Chapter 15 #2
Bastian's hips drive deeper, the words and the motion the same language, pushing truth into Emery's body since Emery's mind will not accept it.
His hand tightens around Emery's cock and his mouth is hot against the back of his neck and Emery is shaking and he cannot tell if it is from the pleasure or the weight of what is being offered.
The pace builds, not fast, never fast with Bastian, but deeper, more insistent.
His hand tightens around Emery's cock and his thrusts hit the angle that makes white light cascade through Emery's vision.
He is close. He is so close and Bastian is whispering filth against his ear, beautiful filth, telling him how he feels around him, how tight he is, how perfectly he takes him, and the words push him over the edge.
He comes with a broken cry, muffled against the pillow.
His body clenches around Bastian and his cock pulses in Bastian's fist and the orgasm rolls through him in waves that make his legs shake and his toes curl and his fingers grip the quilt hard enough to tear.
Bastian strokes him through it, murmuring praise against his skin, and then his own rhythm breaks.
His thrusts go erratic, deep and desperate, and he drives in one last time and holds there, and Emery feels the familiar rush of heat as Bastian spends inside him, his mouth open against Emery's shoulder, his arm a band of iron across Emery's chest.
They lie there. Breathing. The fire crackles. The room is warm and still.
Bastian's hand leaves his cock, trails up his stomach, comes to rest over his heart.
He can feel Emery's heartbeat, rapid and slowing.
His mouth presses against the knob of Emery's spine, a kiss that is barely a kiss, and he does not pull out.
He stays, inside Emery, around him, holding him, and letting go is not something he intends to do.
Eventually, Emery shifts. He turns, carefully, and Bastian lets him go and they face each other on the pillow.
Close. Bastian's white hair is loose around his face, tangled from sleep and sex, and his black eyes are soft and his expression is unguarded in a way that Emery has seen only here, only in this bed, only in the quiet that follows the thing between them.
Emery studies him. Looks for the crack. The seam. The place where the man who whispers endearments in bed transitions into the man who gives orders that end in death. He cannot find it. He has never been able to find it.
Bastian kisses him, brief and sweet. Then he is pulling away, sitting up, swinging his legs off the bed.
He stands and crosses to the washstand and cleans himself.
He finds his tunic on the floor. Pulls it on.
Ties the sash at his waist. Rebraids his hair with quick, practiced fingers.
The transformation is immediate and total, every motion stripping away the man who was breathing against Emery's neck and replacing him with something sharper, something colder, something that carries weight when it enters a room and makes people recalculate their odds of survival.
Emery watches from the pillow.
He watches the softness leave Bastian's body and the danger take its place, and the thing that moves through him is not unease.
It is not the cautious reassessment of a man reminding himself who he is in bed with.
It is heat, low and immediate and unsettling in its honesty, pooling in his stomach even though he has just come, even though the evidence of what they did is still warm between his thighs.
He watches Bastian settle the sash and straighten his shoulders and become the thing the Underground flinches from, and he wants him.
Not despite the transformation. Because of it.
He should not. The shift from tender to lethal should function as a warning, a reminder that the hands which held him are the same hands that will break bone this afternoon without hesitation.
It should make the wanting less. It should introduce the distance that self-preservation requires.
He knows what Bastian is. He has known since the hallway in Sander's stronghold, since Bastian opened his mouth and two men dissolved into ash and Emery stood in the aftermath with his back against the wall and the heat of it still in the air and understood, with a clarity that left no room for negotiation, that the man who had just kissed him breathless could unmake a human body with a word.
It did not make the wanting less then. It does not make it less now.
It makes it more, and the more is the part he cannot explain, the part that does not fit into the framework of who he thought he was.
He is supposed to be repelled by violence.
He is supposed to draw a line between the man who touches him gently and the man who is capable of extraordinary cruelty and choose one and reject the other.
But the line does not exist. There is no seam.
There is only Bastian, whole and undivided, and Emery wants all of him, the soft mouth and the dangerous voice and the hands that know how to hold and how to break, and the wanting is so complete that it terrifies him.
Bastian catches his gaze in the mirror on the washstand. Something passes through his expression, brief and knowing, aware of what Emery is looking at and aware that Emery is not looking away.
He crosses back to the bed. Leans down. Presses one more kiss to Emery's forehead, gentle and brief.
"Take your time," he says. "Rest. Prepare."
Then he is gone. The door closes behind him and Emery lies in the tangled sheets and smells resin and smoke on the pillow and stares at the ceiling.
Until time unmakes me.
He said it the way he says everything, with the unhurried certainty of not making promises he cannot keep.
And Emery, who has spent twenty-five years learning that promises are the currency people spend when they want something from you and discard when the wanting fades, lies in the bed that smells of both of them and tries to dismiss it.
He cannot dismiss it. It sits in his chest beside the heat and the terror and the memory of Bastian's arm tightening across him when he came, and it will not move, and he does not know if that means he is beginning to believe it or if it means he wants to believe it so badly that the wanting has become its own kind of weight.
He closes his eyes. He does not get up for a long time.
***
Emery finds Bastian in the study later that morning.
The door is open, which is unusual. Bastian works with it closed, Hask stationed outside, the barrier between him and the rest of the compound maintained with the deliberate structure of understanding that accessibility diminishes authority.
But today the door is open and Hask is not outside it and Bastian is alone behind his desk with maps spread before him and a pen in his hand, making notations in a tight, precise script.
He looks up when Emery enters. His expression is the professional one, composed and attentive, the crime lord in his element, surrounded by the logistics of his empire, every inch of him communicating control and competence.
There is no trace of the man who whispered every day against Emery's ear this morning, no visible seam.
Emery searches for it, the way he always searches for it, and finds nothing.
"The approach," Emery says, because he came here to discuss logistics and he intends to discuss logistics.
He crosses to the desk and looks at the maps.
Trade routes. District boundaries. The lower levels of the Underground marked with annotations in different colors, each one representing something he does not yet have the key to decode.
"The timing once we're inside. If Sander is in a separate room from where we are, it could take time to reach him.
That's time your crew is waiting outside without a signal. "
"Avery can handle a delay," Bastian says. His gaze is on the maps. His pen continues moving. "He's patient. Resourceful."
"And if the moment doesn't come?"
"It will." Bastian sets his pen down. He looks up at Emery and the professionalism is intact but something shifts beneath it, a quality of attention that goes beyond operational. "You have never failed a contract. You are not going to fail this one."
Emery should be reassured by this. He should take the confidence being offered and let it settle his nerves and move on to the next agenda item.
Instead he stands beside the desk and feels the tension he has been carrying all morning coil tighter in his chest, the tension that has nothing to do with Sander and everything to do with the man behind the desk and the distance Emery has been deliberately constructing between them since he got out of bed.
He woke in Bastian's arms. He lay in Bastian's bed and let Bastian touch him and told him I understand when Bastian said he wanted this every morning.
And then Bastian left and became the other version of himself and Emery lay in the sheets and felt the cold reality of what he had just done settle over him.
He let someone in. He let someone past the wall.
He said words that cannot be unsaid and made sounds that cannot be unmade and now he is standing in this study pretending to discuss approach timelines while the real conversation sits between them, a third presence in the room.
Bastian senses it.
Emery can tell the moment it registers, the slight narrowing of his eyes, the way his body stills behind the desk.
He is reading Emery the way Emery reads targets: cataloging the posture, the set of the jaw, the quality of distance that Emery is projecting with every deliberate inch of space between his body and the desk.
Emery is building a wall and Bastian can see the construction happening in real time.
"Come here," Bastian says.