Chapter 13 #4
He thinks about Bastian as a child. Sixteen years old, killing the man who owned them, winning freedom for himself and his mother with blood on his hands and nowhere to go and nothing to his name except the raw, terrifying power of a voice that could unmake the world.
He thinks about how Bastian built everything he has from that, from violence and loss and the determination that no one would ever own him again, and that if he had the power to stop it, no one would own anyone else either.
He thinks about how no one in his life has ever fought for him.
No one has ever looked at the bruises on his skin and felt the kind of anger that changes the temperature of a room.
No one has ever cleaned his dagger and returned it to him as a promise.
No one has ever crossed the Underground alone, without backup, without crew, to sit in a brothel with an untouched drink and wait for him to decide whether to come closer or run away, and accept either outcome with the same steady, devastating patience.
Bastian keeps coming back.
No one has ever come back.
They kiss against the door and Bastian holds him.
His hands are on Emery's waist, his back, the curve of his shoulders, and they do not wander.
They do not pull at his clothes or reach for his skin or press him toward the bed.
They hold. They stay where they are and they hold him, and the holding is not a prelude to something else.
It is the thing itself. Bastian is not undressing him.
He is not moving them toward sex. He is standing at the door of a rented room in a brothel and kissing Emery sweetly and gently and holding him, and the holding is enough.
Emery's body against his is not a means to an end but the end itself.
Emery is drowning.
He is drowning in the sweetness of it, in the gentleness, in the devastating, incomprehensible reality of a man who could have anyone, who could take anyone, who could command anyone, who has the power and the authority and the beauty to fill his bed every night for the rest of his very long life, choosing to stand in a small room and kiss one person with the unhurried tenderness of having found the thing he was looking for and being in no rush to put it down.
Emery's hands are on Bastian's chest, his fingers curled into the fabric of his open tunic, and he holds on and kisses him back and the kissing is different from every other kiss they have shared because this one is not complicated by sex or strategy or the competing pressures of who they are and what they are supposed to be to each other.
A knock at the door.
Emery pulls back. Bastian's arms do not release him immediately, they tighten, briefly, the reflexive grip of not wanting to let go, and then they loosen, and Bastian steps to the side, and Emery opens the door.
It is Vella. She stands in the corridor with the composed, unhurried presence of a woman who would not interrupt unless the interruption was warranted.
Her slitted eyes move from Emery to Bastian and back, and whatever she sees between them she files away without comment.
Her forked tongue flicks across her lower lip.
"Your gentlemen are back," she says, and the way she says gentlemen carries the dryness of using the word for convenience rather than accuracy. "Downstairs. Asking for you."
Sander's men. Brennan and Royce. Back again, and the timing is either fortunate or orchestrated, and in the Underground the line between those two things is academic.
Emery looks at Bastian. Bastian's expression has shifted, the softness gone, replaced by the focused, calculating attention of a mind that has moved from one register to another without pause, but his hand finds the small of Emery's back, brief and warm, and the touch says go and I am here and be careful in the space of a single gesture.
Emery nods to Vella. He adjusts his hair, his bangles, the line of his trousers.
He puts on the face, the pretty, inviting, carefully constructed face that has gotten him into rooms and out of trouble and close enough to kill more people than he can count.
He does not look at Bastian again because looking at Bastian will make the face harder to wear, and he needs the face right now.
He goes downstairs.
Brennan and Royce are at their usual table.
They look pleased, flushed and eager, carrying good news and wanting credit for delivering it.
Emery crosses the room to them and lets his expression open into delighted surprise, and the performance settles over him, a second skin that fits worse than it used to.
"We were hoping you'd be here," Brennan says, his broad hand already reaching for Emery's waist as he slides into the booth beside them. Emery allows the touch. It costs him something. He pays it.
"Where else would I be?" Emery says, and smiles.
Royce is watching him with the sharp, assessing attention that makes him the more dangerous of the two, but tonight the sharpness is softened by satisfaction. Whatever news they are carrying, it has put Royce in a generous mood, and generous moods make careful men careless.
"We talked to the boss," Royce says. He leans in, his voice dropping to the conspiratorial register of sharing a secret that makes him feel important. "He's interested."
Emery lets his eyes widen. "Really?"
"Wants to meet you," Brennan says, and his hand on Emery's waist tightens with the proprietary squeeze of considering himself responsible for this success. "You and that friend of yours. Tomorrow night."
Emery's heart rate stays steady. His hands stay relaxed.
His expression stays warm and open and exactly calibrated to convey the kind of breathless, flattered excitement that men such as Brennan and Royce expect from someone they consider beneath them.
Inside, behind the face, behind the performance, a different calculation is running: tomorrow night.
Sander. An invitation. The final piece of a plan that started with a guild token and a name and has led him through a brothel and a bedroom and a compound in the Depths and the arms of a man who keeps rewriting the rules of Emery's life without asking his permission.
"I'd love that," Emery says. "Let me talk to my friend. Where should we meet you?"
They give him a location, a corner in the upper tunnels, near one of the toll bridges.
They will take him and his friend from there.
Emery commits it to memory, charms them through the rest of the conversation with the automatic ease of running a program he could execute in his sleep, and walks them to the door with lingering touches on their arms and the kind of parting smile that makes men feel chosen.
The curtain falls closed behind them.
Emery stands in the entranceway and breathes.
The smile falls. The warmth drains from his face.
His shoulders drop and his hands, finally, tremble, not from fear but from the accumulated cost of the performance, the hours and days and years of letting people touch him and smiling through it, and the trembling is the tax his body is levying on his composure and the payment is overdue.
He goes back upstairs.
Bastian is where he left him, standing by the window with his arms crossed and the lamplight catching the white of his hair. He turns when Emery enters, and his expression asks the question before his mouth does.
"Tomorrow night," Emery says. "They'll take us to him."
Bastian nods. The nod is slow, deliberate, weighted with the gravity of having waited for this moment and now calculating every variable, every contingency, every possible configuration of the evening ahead with the methodical precision that has kept him alive and in power for longer than Emery has been alive.
Then the calculation pauses, and the man behind it surfaces, and Bastian crosses the room and takes Emery's face in both hands and kisses him once, softly, on the mouth.
"Come back with me," Bastian says.
Emery asks the question that has been sitting at the back of his throat since he ran. The question he has been carrying, smooth from turning, heavy from holding. "What happens after my usefulness has run out? What happens to me once Sander is dead and the guild has their token?"
Bastian kisses him again, softly, the kind of kiss that exists not to begin something but to answer something.
"That is up to you," he says.
Emery tries not to believe him. He wants to. He wants to believe him so badly that the wanting aches, a physical pain in his chest that has nothing to do with the bruise on his throat and everything to do with the slow, terrifying, irreversible process of letting someone in.
He agrees to go back.
They leave the Hollow together, through the back entrance, into the dark corridors of the Underground. Bastian walks beside him, not touching, not reaching, his presence warm and steady and close enough that Emery could reach out and take his hand if he wanted to.
He wants to.