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Joost had two problems: the moon and his mustache.
Retvenko was a Squaller, older than the other Grisha indentures, his hair shot through with silver. There were rumors he’d fought for the losing side in Ravka’s civil war and had fled to Kerch after the fighting.
“Hoede comes for Yuri, Yuri comes back sick. Two days later, Yuri vanishes for good. Now Anya.”
Kaz Brekker didn’t need a reason.
The boy they called Dirtyhands didn’t need a reason any more than he needed permission—to break a leg, sever an alliance, or change a man’s fortunes with the turn of a card.
Kaz’s eyes found Inej unerringly in the crowd.
No matter what street law decreed, this night smelled like violence.
“It’s about sending a message. What’s the point of a dead guy with forg written on his chest?” “Compromise,” Kaz said. “I’m sorry does the trick and uses fewer bullets.”
“No mourners,” Jesper said as he tossed his rifle to Rotty. “No funerals,” the rest of the Dregs murmured in reply. Among them, it passed for “good luck.”
She had a hundred questions, but as usual, Kaz was keeping a stranglehold on the answers.
Besides, she was the Wraith—the only law that applied to her was gravity, and some days she defied that, too.
His dark coat rippled in the salt breeze, his limp more pronounced tonight, as it always was when the weather turned cold.
Her father would have said the shadows were about their own business tonight. Something bad was going to happen here.
“I’m a businessman,” he’d told her. “No more, no less.” “You’re a thief, Kaz.” “Isn’t that what I just said?”
“I know it comes easy, Geels, but try not to play dumb with me.”
“I like it when men beg,” she said. “But this isn’t the time for it.”
Kaz Brekker was gone, and Dirtyhands had come to see the rough work done.
“You’ll get what’s coming to you someday, Brekker.” “I will,” said Kaz, “if there’s any justice in the world. And we all know how likely that is.”
“You draw on me again, I’ll break both your wrists, and you’ll have to hire someone to help you take a piss.”
But the night’s work wasn’t yet over, and the Wraith didn’t have time for traitors.
Jesper shook his head and rested his hands on the revolvers he’d reclaimed from Dirix. Whenever he got cranky, he liked to lay hands on a gun, like a child seeking the comfort of a favored doll.
He knew Inej was shadowing him.
“When everyone knows you’re a monster, you needn’t waste time doing every monstrous thing.”
“Greed is your god, Kaz.” He almost laughed at that. “No, Inej. Greed bows to me. It is my servant and my lever.”
“Men mock the gods until they need them, Kaz.”
Ghosts, Kaz thought. A boy’s fear, but it came with absolute surety. Jordie had come for his vengeance at last. It’s time to pay your debts, Kaz. You never get something for nothing.
“Since you didn’t bring me here to philosophize, what business?”
A man of faith, Kaz noted, as his mind sorted through everything he knew about Van Eck—prosperous, pious, a widower recently remarried to a bride not much older than Kaz himself. And, of course, there was the mystery of Van Eck’s son.
“A pistol and my cane.”
The pistol was more useful, but the cane brought Kaz a relief he didn’t care to quantify.
I need a mug of the darkest, bitterest coffee I can find, he thought. Or maybe a real punch to the jaw.
The boy was young, the bare scraps of a mustache on his upper lip.
“I do wonder what a boy of your intelligence might have amounted to under different circumstances.” Ask Jordie, Kaz thought with a bitter pang.
“Thirty. The deal is the deal.” “The deal is the deal,” Kaz said.
Inej knew the moment Kaz entered the Slat.
She’d left her luck behind in a Suli camp on the shores of West Ravka. She doubted she’d see either again.
Kaz’s shoulders lifted. “This place is like anything in Ketterdam. It leaks.” Inej could have sworn he looked directly at the vent when he said it.
She wore her sleeves long and the sheath of her knife mostly hid the scar on the inside of her left forearm where the Menagerie tattoo had once been, but they all knew it was there.
He grinned at her, his smile sudden and jarring as a thunderclap, his eyes the near-black of bitter coffee. “We’ll be kings and queens, Inej. Kings and queens.”
He was corded muscle, scars, but only two tattoos—the Dregs’ crow and cup on his forearm and, above it, a black R on his bicep.
One minute he made her blush and the next he made her want to commit murder.
“Please, my darling Inej, treasure of my heart, won’t you do me the honor of acquiring me a new hat?”
