Chapter 4 #3
"Be careful," Doss says, and the worry in his face is genuine, which makes it one of the only genuine things Emery has received from another person this week that didn't come from a man he's supposed to kill.
He watches Doss leave. He stands on the bridge for a long moment with the wind from the gorge pulling at his hair and the distant murmur of the Grith below.
He keeps coming back to the books.
It shouldn't matter. They are objects. Paper and ink and binding, replaceable in theory if not in practice.
He has lost things before. He has lost rooms and belongings and people, such as they were, and he has always moved on because moving on is the only skill that has never failed him.
But the books were different. The books were not things he was given or things he earned or things that came with conditions.
They were things he found, things he chose, things he read in the dark by lamplight while the world outside his door did what it always did and he was, for those few hours, somewhere else.
He breathes. He lets it go, because holding onto it won't bring them back and won't keep him alive.
He has no room, no belongings, no guild protection, and a client who wants him dead or at least doesn't care if he ends up that way.
He is a master assassin, but he is built for stealth and opportunity, not open fights with hired goons in corridors.
He needs a roof and he needs an alibi and he needs time to figure out what the hell he's doing.
He goes back to the Velvet Hollow.
Vella does not ask questions. This is one of the things Emery has come to appreciate about her, this economy of curiosity she practices with everyone who walks through her door.
She sees him standing in the doorway in his street clothes with no bag and no belongings and the expression that comes with running out of places to go, and she gives him his old room and his old attire and a plate of food without requiring an explanation.
She has seen this before. The Hollow is, among other things, a place where people go when everywhere else has shut its doors.
He eats sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands shaking slightly, which he attributes to hunger and not to the slow-building realization that his entire life has narrowed to two options, neither of which he likes.
He can kill Bastian Kane and return the token to a guild that can no longer protect him from a client that wants him dead.
Or he can not kill Bastian Kane and lose his record, his livelihood, and probably his life, in roughly that order.
There is a third option, which is to run.
Leave the Maw entirely. Climb up through the gorge levels to the Upper City and the bridges and the sunlit world above and walk away from all of it: the guild, the client, the contract, the man with the dark skin and the white hair whose hands he can still feel on his body.
He could do it. He has no possessions, no ties, nothing holding him here except a token in his pocket and a record he's too stubborn to break.
He does not seriously consider it. Running means admitting that this is too much for him, and Emery has never in his life admitted that anything was too much for him. It is, depending on your perspective, either his greatest strength or his most fatal flaw.
He puts on the bangles. He puts on the trousers. He goes downstairs and dances.
The Hollow takes him back the way the Hollow takes back everyone: without judgment, without questions, with the quiet, professional warmth of a place that has seen every kind of desperation and has learned to accommodate all of them.
Emery dances and smiles and lets patrons touch him and thinks about books he will never read again and a man whose hands were warm and whose voice made his bones hum.
Two days pass.
The routine is the same as before. Dance, endure, bathe, eat, read.
Except he has no books now, so the reading is gone, and the absence of it leaves a hole in his evenings that nothing else fills.
He lies in bed and stares at the ceiling and his hands feel wrong without pages under them.
He has been reading himself to sleep every night for as long as he can remember, the weight of a book on his chest, the lamp guttering low, the words carrying him somewhere else before the dark closed in. Without it the dark just closes in.
He finds himself reciting Guille from memory.
The lines he knows by heart, which are more than he thought.
The heart asks first for beauty, then for proof that beauty is not merely what it seems. He mouths the words silently into his pillow and hates himself for it because the words belong to a dead poet and the memory of hearing them in Bastian's voice is so vivid he can feel the phantom warmth of the man's chest against his back.
He thinks about Bastian's thumb on his lip.
He thinks about Brynn saying he doesn't keep a lover.
He thinks about what it means that a man who doesn't keep lovers kissed him softly after sex and paused at the door to kiss him again.
He thinks about the knife on the floor and the fact that Bastian found it and tossed it aside and kept going, and what that says about a man's confidence or his recklessness or his trust, and whether there is a difference between the three.
He doesn't think about why he didn't reach for the blade himself. He doesn't think about it because thinking about it means answering a question he's not ready to answer.
During the days he sleeps in fits and wakes with his heart pounding and his hand reaching for a weapon.
He eats what the cook leaves for him. He maps the corridors around the Hollow again, checking exits, noting changes, looking for signs that someone is watching the building from outside.
The habits that have kept him alive this long run underneath everything else, underneath the dancing and the smiling and the performance, a constant quiet hum of where is the door, where is the blade, who is behind me.
On the second evening, Kelsi catches his arm near the bar. Her eyes are bright and she is visibly excited, and Emery's chest does something stupid and hopeful before his brain can intervene.
"Two men have been asking for you," she says. "They came in yesterday and again tonight. They're asking for Desi."
His first thought is Bastian, and the warmth that moves through him at the idea is something he does not want to look at directly.
The thought of Bastian coming back for him, of Bastian sending someone to find him, of being wanted enough to be looked for, is a feeling so unfamiliar that it takes him a moment to identify it. It feels, improbably, close to hope.
But something is wrong. The feeling curdles almost immediately, souring in his gut. Bastian wouldn't send two men to ask around for a dancer by name. Bastian, if he wanted to find someone, would come himself.
Emery moves to the edge of the curtain that separates the back corridor from the main floor and peeks through.
Two men are standing near the entrance talking to Vella.
They are large and muscular, wearing the functional clothes and eager calluses of men who have been hired to do something unpleasant and are looking forward to it.
They don't belong in the Velvet Hollow and they know it and they don't care.
They are asking Vella something and she is listening with the serene patience of a woman who has never once been intimidated by a man in her own establishment.
Vella calls over one of the other dancers and instructs her to show the men to a room. The girl leads them away from the entrance, chattering brightly about drinks and preferences, and the men follow because they are men and a pretty girl is leading them and they are, for the moment, distracted.
Vella turns. Her eyes find Emery's across the room, steady and unhurried, and the look on her face says everything it needs to without a single word. She has seen men this way before. She knows what they are looking for. She knows they are looking for him.
Emery does not go to his room. He slips through the back corridor to the servants' passage, the narrow exit he mapped his first week here, and pushes through the door into the alley behind the Hollow.
The alley is dark and cold and smells of damp stone and rotting produce from the kitchen refuse.
His feet are bare. His chest is bare. He is wearing dancer's trousers and bangles and a knife strapped to his thigh and nothing else, and the stone under his feet is rough and frigid and he moves down the alley in silence because silence is the one thing he has always been good at.
He barely makes it to the end.
The grip that catches his bicep is crushing.
A hand, large and rough and viced around his arm with enough force to grind the bone.
Emery reacts without thinking, years of training compressing into a single fluid response: he drops his weight, twists into the grip to break the angle, and drives his elbow into the ribs of the man holding him.
The grip loosens for half a second. He reaches for the knife on his thigh.
Another hand catches his wrist. A third grabs his hair.
There are more of them than he accounted for, three or four, he can't tell in the dark, and they are bigger than he is and they knew he would run and they were waiting.
One of them wrenches his arm behind his back.
Another pulls the knife from his garter.
He kicks, connects with something soft that produces a grunt, but someone catches his ankle and then both feet are off the ground and a bag is pulled over his head and the world goes dark.