Chapter 12 #3
His feet move on the stone and then on the rug, the bearskin thick and warm beneath his bare soles, and he comes to stand beside where Bastian is sitting on the floor.
Bastian does not reach for him. He turns back to the fire, his profile lit in amber and shadow, and the ease of the movement, the lack of urgency, the complete absence of pressure, is the thing that undoes Emery more than anything else.
Bastian has left the next move in his hands, the way he always leaves the next move in his hands, and the consistency of this is either the most calculated manipulation Emery has ever encountered or the most honest act of care, and he cannot tell the difference anymore.
"Are you nervous about the upcoming job?" Bastian asks.
The question is casual and pragmatic. It gives Emery something to hold onto that is not the devastating softness of the expression Bastian just aimed at him, and Emery recognizes the mercy of it, the deliberate choice to offer a safe topic when an unsafe one is sitting right there between them, close enough to touch.
Emery does not answer the question. He asks a different one. "What do you stand to gain from killing Sander?"
Bastian's eyes light up with something that looks to be genuine delight at being asked, and the delight is unexpected, not because Bastian does not experience it, but because Emery has not seen it aimed at a question before.
It changes his face. Makes him look less a crime lord and more a scholar asked about his field of study by someone who might actually care about the answer.
He explains. Sander is encroaching on his territory, undermining the stability of the trade networks Bastian has spent years building by flooding them with a commodity that poisons everything it touches.
"Goods move clean," Bastian says, and his voice carries the conviction of a moral line, not a business philosophy.
"Goods can be taxed, regulated, tracked.
Flesh does not move clean. It corrupts every chain it enters.
The merchants who handle it become compromised.
The routes it travels become toxic. The people who profit from it become the kind of people who will do anything, sell anything, betray anything, because once you have crossed that line there is no lower line to stop you. "
He pauses. The fire crackles. A log shifts and sends a plume of sparks up the chimney.
"We do not need that kind of poison in our well," he says.
Emery is surprised by this. He has heard Bastian described in many ways, ruthless, efficient, dangerous, cruel, but he has never heard him described as principled, and the gap between the reputation and the reality is wide enough to fall into.
He asks what the difference is. Why flesh is worse than goods.
Why a man who extorts merchants and breaks fingers and has killed people in ways that have become cautionary tales draws his line here, at this species of cruelty, when there are so many others he apparently tolerates.
Bastian is quiet for a moment.
The silence is different from his usual silences, heavier, denser, carrying weight that Emery can feel in the air between them the way you feel a storm building.
Bastian is not deciding whether to answer.
He is deciding how much of the answer to give, and the decision is visible in the set of his jaw and the way his hands rest on his knees, fingers spread, bracing himself against something.
Then, slowly, he tells him.
"When I was a child," Bastian says, and his voice is low and steady and stripped of every flourish, every weapon, "my mother and I were sold by my father.
She was a Vesper. He was human. He considered her inferior to him, and when he tired of her he sold us both to a man who collected things he considered exotic. "
The words land in the space between them. Emery does not move. He does not breathe.
"The owner was not a kind man," Bastian continues, and there is a quality to his voice now that Emery has never heard, a careful, controlled flatness, the sound of describing a wound that has healed but left scar tissue so deep it changes the shape of everything built on top of it.
"He kept us for years. He used us as he saw fit.
He was creative in his cruelties and he was consistent, which is worse than creative because you cannot prepare for what you cannot predict, but consistency means you know exactly what is coming and you have to endure the knowing. "
The fire shifts. Shadows move on the walls.
"I killed him when I was sixteen," Bastian says, and the statement carries no bravado, no satisfaction, no triumph.
It is a fact. It happened. He killed a man when he was barely more than a child because the alternative was to continue being owned, and the fact is no more and no less than that.
"I won us our freedom. I kept my mother safe.
I built everything I have from the wreckage of what was done to us. "
He turns his head and looks at Emery, and his dark eyes are open in a way that Emery has never seen them, not soft, not fond, not heated, but raw and exposed.
He has pulled something out of the deepest part of himself and placed it in someone else's hands and is now waiting to see what they do with it.
"I remember long nights of being owned by someone else," Bastian says.
"Of not knowing what the whims of that person would be on any given day.
Whether today would be tolerable or whether today would be one of the days that I carry with me for the rest of my life.
" His jaw tightens, then releases. "It is the one price I cannot allow anyone else to pay.
Not in my territory. Not under my watch. Not while I have the power to stop it."
Emery sinks down onto his knees on the rug beside him.
He does it without deciding to. His body takes him down the way his feet carried him into this room, without consultation, without the approval of the rational mind that has governed his movements for as long as he can remember.
He kneels on the bearskin beside the most dangerous man in the Underground and he knows what Bastian has just given him and does not know why he gave it.
The why is the part that destroys him. Because this is not a tactical disclosure.
This is not information shared to build trust or secure loyalty or advance an agenda.
Bastian has no reason to tell Emery this.
There is no strategic value in a crime lord revealing his deepest wound to an assassin who was hired to kill him.
The only reason to tell someone this is because you want them to know you, not the version of you that the world sees, not the reputation or the title or the fear, but the actual, scarred, surviving person underneath all of it.
Bastian has shown him the underneath, and Emery does not know what to do with the gift, because no one has ever given him something this way before.
No one has ever trusted him with the soft, unprotected parts of themselves.
He is the weapon, the tool, the pretty face deployed for a purpose.
People do not show him their wounds. People show him their desires and their cruelties and their egos, and he uses all three to get close enough to kill them, and this quiet confession on a rug before a fire does not fit into any framework he has for understanding human interaction.
"Your mother," he says, because his voice needs to say something and this is the least dangerous thing available. "Where is she now?"
Bastian smiles. It is genuine, unguarded and warm and carrying none of the sharpness or calculation that his smiles usually carry, and the genuineness of it makes Emery's chest ache in a way that is becoming familiar and does not stop being alarming.
"Safe," Bastian says. "In a cottage outside the city. She has a garden, and a cat that despises everyone except her, and she does not question what I do because I have always kept her safe." He pauses. "She would like you, I think."
The last sentence is unnecessary. It is extraneous, gratuitous, the kind of thing a person says when they are thinking about a future that includes the person they are talking to, and Emery does not know what to do with the implication so he does nothing.
He kneels on the rug and looks at the fire and feels the warmth of it on his face and the warmth of Bastian beside him, radiating heat the way Vespers apparently do, and he is so close to something he cannot name that the proximity is making his eyes sting.
Bastian reaches up and brushes his thumb across Emery's cheek.
The touch is light. Lighter than a man with Bastian's strength has any right to be.
It traces the line of his cheekbone and rests there, and Emery leans into it because he cannot help himself, because his body has decided that Bastian's touch is the only thing in the world that does not feel invasive and has stopped consulting his brain on the matter.
"Are you still planning to collect on the token?" Bastian asks.
The question is quiet and carries no weight, not the weight of a threat, not the weight of an accusation, not even the weight of genuine curiosity.
It carries, instead, the weight of something Bastian is willing to hear the honest answer to, whatever that answer might be.
He is asking Emery if he still intends to kill him and the asking is not afraid.
Emery does not pull away. He holds Bastian's gaze and lets the question sit between them and thinks about the guild token that is still in his pocket, that has been in his pocket since Bastian pressed it into his palm in that alley with his lips at his ear and his name on his tongue.
He has not returned it. He has not discarded it.
He carries it the way you carry a key to a door you have not yet decided whether to open or seal shut.