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She knew how she sounded—stern, fussy, like an old crone making dire pronouncements from her porch. She didn’t like it, but she also knew she was right.
“You can’t spend his money if you’re dead.” “I’ll acquire expensive habits in the afterlife.”
She’d die after a worthy fight, not because some man had tired of her or required more from her than she could give.
She sounded like a little girl who didn’t know what she was doing. And that was exactly how she felt.
he saw the shame that came with gratitude,
“Do you have a different name for killing when you wear a uniform to do it?”
“Maybe you’re the ones who shouldn’t exist, Helvar. Weak and soft, with your short lives and your sad little prejudices. You worship wood sprites and ice spirits who can’t be bothered to show themselves, but you see real power, and you can’t wait to stamp it out.”
Kaz thought of the little wind-up dog, of drinking hot chocolate on the bridge. He thought that heaven would look like the kitchen of the house on Zelverstraat and smell like hutspot cooking in the Hertzoons’ oven. He still had Saskia’s red ribbon. He could give it back to her. They would make candies out of quince paste. Margit would play the piano, and he could fall asleep by the fire. He closed his eyes and waited to die.
Though he’d trusted her with his life countless times, it felt much more frightening to trust her with this shame.
We’re either geniuses or the dumbest sons of bitches to ever breathe air.” “We’ll know soon enough.”
University was supposed to be the thing that gave him direction, but instead he’d wandered down a different path.
the hopeful farm boy who picked the worst possible person to care about, who searched for signs in things that he knew deep down meant nothing—when
I’d promise you safety. I’d offer you happiness. I don’t know if that exists in the Barrel, but you’ll find none of it with me.”
What bound them together? Greed? Desperation?
Inej’s mother and father might still shed tears for the daughter they’d lost, but if Inej died tonight, there would be no one to grieve for the girl she was now.
She could see it took every last bit of his terrible will for him to remain still beneath her touch. And yet, he did not pull away. She knew it was the best he could offer. It was not enough.
He wasn’t sure he recognized himself.
She’d shown him in a thousand ways that she was honorable and strong and generous and very human, maybe more vividly human than anyone he’d ever known.
“The life you live, the hate you feel—it’s poison. I can drink it no longer.”
She’d laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.
He needed to tell her … what? That she was lovely and brave and better than anything he deserved. That he was twisted, crooked, wrong, but not so broken that he couldn’t pull himself together into some semblance of a man for her. That without meaning to, he’d begun to lean on her, to look for her, to need her near. He needed to thank her for his new hat.
It wasn’t enough—it would never be enough—but it was a beginning.
They were monsters, he knew it, but boys as well, boys like him—taught to hate, to fear.
“Stay in Ketterdam. Stay with me.” She looked down at his gloved hand clutching hers. Everything in her wanted to say yes, but she would not settle for so little, not after all she’d been through. “What would be the point?” He took a breath. “I want you to stay. I want you to … I want you.”
Inej had wanted Kaz to become someone else, a better person, a gentler thief. But that boy had no place here. That boy ended up starving in an alley. He ended up dead. That boy couldn’t get her back.
Inej could never be his, not really, but he would find a way to give her the freedom he’d promised her so long ago.
