BOMBS AWAY ➤ kaz brekker

the killing game

This is your job, so do it. 

After three weeks spent shivering in a hotel bed that creaked every time she breathed, Esther came to her senses. She would not crawl, nor beg, but she needed a job, so she went to Kaz. Although she would have loved to wait for him to come to her, she wasn't keen on starving to death, lying on a bed-bug-ridden mattress - and besides, she didn't even know if he would have come. She didn't know this new Kaz. She could only hope to see glimmers of the boy he'd once been.

As soon as she had stepped into the Crow Club, Inej had melted out of the shadows to whisk her up the stairs and into the same private gambling parlor where she'd spoken to Kaz on that fated day. Upon her entry, he turned from where he'd been staring at cards laid out on the table. Resting in his hand was the beautifully made crows-head cane  that she had come to expect when she was near him. His black eyes burned through her, and he had the audacity to smile at how she'd caved. He examined her, looking her up and down, taking in the shadows under her eyes and the sickly color of her skin. Esther had miscalculated the cost of everything she would need, and she ran out of sufficient food quickly, leaving her malnourished and unhealthy. Yet as much as she wanted to collapse, she held herself tall, her chin high, looking him straight in the eyes. She would not bow to him. She would not bow to anyone, but especially not to him, a kind boy turned so cold.

He hadn't said a single word about how she had caved, but with every deft movement she saw his disdain. The slight smirk he wore like a crown, the gleam in his eyes of a man overtaken with glee. And yet aside from all that, he was the perfect picture of a cordial businessman. He showed her where to sign and shook her hand when it was all over. Cold and unfamiliar, just like them - or, more accurately, just like what they'd become.

So Esther suddenly found herself a member of Kaz's notorious gang, the Dregs. Sitting down at the bar after she met with Kaz, scarfing down every square inch of food that would fit in her stomach, she heard from Inej how Kaz had built the gang from nothing. The Dregs had started out as a jumble of ill-fitting street urchins and thugs, but Kaz had descended from the heavens to help them murder, steal, blackmail, and participate in all sorts of other unsavory activities. With every word, involuntary panic rose in Esther. She didn't want her friend to have changed. He was all that she had left of home. But as she listened to Inej's tale, she knew he was a monster wearing her friend's face. He was not home anymore.

Aside from aiding a ruddy haired boy named Wylan in the making of explosives, Esther didn't do much for the Dregs. While they worked, Esther made up all sorts of lies to tell Wylan. He was curious about her, but seemed just as reluctant to talk about his past as she was to talk of hers. But then he asked her to tell him about the life she would have liked to live, and that was all she needed to ease up.

"I would have been born a princess," she said as she and Wylan constructed a flash bomb. "I would have been born with the birthright of a thousand jewels and a clear line to the throne." She tried to make her speech as poetic as possible, since she noticed that the boy enjoyed those types of stories. "I would have been trained from birth in diplomacy, strategy, swordplay, the proper way to hold your tea or walk down the stairs." Each time she spoke, she was reminded of the elegant letters from her mother that sat locked in a case in her new room at the Slat. She thought of the swirling ink painted into the shape of words, dreams that her mother shared only with her. Three dreams I will give to you, my dear. And three dreams she did. Three letters total, since the day she left without a promise to come back.

Esther's mother and father had not been married when they were gifted a baby girl. In fact, Sander had been married to Greta, a woman with ice-blond hair, as cold as the land she came from. To anyone from the outside she appeared to be a motherly, sweet wife who readily welcomed guests into her home and rocked her children to sleep at night. But Esther wasn't from the outside, so she got to see the side that her lovely stepmother saved just for her.