Nina is sound asleep still — she usually sleeps in late — and most of all she is safely unaware of Matthias' fucked up dream.

It was a dream, just a dream, he scolds himself, but he feels his cheeks heat up all the same. The thing is, it is just a dream — he has no feeling whatsoever for the person that occupied his sleeping moments — but he still feels deadly ashamed.

It was a wet dream, that is.

He is a whole adult, fiancé to the most gorgeous woman alive, and he just had a fucking wet dream about… Well, about the least person he could have ever imagined to have such a dream about.

The dream blurs and fades in the back of his mind the more he wakes from it, but some bits of it are still clear as water in his mind: being shoved against a wall by a (way smaller) lithe body, a demjin crowding him like a predator and… And kissing him.

Matthias just dreamt about Kaz Brekker, Dirtyhands, the bastard of the Barrel — the demjin, that is — kissing him six ways to Sunday like it was the only thing he wished to be doing. Matthias knows it's just a dream — but his dreams are usually crowded with Nina, still in the shape of a witch in some, but mostly he has very good, generous dreams about her. His nightmares evoke white wolves calling for him and a young boy shooting him — missing vital points just by an inch, for the relief of a sobbing Nina.

Ever since he is allowed to live free of all his ghosts — to live like a person rather than a soldier, rather than a criminal — he has mostly dreamt peaceful dreams though.

Until tonight.

Perhaps it's because they are visiting Ketterdam in less than a week to marry there with all their friends present, after so many years of having settled in the Southern Colonies. Perhaps he got scared, and it brought back some traumas and unwanted memories. Perhaps he ate too much the previous evening — Nina says that a heavy stomach brings on heavy thoughts in the night.

The dream had begun as a nightmare — he was running on thin ice and he felt stuck in place as the drüskelle approached him, like hunters circling their prey. He hadn't even had time to hear the shot, that his chest had been pierced through and the ice had cracked open on an endless pit.

At the end of the pit, Matthias had found himself back in Ketterdam, in the room where he had first met the rest of what now are his best friends, and at the time had been people he was ready to kill to have his grace back. How naive and stupid he had been. How grateful he is for what an impossible heist against his whole country had brought to him.

But the dream was not kind and melancholic of the good, old times. There had been Kaz, furious and threatening like he had appeared to Matthias the first times — and then there had been Kaz kissing him. It had been a heated, biting kiss, all teeth and tongues and bodies pressed close, until it had built and built and Matthias had moaned for Djel and… And then he woke up.

He woke up breathing heavily in his bed, that's where he is now, ashamed and confused and startled. Nina stirs besides him, a smile stretching on her lips when she throws an arm over and feels that Matthias is still in bed.

"M'ning," she mumbles, opening a deep, green eye just a bit, snuggling closer to him.

He considers not telling her. What if she thinks of him as a dirty, fucked up cheater? What if she leaves him and tells him to go and kiss Brekker, for all she cares? But he knows that's not Nina. He knows she knows him — deeply, lovingly, adoringly — and that he is safe telling her about his… His lustful dreamt kiss about Kaz Brekker of all people, apparently.

"You won't believe what I dreamt," he says.