Chapter 10 #2
Emery asks them if they come here often.
Brennan says they have been here a few times looking for someone.
A dancer. Someone who was recommended. Emery tilts his head and says that sounds very specific, and Brennan laughs and says their boss has specific tastes.
Emery files the word boss away and lets the silence after it breathe, because silence after a useful word is a net, and if you hold it open long enough, people swim into it on their own.
Royce is watching him. Not with suspicion, not yet, but with the careful attention of having been around enough pretty faces to know that beauty is its own kind of weapon.
Emery meets his eyes and holds them for one beat longer than necessary, then drops his gaze with a smile that suggests shyness rather than strategy, and watches the tension in Royce's shoulders ease by a fraction.
He is repulsed.
The revulsion is not new, but the intensity of it is.
He has done this before, many times, more times than he can count, in establishments exactly this kind with men exactly this breed, and the revulsion has always been manageable, a background hum that he could acknowledge and set aside the way you set aside a headache when there is work to be done.
But tonight it sits higher in his throat, closer to the surface, and every time Brennan's thick fingers graze his skin Emery's body recoils in a way that requires active effort to suppress.
He thinks about Bastian's touch, careful, deliberate, always preceded by a pause that is almost a question, and the comparison makes the hands currently on him feel invasive in a way they never used to.
He is secretly repulsed to be letting men who are not Bastian touch him again, and the secrecy is important because the repulsion is a liability and liabilities get you killed.
The first night ends without incident. Emery charms them to the door and watches them leave and stands in the Hollow's entrance for a long moment after the curtain falls closed, breathing in the incense-heavy air and letting his smile fall away from between his teeth. His jaw aches from the clenching.
Hask materializes beside him. Not literally, though with whatever Hask is he can never be entirely sure, but with the silent, unhurried approach of having watched the entire exchange and having opinions he is not yet willing to voice.
"That's them," Emery says. He does not look at Hask. He is looking at the curtain and the dark beyond it and trying to get the feeling of Brennan's fingers off his wrist.
Hask says nothing for a moment. Then: "You look like you need a bath."
"I always need a bath after work."
"That's not what I meant."
Emery turns to him. Hask's pale eyes are visible above the half-mask, and there is something in them that is almost gentle, though the word seems wrong for a man who can pull the warmth from a body through tendrils of living shadow.
It is not gentleness. It is recognition, the understanding of having watched Emery perform for three nights and knowing the cost of the performance in a way that most people would not.
Emery does not know what to do with that, so he does what he always does with things he does not know what to do with. He ignores it.
"Same time tomorrow," he says, and goes to take his bath.
The second night is worse.
Brennan and Royce arrive earlier, already a drink in from wherever they have come from, and their boldness has compounded overnight the way interest does in a lender's ledger.
The reservations of the first evening have been replaced by the easy familiarity of men who have decided that Emery belongs to them, not officially, not yet, but in the way that men in the Underground decide things belong to them, which is to say they put their hands on it and wait to see if anyone stops them.
No one stops them.
Emery lets them touch him. He lets Brennan's hand settle on his lower back and stay there, heavy and proprietary.
He lets Royce's fingers trace the shell of his ear when he leans in to hear something Emery is saying.
He lets them pull him closer on the booth until he is wedged between them, their body heat pressing in from both sides, their breath on his neck, and his skin is screaming but his face is serene because that is the job and he has always been good at the job.
He is so good at the job. He has been good at this for so long that the goodness has become a kind of prison, a cage built from his own competence that he cannot escape because escaping would mean admitting that the thing he is best at is the thing that is slowly hollowing him out.
He redirects their hands when they wander too far.
Moves a wrist when it drifts toward his thigh.
Angles his body when a palm slides too low on his hip.
He does it with the smoothness of long practice, making the redirection feel more invitation than refusal, and each time Brennan or Royce reaches for him again he lets them believe they are getting closer to something he has no intention of giving.
The drinks help. Not his drinks, he is nursing the same cup of watered wine he has been nursing for an hour, but theirs.
Brennan is on his fourth ale and Royce is working through something amber and sharp-smelling, and the alcohol is doing what alcohol always does to men who want things: it makes them generous with their words and careless with their secrets.
Emery asks them about their work. He does it the way you ask a man about himself when you want him to feel important: with wide eyes and parted lips and the kind of breathless curiosity that suggests his world is very small and their world is very large and would they please tell him more about it.
It is insulting, how well it works. It is always insulting, and the insult is directed at both parties, at the men for being so easily manipulated and at Emery for knowing exactly how to do it.
Brennan talks about shipments. Supply routes through the lower tunnels that have been disrupted by Bastian's people, necessitating detours that cost time and money.
Royce talks about territory, about the encroachment that has been squeezing their boss's operations for the better part of a year, though he is more careful with his words and Emery has to read between them.
Emery asks about the boss. Not directly, never directly, but in the way that a curious, pretty dancer might ask about the person who employs two strong, impressive men such as themselves.
What is he like? Does he treat them well?
They seem so loyal. It must be nice to work for someone who inspires that kind of dedication.
Brennan preens. Royce's eyes narrow a fraction, but the flattery and the ale smooth the suspicion before it can take root.
They ask him to take both of them to a room.
They say it the way men say things they have been thinking about all night and have finally drunk enough to voice: too eager, too loud, practically salivating about it, and the image they are constructing with their words, both of them, at the same time, and him between them, hits Emery with a cold that moves through his chest and settles in his stomach and he reminds himself, with the detached precision of talking himself down from a ledge, that he has to do this to get to Sander.
That the revulsion is a luxury he cannot afford. That he has done worse for less.
He has done worse for less. He has. The words are true and they are also the oldest lie he tells himself, the one he reaches for every time his body recoils from something his circumstances require, and the lie is wearing thin.
The thread-count of it is not what it used to be.
He can see through it now, to the thing underneath, which is the simple and devastating fact that he does not want to be touched this way anymore and the not-wanting is not a weakness but a wound, and the wound has been there for a very long time, and Bastian did not create it but has made it impossible to ignore.
He redirects them. Smiles. Asks them why they do not invite him to meet their boss. Their boss sounds in need of stress relief and Emery is so good at that. They could all share him.
The words taste of ash in his mouth. He says them with the easy, conspiratorial warmth of offering a gift, and the men eat it up because of course they do, because men who want are always hungry and Emery has spent years learning exactly what to feed them.
Brennan is amenable immediately, the idea of presenting their boss with a prize appealing to whatever passes for his ambition.
Royce considers it longer, the calculation visible behind his eyes, the risk versus the reward, the question of whether their boss will be pleased or angry, the secondary question of whether the dancer is too good to be true.
Emery watches Royce think and feels the moment the man's suspicion is outweighed by his desire, because the desire always wins.
It always wins with men who want. That is the fulcrum on which Emery's entire skill set balances: the reliable, exploitable truth that wanting makes people stupid.
"We'll need to run it by him first," Royce says.
Emery smiles. "I'll be here whenever you're ready."
He sees them off at the curtain with a lingering touch on each of their arms and the kind of parting look that promises more than it delivers, and then the curtain falls and they are gone and he stands there for a long moment with his hands at his sides and the feeling of their fingerprints all over him in a film he cannot wash off.
He finds Hask.
Hask is sitting at a nearby table with a drink in one hand and a dagger in the other. The dagger's point is buried in the tabletop and he has been spinning it in slow rotations, the blade carving a small, precise circle in the dark wood, and he only stops when Emery says, "I've got them."