Shadows: A Six of Crows Fan fic

Chapter Nineteen: Inej

The instant her back butted up against the wall her anger was gone. She'd been trying to punish him earlier. Trying to make him suffer as she walked around her cabin doing the exact same things he'd made her watch in the Slat. She wanted to make him ache for her and realize how absolutely stupid he was for throwing her away so carelessly by his actions. Wanted to show him she would never be his because she now, once again, belonged to someone else.

But then she'd heard his side of things; heard the hurt and sorrow in his voice as he apologized to her with everything he had.

And then she'd watched his eyes. Watched them as they suddenly turned from full of hurt and sorrow to something much, much darker. She'd watched them go lower than she'd ever seen him let his eyes trail before and it gave her a twisted pleasure that she'd been able to make him want her with something as simple as a water droplet.

Her miscalculation, however, was that she hadn't seen just how much he would want her. Behind his cold and brooding mask, she hadn't seen what was now so openly displayed for her in his eyes mere inches from her face. Surprise had taken her when he'd brushed the hair from her face, her stomach twisting in knots as he'd stepped abruptly forward again and again until he'd trapped her. Both of his arms quaking on either side of her head, his breath coming out in shaking warm brushes of air, sweeping against her cheeks. His body was so close to hers, the heat of him so close turning every morsel of her anger into something else. Something she couldn't control for much longer. Something she didn't know if she wanted to control.

But, when he'd tried to move his hand to cup her cheek, the cold leather feel of the tips of his fingers snapped her halfway out of her fog. Enough to realize what she'd said so long ago on the boat to Fjerda. No matter what her body wanted, her heart still couldn't take such a guarded, distanced relationship. She would have him without armor, or she wouldn't have him at all.

Static rushed through her fingers as she touched the skin along his wrist, tugging at the cuff of his gloves. She'd half expected him to deny her, to tell her no, but at the nod he gave her she wanted to rip the blasted things off his hands. She almost did until she heard the sharp inhale he gave as her fingers brushed his skin again. Watching his face, she pulled the gloves slowly off each of his hands, relishing in the power she wielded as his dilated eyes focused impatiently on her hands working the gloves off. She basked in his undivided, practically drunken, attention as he dared not move until she let him. She shivered as his one now-freed hand moved to her side, pinching her skin as his fingers tightened in the fabric but still stayed unmoving until she'd finished with the second.

She'd never had this much control and power before. In the past, in the Menagerie, when people had come to her for pleasure and passion, she'd been used, abused, mistreated, tossed about like the toy they thought her to be. She was controlled by their whim and fancy. She could never cry, she could never tell them to be still, to have them do what she said or wanted. All she was subjected to was from their own wants and wills. Her own will stripped from her unknowingly by these men even as they imagined a different face on her or didn't even care to know what her face looked like.

But with Kaz... with Kaz, she knew that she could say anything and he would comply. If she told him to stop, he would, if she told them she wanted his gloves off... well now they were off. As she moved his hand to her cheek, she knew that his eyes were seeing her and only her. She knew that, as his thumb brushed softly against the ridge of her cheek, she was the one he wanted to feel against his skin. That the touch of her fingers gliding down his forearms where what made his breath catch and his knees quake along her thighs.

She knew all this perfectly, in a fairytale world locked away in a magical part of her mind where no truth or shadows could come to ruin the beauty of the moment. But in the real world, she knew the instant his tremoring stopped coming from her and started responding to the memories invading his mind. When the darkness in his eyes turned from want to pain and terror.