the discourse about the ages being removed from six of crows is about to drive me up a wall
cause i've seen a lot of people saying it's a good thing bc "their ages never made sense, they were too mature and doing things teenagers couldn't/wouldn't do"
and man, it's almost like that's the fucking point??? it's almost like soc is a series about a group of deeply traumatized kids who have gone through things no one their age should have to and have been forced to mature way faster than they should have as a result of their circumstances.
"oh but there's no way kaz could command that kind of respect and fear as a 17-year-old" bro he's fucking unhinged. people have tried to underestimate him bc of his age. he made them regret it.
"oh but thinking about inej being a sex slave at such a young age makes me feel icky :/" IT'S SUPPOSED TO. her backstory is not supposed to make you feel good or be comfortable to read about.
and that's not even getting into all the times in the series the crows do, in fact, act like teenagers despite their circumstances. like the way they acted around colm?? kaz and jesper getting into that petty fight and then instantly backing down like kicked puppies when colm scolded them? c'mon.
i just think that saying the crows' ages don't make sense is missing a lot of what six of crows is about.
headcanon that whenever the crows all meet up they have an unspoken game of who can pickpocket the most from each other without getting caught. when it’s time to say goodbye they all gather around and hand out what they got back to whoever they got it from
Summary: A client at the Crow Club comes to Kaz with a proposition about his heartrender. When he refuses to back off, Kaz takes matters into his own hands. Warnings: established relationship, heartrender!reader, blood, killing, Kaz's pov, his trauma, angst, implied smut, bit of canon divergence, yearning, fluff, talks of prostitution, effects of war and lack of Grisha rights.
The man arrived on a Thursday, though Kaz wouldn't remember the day later. He would only remember the way the man's eyes had tracked you across the room, the particular quality of his attention instead of the usual Barrel lechery and the casual assessment of a gambler appreciating a pretty barmaid. Kaz's neck prickled with an instinct he'd learned to trust long ago.
You were working the bar, as you did when there were no heists and planning. The Crow Club was crowded, the air thick with smoke, the clink of glasses and the low murmur of gamblers sizing up their odds. Kaz was at his usual table, dealing cards to a group of minor merchants who were losing money with the desperate cheerfulness of men who couldn't afford to lose it. His hands moved through the shuffle mechanically, but his eyes were on the stranger at the bar.
The man was in his forties, expensively dressed in the understated way of someone who had money but didn't feel the need to advertise it. Dark hair, slightly graying at the temples. A face that might have been handsome once, before drink or dissolution had softened it. He ordered a whiskey and watched you pour.
When you handed him the glass, the man's hand closed over yours.
It was brief, just a moment of contact, the kind of incidental touch that happened a hundred times a night in a crowded gambling den. But Kaz saw the way the man's eyes widened slightly, the way his grip lingered a beat too long before releasing. He saw the way you stiffened, your professional smile flickering. The man must've been an amplifier and had sensed you being Grisha. Kaz internally cursed whatever saints you prayed to for protection for doing a lousy job.
He saw the way the man leaned forward and asked you a question, his voice too low to carry across the room.
You answered. Your expression didn't change, you were too well-trained for that, but Kaz saw the way your shoulders squared, the way your chin lifted. Whatever the man had asked, you'd given him an answer he hadn't expected.
Then the man turned and began making his way across the room toward Kaz's table.
"Are you the boss?" the man asked, stopping beside Kaz's chair. His accent was Kerch, educated, the accent of the mercant class rather than the Barrel. Up close, Kaz could see the faint sheen of sweat on his brow, the slight dilation of his pupils. Not drunk but not entirely sober either.
Kaz finished dealing the hand before he looked up. "Owner. If you have a complaint about the service, take it up with the bar manager."
"No complaint. A business proposition." The man pulled out the empty chair across from Kaz and sat down without being invited. The merchants at the table exchanged uneasy glances. "I'd like to discuss it privately."
"I'm in the middle of a game."
"It's important."
Kaz studied him for a long moment. The man's heartbeat was elevated, Kaz couldn't hear it the way you could but he could see it in the pulse at his throat, the slight flush on his cheeks. Arousal, Kaz thought. Not anger or fear. Arousal.
"Take over," Kaz said to the Dreg standing guard near the wall. He rose from his chair, his cane clicking against the floorboards. "You have two minutes. Speak."
The man smiled. It was a confident smile, the smile of someone accustomed to getting what he wanted. "The Heartrender at the bar. I'd like to buy a night with her."
The room didn't go quiet but for Kaz, the world narrowed to a single point of pure, cold fury.
"I don't run whores," he answered. "My employees aren't for sale. If you're looking for that kind of entertainment, there are brothels on West Stave."
"I've been to the brothels. They don't have what I want." The man leaned forward, lowering his voice. "I'm willing to pay any price. Name your figure. I have the money."
"The answer is no."
"Double your highest earner. Triple it. I don't care."
"No."
The man's smile flickered but didn't fade. "You don't understand. I'm not some drunk looking for a quick fuck. I know what she is. I know what she can do." His tongue darted out, wetting his lips. "Heartrenders who work as whores are incredibly rare. They don't need to, they can get money with their power through other jobs, safer jobs. But the things a Heartrender can do to you in bed…" He shook his head, a gesture of something approaching reverence. "It doesn't compare to anything an ordinary human is capable of. The way they can control your body, the way they can make you feel...I've experienced it once. Years ago. I've been looking ever since."
Kaz's hand tightened on the head of his cane. He could feel the crow's beak pressing into his palm through the leather of his glove. "She's under the protection of the Dregs. She has a job. That job doesn't involve clients."
"Every woman has a price."
"Not this one."
"I'm an amplifier." The man said it like a trump card, like a revelation that would change everything. "Do you know what that means? Grisha are drawn to amplifiers. Our presence amplifies their power, makes them feel good. Stronger. More alive. She'd enjoy it. I'd make sure of it." He smiled again, and this time there was something almost confiding in it, man-to-man, as if Kaz were a fellow connoisseur. "It wouldn't just be for me. She'd get pleasure out of it too. More than she's ever felt."
Kaz thought about the first time you'd held his hand without gloves. The way his skin had screamed and his lungs had seized and his mind had flooded with the cold dark water of the harbor. He thought about the months of practice it had taken just to tolerate that simple contact, the years of work to get to where he was now: still damaged, still broken, but able to touch you, able to hold you, able to press himself inside you.
He thought about the way you didn't like to be grabbed suddenly. So he never did, even though brief contacts were easier for him. The way you tensed when you were grasped at a wrist, a remnant of your Grisha training, your first instinct always to break free. He'd learned that early. He'd learned to hold your hand lightly when he pressed his lips to your pulse point, to let you come to him rather than pulling you in.
He thought about the way you gasped when he touched you, the way your eyes fluttered closed, the way you murmured in Ravkan when you were too far gone to remember Kerch. He thought about the sweet torment of watching you for years, unable to touch you, and the transcendent relief of those first seconds of warmth when he'd finally held your hand skin to skin without the waters rising in his mind.
And this man, this sweating, mediocre man, thought he could walk into Kaz's club and buy that. Thought he could pay for the privilege of touching you, of being inside you, of experiencing the pleasure that only you could give. Thought he could use his amplifier's nature to make you enjoy it, as if that made it better instead of infinitely worse.
Kaz felt a rage rise up in him that he had scarcely experienced since he was crawling out of the Reaper's Barge with his brother's bloated body still floating behind his eyes. It was a cold, patient rage, the kind that didn't burn itself out but settled into his bones like ice.
"Some things she doesn't need to know," he said.
The man blinked. "What?"
"Not that she's unaware men like you exist. She knows. She's known since she was old enough to understand what her power meant. She knows that otkazats'ya fetishize Grisha, that they whisper about what it would be like to bed a Heartrender, that they treat her abilities like a commodity to be purchased." Kaz's voice was flat, devoid of inflection. "But she doesn't need her day ruined by hearing this particular proposition. So I'm going to give you one final answer, and then you're going to leave."
"Now wait..."
"No. I'm not interested in your money. I'm not interested in your amplifier nature. I'm not interested in anything about you except your absence from my establishment. If I see you here again, if I hear that you've approached her, if you so much as look in her direction the next time you're on East Stave, I will make you regret it in ways you cannot currently imagine." Kaz leaned forward, and the expression on his face made the man recoil. "Do you understand?"
The man's confident smile had vanished entirely. He opened his mouth, closed it, then pushed back his chair with a scrape of wood on wood. "You're making a mistake. I have connections. I have..."
"You have thirty seconds to get out of my club."
The man went.
Kaz watched him leave, his dark eyes tracking the man's progress through the crowded room and out the door. Then he returned to his card table, picked up the deck, and resumed dealing as if nothing had happened.
Inside him, the cold was still spreading.
He didn't follow immediately. That would have drawn attention. Instead, he finished his shift at the card table, checked in with Anika about the night's take, and made his usual rounds of the club. He stopped at the bar to speak with you, a mundane topic about supply orders, an excuse to hear your voice and reassure himself that you were still there, safe, blissfully unaware of the conversation that had transpired.
"Long night?" you asked, sliding a glass of water across the bar toward him.
"Tolerable." He took the glass but didn't drink. "There was a man earlier. At my table. What did he say to you?"
You shrugged, wiping down the bar with a rag. "The usual. Asked if I was Grisha. I told him I was a Heartrender, that usually makes them back off." You frowned. "This one didn't back off. He just smiled and asked who was in charge."
"What did you tell him?"
"That if he had a complaint, he could speak to you." You looked at him, your gaze sharpening. "Why? What did he want?"
"To lodge a complaint." Kaz set down the glass. "Dealt with. He won't be back."
You studied him for a moment longer, and he knew you were listening to his heartbeat, checking for the lie. But he'd been lying to people for more than a decade, and he knew how to keep his pulse steady even when his mind was on fire.
"All right," you said finally. "I trust you."
The words hit him harder than they should have. I trust you. You'd said them a hundred times before, in a hundred different contexts, but tonight they felt like a blade between his ribs. Because he was about to go behind your back. He was about to do something you wouldn't approve of, something he had no intention of ever telling you about.
He told himself it was for your protection. Some things, you didn't need to know.
The man's name was Emiel Weikamp. Kaz learned that within an hour of leaving the Crow Club, courtesy of a quick visit to the city registrar's office; locked, but locks had never been an obstacle for him, and a few well-placed questions to the night watchman who patrolled the Financial District. Weikamp was a minor investor, the third son of a mercant family, wealthy enough to afford his vices but not important enough for anyone to miss him immediately.
He lived in a modest townhouse on the Geldstraat, a neighborhood of comfortable respectability that housed the city's middle-tier merchants and their families. The townhouse had a side entrance for servants, and a window on the second floor that had been left slightly ajar.
Kaz let himself in. He was delighted to discover that no servants actually lived there. It seemed Weikamp could only afford to hire them by day.
Weikamp was asleep in his bedroom, sprawled across silk sheets that cost more than most Barrel residents earned in a year. He was still wearing his clothes from the club, his cravat loosened, his shoes kicked off onto the floor. The room smelled of whiskey and stale cologne.
Kaz stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching him breathe.
He could have killed him then. It would have been easy, a pillow over the face, a knife across the throat, a dozen different methods that would leave no trace and no witnesses. But Kaz didn't want easy. He wanted Weikamp to understand. He wanted him to feel every moment of what was happening to him with perfect clarity, without the numbing fog of alcohol or sleep.
So he waited. He sat in the armchair in the corner of the bedroom, his cane resting across his knees, and watched the slow rise and fall of Weikamp's chest. The hours passed. The sky outside the window lightened from black to gray to pale gold. The bells of the Church of Barter tolled the dawn.
Weikamp woke just after seven, groaning, his hand pressed to his forehead. "Ghezen," he muttered. "What did I..."
"Good morning."
Weikamp's head snapped up. He saw Kaz sitting in the corner, still in his dark suit, his crow-headed cane gleaming dully in the morning light. His face went white.
"What...how did you..."
"You made a business proposition last night." Kaz's voice was calm, conversational. "I declined. But I've been thinking about it, and I realized there was more to discuss."
"I...look, if this is about the money, I can..."
"It's not about the money." Kaz rose from the chair, his cane tapping against the hardwood floor. "It's about what you said. About Heartrenders. What they can do. How it doesn't compare to anything an ordinary human is capable of."
Weikamp was scrambling backward on the bed, his eyes wide with the beginnings of terror. "I didn't mean any offense. I was drunk. I wasn't thinking..."
"You were thinking very clearly. You told me you've experienced it once before. You told me you've been looking ever since." Kaz stopped at the foot of the bed. "I want to know about the first one. The Heartrender you paid. How did you find her?"
"I don't...it was years ago, I don't remember..."
Kaz moved faster than Weikamp could track. The crow's head of his cane came down on the man's right hand with a sound like snapping kindling. Weikamp screamed.
"Let me be clearer," Kaz said, as the man cradled his shattered fingers against his chest. "I'm not asking because I'm curious. I'm asking because I want to know exactly what you did to her. And I want you to know, before you answer, that you're not leaving this room alive. The only variable is how long it takes you to die."
Weikamp was crying now, tears streaming down his face, his breath coming in harsh, hitching gasps. "Please. Please, I have money. I can pay you. Whatever you want."
"Nothing you have that I want." Kaz circled the bed, his cane leaving small indentations in the carpet. "Tell me about the Heartrender. The first one."
"I don't...she was...In Belendt. Years ago. Right after the Ravkan civil war. She was a refugee." Weikamp words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other. "I paid for a night. I didn't hurt her. I didn't force her. She agreed to it."
"She agreed to it because she needed the money. Because war had left no options for Grisha and she was forced into prostitution." Kaz's voice was still calm, still conversational. "And you used her. You paid for her body and her power, and you've been chasing that experience ever since. Tonight, you thought a girl barely half your age would do."
"It wasn't like that..."
"What was it like, then?"
Weikamp opened his mouth, but no words came out. His broken hand was swelling, the fingers bent at unnatural angles. His face was gray with pain and terror.
Kaz reached into his sleeve and withdrew one of the slim knives he always kept concealed there. The blade was very sharp and thin, designed to slip between ribs and find hearts with minimal resistance.
"I want you to understand something," Kaz said. "The Heartrender at the Crow Club, the one you wanted to buy, is not a whore. She is not a commodity. She is not an experience for you to purchase and relive and chase for the rest of your miserable life. She is a person. A person I have known for years. A person I have watched, wanted and waited for. A person who held my hand and kissed my hair when I couldn't bear to be touched anywhere else. A person who stayed when anyone else would have left."
He pressed the tip of the knife against Weikamp's throat, just hard enough to dimple the skin.
"I know exactly how good a Heartrender can feel. I know it better than you ever will. But I also know the years of work it took to get there. The pain, the patience. The trust she gave me when I didn't deserve it. And you..." Kaz's voice dropped to a whisper. "You thought you could walk into my club and buy that. With money. As if what she gives me could be purchased."
"I didn't know," Weikamp sobbed. "I didn't know she was yours."
"Not the point." Kaz withdrew the knife and stepped back. "The point is that she's not anyone's. She's not a thing to be owned or bought or sold. But you've spent your entire life treating Grisha like objects, like experiences to be consumed. You saw a Heartrender and your first thought was how to get her into your bed. Not who she was. Not what she wanted. Just what she could do for you."
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I swear..."
"I believe you're sorry you got caught. I believe you're sorry you're about to die. But you're not sorry for what you did, and you wouldn't hesitate to do it again if you had the chance." Kaz looked at him with something akin to pity, but Dirtyhands was not capable of pity anymore. "You said you're an amplifier. That your presence makes Grisha feel good. That she'd enjoy it."
Weikamp didn't answer. His breath was coming in short, panicked gasps.
"I want you to know that I don't care." Kaz raised the crow-headed cane. "I don't care what your nature is. I don't care what you could make her feel. She feels enough with me. She feels everything with me. And you will never touch her. You will never look at her. You will never think about her again after the next five minutes."
The cane came down.
He broke the other hand first, methodically, each finger snapping under the silver crow's beak. He shoved Weikamp's own handkerchief in his mouth so he could scream until his voice gave out without alerting the neighboring houses. Then Kaz moved to the knees, shattering each one with the same cold precision, leaving the man crumpled on the floor in a heap of shattered bones and animal terror.
He saved the throat for last.
The slim knife did its work cleanly, a single swift cut that opened Weikamp's neck from ear to ear. The blood came fast, a dark tide spreading across the expensive carpet, and Weikamp's eyes went wide and glassy as he drowned in it.
Kaz watched until the body stopped twitching. Then he cleaned his knife on the silk sheets, tucked it back into his sleeve, and walked out the servants' entrance into the pale morning light.
He didn't feel satisfaction. He didn't feel guilt. He felt only the cold, patient rage that had settled into his bones the moment Weikamp had smiled and said "I'd like to buy a night with the Heartrender". The rage was still there, even now, even after. It might always be there.
But you were safe. You were still at the Slat, probably still asleep. You would wake up in an hour or two and go about your day, and you would never know what had happened in this quiet townhouse on the Geldstraat.
Some things, you didn't need to know.
Kaz walked back to the Barrel as the city woke around him, his cane tapping a steady rhythm on the cobblestones. The morning fog was lifting. The ships in the harbor were sounding their horns. In the distance, a bell was tolling the hour.
He had blood on his cuffs and a dead man's screams still echoing in his ears, but his hands were steady and his mind was clear. He had done what needed to be done. And tonight, when he went to your room and kissed your hair and held your hand in the darkness, you would ask him about his day, and he would tell you it was fine. Nothing unusual, just business.
You would believe him. That was both the worst and the best part.
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