Crooked Kingdom

The crew's plan comes together in layers. Having already traded Van Eck's pregnant wife Alys for Inej's freedom, Kaz and the others discover that merchant Jan Van Eck has allied with rival gang boss Pekka Rollins, deputizing every gang in the Barrel against them and cutting off their escape routes. Kaz answers with his most audacious con yet: he stages a public auction for the indenture of Kuwei Yul-Bo, the Shu Grisha who can produce (and, it turns out, potentially cure) jurda parem, drawing bids from Fjerdan, Ravkan, Shu, and Zemeni delegations. He disguises Grisha allies as members of Ketterdam's secretive Council of Tides, who publicly accuse Van Eck of rigging the auction by secretly bankrolling the Shu delegation. The Merchant Council turns on Van Eck, convinced he has swindled them, when in fact the money has been funneled to Kaz's crew all along. Van Eck is arrested and financially and socially ruined.

In the chaos of the job, Kuwei's death is faked so he can be smuggled out of the city with the Ravkan delegation to search for an antidote to jurda parem, freeing him from being anyone's weapon. The victory comes at a steep cost: Matthias Helvar is shot by a young drüskelle recruit during the fighting and dies from the wound, a loss that devastates Nina, who has also just discovered she has developed an eerie new ability to animate and control the dead, apparently a side effect of surviving withdrawal from jurda parem. Kaz delivers his own final blow to Pekka Rollins, convincing him through a cruel bluff that his estranged son has been buried alive; Pekka abandons his criminal empire in Ketterdam and leaves the city to search for the boy, clearing the way for the crew's enemies to fall.

With Van Eck disgraced and gone, his son Wylan inherits the family's properties and fortune, stepping into legitimate business with Jesper staying on to help him manage it while also committing to train with a Fabrikator to properly develop his Grisha powers. Jesper's father, Colm, who had come to the city over his son's gambling debts, is able to return home reassured that Jesper's finances and life are, for once, in order.

In the closing chapters, Kaz tracks down Inej's long-lost parents with help from the privateer Sturmhond and brings them to Ketterdam to reunite with her. The real Council of Tides, aware that their identity was impersonated during the auction scheme, makes it clear to Kaz that they are watching him. Inej, newly wealthy and free, makes her first move against the Ketterdam slave trade by directly threatening Pekka's remaining interests in it, and sets out to captain her own ship, hunting slavers, with Kaz having arranged the vessel for her. The book ends with Kaz and Inej acknowledging the bond between them, Kaz managing, for the first time, to let her touch him without being overwhelmed by his old trauma, even as both know her path will keep pulling her away from Ketterdam and him.