate.

“You aren’t a flower, you’re every blossom in the wood blooming at once. You are a tidal wave. You’re a stampede. You are overwhelming.”

“Corpselight,” whispered Inej, and Nina shuddered. Bonelights, made from the crushed skeletons of deep-sea fishes, glowed green. But the corpselights burned some other fuel, a blue warning that allowed people to identify the flatboats of the bodymen, whose cargo was the dead.

Dang. That's terrifying.

“No matter the height of the mountain, the climbing is the same.”

Sure, a lock was like a woman. It was also like a man and anyone or anything else—if you wanted to understand it, you had to take it apart and see how it worked. If you wanted to master it, you had to learn it so well you could put it back together.

“You’re not weak because you can’t read. You’re weak because you’re afraid of people seeing your weakness.

We can endure all kinds of pain. It’s shame that eats men whole.”

Nina glanced from Inej to Kaz and saw they both wore the same expression. Nina knew that look. It came after the shipwreck, when the tide moved against you and the sky had gone dark. It was the first sight of land, the hope of shelter and even salvation that might await you on a distant shore.

They valued the things he could do instead of punishing him for the things he couldn’t.

Like true friends should.

“Mati en sheva yelu. This action will have no echo. It means we won’t repeat the same mistakes, that we won’t continue to do harm.”

“There’s a wound in you, and the tables, the dice, the cards—they feel like medicine. They soothe you, put you right for a time. But they’re poison, Jesper. Every time you play, you take another sip. You have to find some other way to heal that part of yourself.” She laid her hand on his chest. “Stop treating your pain like it’s something you imagined. If you see the wound is real, then you can heal it.”

“Would you tell your parents the truth? Would you tell them everything you’ve done … everything that happened?” “I don’t know,” Inej admitted. “But I’d give anything to have the choice.”

He moved slowly, deliberately, kept the kiss quiet, the barest brush of his lips, giving Wylan the chance to pull away if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He drew closer.

Dang it! Why do they always have to put this stuff in here!

“I’ve taken knives, bullets, and too many punches to count, all for a little piece of this town,” said Kaz. “This is the city I bled for. And if Ketterdam has taught me anything, it’s that you can always bleed a little more.”

“It’s done.” He’d liquidated every asset he had, used the last of the savings he’d accrued, every ill-gotten cent.

Oh my gossshhhhhh

When he turned back to her, he was ready. “Whatever happens to me, survive this city. Get your ship, have your vengeance, carve your name into their bones. But survive this mess I’ve gotten us into.”

“If you ever cared about me at all, don’t follow.”

Two of the deadliest people the Barrel had to offer and they could barely touch each other without both of them keeling over. But they’d tried. He’d tried. Maybe they could try again.

But in that moment, through the wide slats in the banister landing, she saw his eyes were open. His gaze found hers. He’d known she was there all along. Of course he had. He always knew how to find her. He gave the barest shake of his bloodied head.

I am going to frickin cry

“I recommend a cane,” Kaz said.

Haha. Nicely said.

“In the Barrel, we don’t trade in safety,” Kaz said, the abraded burn of his voice carrying over the crowd. “There’s only strength and weakness. You don’t ask for respect. You earn it.”

Kaz had never been able to dodge the horror of that night in the Ketterdam harbor, the memory of his brother’s corpse clutched tight in his arms as he told himself to kick a little harder, to take one more breath, stay afloat, stay alive.

The rage inside him burned on and he learned to despise people who complained, who begged, who claimed they’d suffered. Let me teach you what pain looks like, he would say, and then he’d paint a picture with his fists.

And that was what destroyed you in the end: the longing for something you could never have.

“They don’t know who we are. Not really. They don’t know what we’ve done, what we’ve managed together.” Kaz rapped his cane on the ground. “So let’s go show them they picked the wrong damn fight.”

In the end, he was not Nina or Matthias or Kaz or Inej or Jesper. He was just Wylan Van Eck. He told them everything.

He did not. No, no, no!

But just as surely as life connected everything, so did death. It was that endless, fast-running river. She’d dipped her fingers into its current, held the eddy of its power in her hand. She was the Queen of Mourning, and in its depths, she would never drown.

When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.

I am not sorry, she realized. She had chosen to live freely as a killer rather than die quietly as a slave, and she could not regret that.

Kuwei Yul-Bo had to die tonight.

What? What the heck? I mean, I don't limke him, but what?

She smiled then, her eyes red, her cheeks scattered with some kind of dust. It was a smile he thought he might die to earn again.

He was on the ice once more, and somewhere he could hear the wolves howling. But this time, he knew they were welcoming him home.

I am NOT okay :(