Chapter 11 #2
The words sit between them on the table. Emery looks at the piece of bread in his fingers and thinks about how easy it would be to believe him. How easy it would be to let the words mean what they sound like, to stop examining every kindness for the hook inside it.
He eats the bread. It is good bread. Everything Jivaldi makes is good, and Emery files this away as yet another thing about this compound that is slowly, insidiously convincing him that he belongs here, which he does not, because belonging is a thing that happens to other people and Emery is just passing through the way he has always been passing through.
Bastian drinks his water. He watches Emery, at least some of the time, with unguarded attention, having decided that staring is something he is allowed to do.
There is something in his gaze Emery does not recognize, something that sits beyond desire and beyond assessment and beyond the fond, heated look he has come to expect.
It is quieter than those things. Steadier.
Emery thinks, for a brief moment, that it is jealousy. That Bastian is angry at the men at the brothel for touching him. That the careful, measured calm of his expression is a lid pressed down over something possessive and dark.
He dismisses the idea. It is stupid. Bastian is a crime lord who controls half the Underground's trade routes and commands the loyalty of people who can level buildings with their voices or their shadows.
He does not get jealous over a dancer. The thought is narcissistic and presumptuous and Emery tells himself as much and moves on and does not notice the way Bastian's grip on his cup tightens, just barely, when Emery absently rubs at a red mark on his forearm that a patron left earlier in the evening.
"The books," Emery says, because the silence is getting heavy and heavy silence with Bastian leads to places Emery is not prepared to go tonight. "You brought them to my room."
Bastian does not answer him directly. He sets his cup down and leans back in his chair, the wood creaking under the shift of his weight, and asks: "Which is your favorite?"
"Depends on my mood," Emery says. "And how miserable my day has been."
Bastian hums. The sound is low and brief and carries no power behind it, just a man thinking, but Emery feels it in his sternum anyway, because his body has learned to respond to the vibrations of Bastian's voice and the learning was not something he consented to.
"It is strange," Bastian says, "for such a voracious reader to own such a small collection."
Emery fixes him with a look. He knows Bastian is not being deliberately cruel.
He knows the observation is honest. But the honesty of it is what makes it sting, because Bastian is asking a question he already knows the answer to and the fact that he is asking it anyway means he wants Emery to say it out loud, and saying it out loud is different from knowing it privately.
"I have to choose whether to buy books or food," Emery says. His voice is flat and precise. "Maybe that is not the type of survival choice that you ever have to make."
Bastian does not bristle. He does not defend himself. He nods, slowly, with unhurried gravity, accepting the truth of something without qualification or excuse.
"I want for little," he says. "I have built that for myself, and I fill my library as I please.
I will not pretend I know what it is to choose between sustenance and the thing that sustains you in a different way.
" He pauses. His dark eyes hold Emery's across the table.
"All of the people in my crew are capable of having a roof over their head, food in their stomach, and still not be scraping by. "
The words land with the quiet weight of something that means more than its surface. Emery cannot decide whether Bastian is offering him a job or offering him a life, and the distinction between those two things has never mattered more than it does right now.
"Is this your recruitment speech?" Emery asks.
Bastian laughs. It is a real laugh, brief and low and unexpected, and it does something to his face that Emery has never seen before.
It softens it. Opens it. For a moment the most feared man in the Underground is just a man, the kind of person Emery could have met in a bookshop in another version of things and liked without complication.
He drinks his water. He does not explicitly deny it.
The silence that follows is not empty. Emery finishes his bread and starts on the cheese and thinks about roofs and food and libraries and the terrifying possibility of a life that is not scraping by.
He has never had that. He does not know what it looks from the inside.
He has seen it from the outside, walked through the homes of dead marks, seen the shelves full of books and the pantries full of food and the beds with sheets that were not threadbare, but knowing what a thing looks and knowing what it feels are separated by a distance that cannot be crossed with coin alone.
Bastian finishes his water. He stands, and the movement is unhurried, the kind of standing up that belongs to a man leaving but in no rush to be gone.
He picks up his cup and carries it to the basin and sets it beside the pitcher, and on his way past Emery he pauses.
His hand comes to rest on the back of Emery's neck, warm and gentle, the thumb tracing a single line along the ridge of his spine, and the touch lasts exactly long enough for Emery's eyes to close and his breath to catch and his entire body to lean, just barely, into the warmth before Bastian lifts his hand and continues walking.
"Get some rest," Bastian says from the doorway. "Tomorrow will be long."
Then he is gone, and Emery is alone in the kitchen with the coals and the herbs and the ghost of a touch on the back of his neck that he can still feel.