TROUBLE , kaz brekker

xx. echo?

CHAPTER TWENTY

KAZ THOUGHT THAT SHE was dead.

He had walked into a Ravkan tavern, enticed by gunshots and screams, to find enough blood to spell trouble and a red-haired corpse with empty, empty eyes.

Two bodies, only one heartbeat. He'd walked this path before - it's familiar taste flooded his lungs and threatened to drown him all over again.

By the good graces of well practiced, nimble fingers, Kaz had just escaped the Darkling and lived to tell the tale but not even that could prepare him to face mortality once more.

Cruel, cruel mortality. He'd learnt the hard way that life's eternal constant was to take more than it gave. His conversation with the General had revealed as much. Mystery after mystery, what else was lurking in the shadows of Ravka?

And so, as he lingered on the precipice between life and death, Kaz thought for one terrible moment that Echo Caddel was dead. The worst part? He hadn't been there to stop it.

But even at a first glance, the lines of the corpse were too harsh, too sharp - even in death.  That was all Dirtyhands needed to know that just this once, for this one heavenly moment, the Saints had been watching over him. And so, the doppelgänger leered at him through unseeing eyes ( eyes that couldn't ever rival her exact shade of green ) as the unsteady silhouette teetering above her began to fall. Echo was alive.

That didn't necessarily mean that she was safe.

Her body fell to the floor and Kaz was there, the underside of his boots slick with blood that made every step unstable. "Echo?" Kaz whispered as he watched her pale chest heave with the force of breath.

No response. That was when Kaz noticed the steady stream of crimson that flowed from the side of her head. It pooled under her skull like a perverse halo and yet - that wasn't what worried him the most.

The Bastard of the Barrel had seen his fair share of injuries in Ketterdam. Saints, he'd probably caused most of them. So, he knew the way blood oozed, slow and steady, when bones shattered and splintered and he knew it meant nothing good.

He tried again, just to be sure.

"Echo?" Nothing.

Kaz was no fool. Gunshots, bleeding ears and an utter unresponsiveness to sound? At best, the tear in her muscles would never heal. At worst, it would kill her.

But Kaz couldn't - wouldn't - think about that. Not now, not when her blood was seeping into the black fabric of his neatly folded dress pants and her breathing ( that lulling rhythm he could recall like an old Kerch lullaby ) was erratic and distorted and deafening.

The corpse at his feet seemed to laugh and Kaz began to realise why Echo despised her family so fiercely that it could drive her to this. Even in death, they just couldn't leave her be.

He wanted to take her gently in his arms, but the blood that stained her hands was mirrored on his own and what solace could he offer in his own brutality? He was damned and now she was damned too. The only comfort Kaz could offer was that they were both damned together.

Echo would scoff at that, if she could hear him.

But for now, she was struggling to her feet. Gone was the heavy weight of her ridiculous dresses but it had been replaced by something much more tormenting: pain. She buckled and fell under waves of nausea and vertigo and a million other things Kaz never wanted to feel again and as he watched her put one foot in front of the other he felt sick. And he then felt rage.