Chapter 13 #3
Bastian watches him come. His expression does not change.
He does not look angry. He does not look betrayed.
He does not look as though his operative stabbed a member of his crew and fled into the night without explanation.
He is looking at Emery the way he always looks at Emery, seeing nothing else in the room worth the effort of looking at, and the consistency of this, the absolute, immovable constancy of the way Bastian sees him, is the thing that makes Emery's eyes sting and his throat tighten and his voice, when it comes out, carry a roughness that has nothing to do with Fredan's fingers.
"Would you like another drink?" Emery asks.
The question is mundane, inane, the kind of thing a dancer says to a patron in a brothel, a transaction wrapped in social niceties. It is also, and they both know this, a door. Emery is standing in front of it with his hand on the handle and he is asking Bastian if he wants to walk through.
Bastian's eyes are half-lidded. The lamplight catches in them, deep and dark, and they carry the warmth that Emery has learned to recognize as the expression Bastian wears when he is being careful, not guarded, because Bastian is never guarded with him, but careful in the way that you are careful with something valuable that you are afraid of dropping.
His hand finds Emery's hip. The touch is searing and familiar against his bare skin, Bastian's palm settling against the jut of bone with the easy, proprietary warmth of a hand returning to a place it has been before and intends to be again, and Emery does not flinch.
He does not pull away. He leans into the touch, just barely, and the leaning is an answer to a question Bastian did not ask.
Bastian does not answer about the drink.
Instead his hand moves from Emery's hip to his hand, slow and deliberate, and he places something cold and metal in Emery's palm and closes his fingers around it.
Emery looks down.
His dagger. The one he buried in Fredan's hip.
The blade is clean, the steel gleaming in the lamplight, the leather-wrapped hilt familiar against his fingers.
It is intact, cared for, polished. As though it was never used.
As though it was never buried four inches deep in the flesh of a man who called Emery a whore and pressed his face into a wall and told him he was not special.
Emery stares at it and his mind goes very still.
The dagger in his hand means Bastian knows.
Of course Bastian knows, Fredan would have made sure of it, would have gone straight to him, bleeding and furious and righteous with the outrage of being stabbed by someone he considers beneath him.
Fredan would have told Bastian everything.
His version of everything, which would not include the hand on Emery's throat or the words in his ear or the way his body pinned Emery to the wall with a weight that was not just physical but historical, the accumulated mass of every man who has ever pressed Emery against something and taken what he wanted.
Fredan's version would be simple: the whore attacked him. The outsider drew blood. The interloper stabbed one of Bastian's own in Bastian's own compound.
And Bastian came here. Not to punish. Not to demand an explanation.
Not to drag Emery back or make him answer for the blood.
He came here and sat at a table with a drink he did not touch and waited, and when Emery came to him he put the clean dagger in his hand and closed his fingers around it, and the gesture says everything that needs to be said and nothing that Emery is prepared to hear.
No one around the table is watching. They probably know better.
The other patrons, the dancers, the four-armed bartender, they all have the finely calibrated awareness of people who understand that whatever is happening between the most notorious crime lord in the Underground and the blond dancer he keeps looking at is none of their business and becoming their business would be a mistake.
Emery looks to Bastian's face and finds him patient and fond as ever.
The fondness is not diminished. It is not cautious or conditional or tinged with the wariness of reconsidering an investment.
It is the same fondness, steady, warm, constant, and the constancy of it is what breaks something loose in Emery's chest, some bolt he did not know was holding a door closed, and behind the door is the understanding that Bastian did not come here because Emery is useful. He came here because Emery left.
Emery decides he wants whatever comes next to be on his terms.
He holds out his free hand. His fingers are steady. His heart is not, but his heart has been unreliable since the night Bastian first kissed him in a hallway outside a bedroom and he has stopped expecting it to behave.
"Do you want to come somewhere quieter?" he asks.
Bastian takes his hand.
Emery leads him across the room and up the stairs and down the corridor to his room, and his heart is hammering the entire way, and Bastian's hand in his is warm and solid and holds on with the grip of having been given something he was not sure he would get and not intending to let go of it carelessly.
The door closes behind them.
The room is small and warm and draped in the Hollow's signature fabric, and the lamp on the bedside table casts everything in amber and shadow.
Emery turns to face Bastian and finds him closer than expected, his dark eyes level with Emery's in the low light, and the proximity is electric, charged with everything that has happened between them and everything that has not happened yet and the knife-edge tension of two people standing very close together who have not yet decided what they are going to do about it.
"If you were as good an assassin as you claim," Bastian says, and his voice is low and carries the faintest edge of something that is not quite amusement and not quite anger and sits in the space between the two, balanced on its point, "you would make sure the man you stab is dead before you walk away. "
Emery glares at him. The glare is genuine, fueled by the residual anger of last night and the frustration of being lectured on assassination technique by a man who, however justified, did not have Fredan's hand around his throat, and the genuineness of it feels a relief, because Emery is so tired of performing, so tired of smiling and charming and being whatever the person in front of him needs, and with Bastian he does not have to perform.
With Bastian the anger can be real and the glare can be real and the person behind both of them can be real, and the realness will not be punished.
"If I wanted Fredan dead," Emery says, and his voice is cold and precise and carrying the authority of a professional making a professional distinction, "Fredan would be dead. I wanted to be let go."
Something moves in Bastian's eyes. Unreadable and dangerous, a shifting behind the black of his irises that Emery cannot parse, not anger, not exactly, but something related to anger the way a wildfire is related to a candle.
The same element, exponentially larger, barely contained.
Emery hesitates. He has never seen Bastian look quite this way.
The expression is not aimed at him, he knows this instinctively, but it is present in the room with them, heavy and dark, and it changes the temperature.
Bastian steps forward. The space between them disappears. His hand comes up and brushes Emery's hair out of his face, the gesture tender and precise, and his fingers trace the line of Emery's jaw and then, gently, he tips Emery's chin up, and his gaze drops to the bruise on Emery's throat.
The silence that follows is the loudest thing Emery has ever heard.
Bastian's fingers hover over the bruise without touching it.
The marks are visible now, four fingerprints and a thumb, purple and vivid against pale skin, the unmistakable signature of a hand that closed around someone's throat with the intention of hurting them, and Bastian looks at them with an expression that Emery has seen only once before, in the corridor of Sander's stronghold, in the moment before he opened his mouth and turned two men to ash.
"You should want him dead for touching you," Bastian says, and his voice is low and dark and carrying the subsonic vibration of something that is not speech, something that lives beneath language in the place where a Vesper's power resides, and the vibration settles in Emery's stomach and sends a chill through his entire body that is not cold but awareness.
The awareness of standing very close to something vast and lethal that is, right now, very angry, and the anger is not for Emery but because of him, on his behalf, in his name.
"I am not afraid of a body count, Emery. "
Emery considers the dagger returned to him. Clean. Polished. As though it was never used.
He asks the question.
"Did you kill him?"
Bastian kisses him.
The kiss is not an answer. Or perhaps it is exactly an answer, and the answer is that is not something you need to worry about, and the phrasing of the not-worrying carries a finality that tells Emery everything the kiss does not say.
Emery melts against him. He is so far gone already.
He is so far past the point of no return that the point of no return is a distant memory, a speck on the horizon behind him, and the horizon ahead is all Bastian, his warmth, his mouth, his hands that settle on Emery's waist and hold him with the careful, absolute grip of never letting him hit the ground.