THESE BROKEN VOWS (Kazbrekker x Fem!reader) [ book version]

CHAPTER 9

✨Y/N P.O.V ✨

As Y/N and Kaz moved farther from West Stave, the silence between
them spread like a stain.

Other than the occasional banter from the Ghafas infront of them, there was nothing but silence.

They’d abandoned their capes and masks in a rubbish heap behind a run-down little brothel called the Velvet Room, where Kaz had apparently stashed another change of clothes for them.

It was as if the whole city had become their wardrobe, and Inej had told Y/N that she couldn’t help but think of the conjurers who drew miles of scarves from their sleeves and vanished girls from boxes that always reminded her uncomfortably of coffins.

Dressed in the bulky coats and roughspun trousers of dockworkers, they made their way into the warehouse district, hair covered by hats, collars pulled up despite the warm weather.

The eastern edge of the district was
like a city within a city, populated mostly by immigrants who lived in cheap hotels and rooming houses or in shantytowns of plywood and corrugated tin, segregating themselves into ramshackle neighborhoods by language and
nationality.

At this time of day, most of the area’s denizens were at work in the city’s factories and docks, but on certain corners, Y/N saw men and women gathered, hoping some foreman or boss would come along to offer a
lucky few of them a day’s work.

After she’d been freed from her indenture issued by the Fjerdans, Y/N had wandered the streets of Ketterdam, trying to make sense of the city.

She’d been overwhelmed by the noise and the crowds, certain that Tante Heleen or one of the bawds would catch her unawares and drag her to one of the brothels of the West Stave.

But she’d known that if she was going to be useful to the Dregs and earn her way out of her new contract, she couldn’t let the strangeness of the clamor and cobblestones best her.

We greet the unexpected visitor.

She would have to learn the city. She didn’t have to do that alone. The Ghafas were a great help. Being spiders, they both knew every alley way and short route in the city.

She’d gotten to know the gabled peaks and window boxes of the Zelverstraat, the gardens and wide boulevards of
the embassy sector.

She’d traveled far south to where the manufacturing district gave way to foul-smelling slaughter houses and brining pits hidden at the very outskirts of the city, where their offal could be sluiced into the swamp at Ketterdam’s edge, and their stink was less likely to be sent wafting over the residential parts of town.

The city had revealed its secrets
to her almost shyly, in flashes of grandeur and squalor.

Now she and Kaz left the rooming houses and street carts behind,
plunging deeper into the busy warehouse district and the area known as the Weft.

Here, the streets and canals were clean and orderly, kept wide for the
transportation of goods and cargo.

They passed fenced-in acres of raw
lumber and quarried stone, closely guarded stockpiles of weapons and
ammunition, huge store houses brimming with cotton, silk, canvas, and furs, and warehouses packed with the carefully weighed bundles of dried jurda leaves from Novyi Zem that would be processed and packaged into tins with bright labels, then shipped out to other markets.