How Villains Are Made - Kaz Brekker

Chapter Eight

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Kaz seemed to know what he was doing, standing nearby when Maud wasn't working in a crowded place, because Per Haskell seemed less and less interested in the girl the more than Kaz seemed to simply show up whenever she was there. Nobody else seemed to notice, because he was there, but he wasn't close, he was just blending in with the shadows like the spider he had been before his knee got hurt.

But still, Kaz needed to work through a lot of things as head of the club and right-hand of a very lazy leader of a gang, and that meant that he was locked away in his office (which he refused to call a 'bedroom' more than he needed to) with Inej sometimes showing and exchanging no more than a few sentences with him.

But she knew something was different.

Inej always noticed.

Before, she would end up hanging around, feeding the birds and he would just let her, because she wouldn't get in the way of his work, but now he seemed eager to be alone and more restless than usual with dark circles around his eyes and working more than appropriate. And she understood when Kaz called her up to his office one morning during breakfast.

Everybody had been eating and lounging around in the Slat when one of the new recruits came to give her the warning that Kaz wanted to talk to her upstairs and the first reaction that Per Haskell had to it wasn't his usual curiosity; he was looking at Maud, who seemed suddenly overly-focused on her porridge.

Something had happened and it involved them three.

"Did he say what it was about?" she asked the recruit, frowning.

"No, just told you to go up as soon as you could," the boy said.

She had asked that for Per Haskell's sake, because she was very aware that Kaz would never explain anything. He barely explained himself to her, let alone someone so lowly in the system. Per Haskell once more looked at Maud, who gently took a spoon to her mouth and said nothing and didn't look at Jesper when he started talking to her, just nodded in acknowledgment that he was talking to her.

Inej got up and tightened her vest up before making her way towards the stairs. She did not glance back at anyone on her way up, but she did hear Jesper's voice stopping slowly as if he had just noticed Maddie wasn't paying attention to him at all.

Knocking at Kaz's office door, she waited for the small voice from the other side of the door to answer before she walked in. She closed the door behind her once she was inside.

"Good morning," she said.

"I have a job for you," he announced, ignoring her greeting.

Inej raised her eyebrows as she watched Kaz for a second. He had been skipping sleep and meals again, that much was clear by the state of disarray that he found himself in at that moment – he probably didn't say 'good morning' because to him it was still night or something similarly worrisome.

"Kaz, did you sleep?" she asked.

"I heard about this girl that just got here. A Grisha," he continued saying, ignoring her completely once more. Inej shifted her weight, uncomfortable as he wrote something on a piece of paper. "You need to talk to her and get her away from the Dime Lion's turf. If you go right now, you might change her mind before tonight," he offered her the piece of paper, shaking it in the air as his eyes followed his other hand while he put his pen in its place. "Listen, she's about to sign up to work in his brothel, I don't know in which area of it – whatever it is, we need her here."