Chapter 1 #3
He's been selling his body, and his dagger, and his peace of mind for years just to get by.
Things are a little better now that they're on his terms, now that he's the one who decides whether to take a token or leave it on the desk, but he's still just a tool someone is using.
It really doesn't make a difference whether they're paying him to lay on his back or put someone else on theirs.
The nights blend together. One slimy, entitled patron after another.
A half-giant with a belly full of ale who keeps calling Emery sweetheart in a voice that implies they're going to abscond into the night together.
Emery perches on the arm of his chair and lets the man's hand rest on his thigh and thinks about Guille's poetry, about love as a wound you choose to keep open, and wonders what Guille would think if he could see his words being used as a mental escape from a hand creeping toward his waistband.
A fae woman with crystalline hair who is polite and gentle and tips well, and whose company Emery finds tolerable for the full thirty minutes she pays for, which is the closest thing to enjoying himself he's experienced since he walked through the curtain.
A pair of humans, brothers by the look of them, who want him between them and whose hands find matching places on his body and who talk to each other about him while he's right there, reducing him to a doll that happens to breathe.
Emery smiles and moves and lets them touch him and thinks about the princess and the commoner falling in love and wonders what that could possibly feel like.
He lets them kiss him. He lets strangers put their mouths on his neck, his jaw, his lips.
He tilts his head back and makes the right sounds and his brain goes somewhere else entirely, somewhere with rolling hills and open skies and the wind against his face, and the disconnect between what his body is doing and where his mind has gone is so practiced, so seamless, that it barely registers as a coping mechanism anymore. It's just the way he works.
On the fourth night, a man goes too far.
Fleshy-faced trader with rings on every finger and the entitled air of a man who has never been told he can't have something.
He has Emery in his lap and his hands are roaming, aggressive and graceless, belonging to someone who hasn't once considered asking first. Emery redirects the first grab with practiced ease, having been rerouting unwanted hands since before he could legally drink.
A casual shift, a guiding touch, the man's fingers moved from somewhere they shouldn't be to somewhere more tolerable.
The man grumbles. Emery smiles. The matter seems settled.
It isn't.
The second grab is sudden, aggressive, the man's ringed fingers digging between Emery's thighs with a possessiveness that makes Emery's stomach turn and his vision sharpen in the way it does when his body decides, independent of his brain, that it is done being touched.
He breaks the man's wrist.
It happens fast. A twist, a pivot, the angle of pressure he learned from a dock fighter in the upper levels who owed him a favor.
The crack is satisfying. The man howls, lurching backward off his chair, cradling his hand against his chest. He's screaming obscenities that echo off the velvet-draped ceiling and every head in the Hollow turns and Emery is standing over him with his arms crossed over his chest and the strange, electric calm that always follows violence settling into his bones.
Vella's people are there before the man can stand. Two of them, large and professionally dispassionate, who take the patron by his arms and escort him out with the kind of ease that suggests this is not the first time and will not be the last.
Vella finds him after.
She stands close enough that he can see the subtle shift of scales on her throat and the quiet concern in her dark, slitted eyes, and she says again what she said the first day: this is a business, and he has the right to refuse service to anyone he wishes.
Emery breathes. He gives her a calm smile that she believes enough to let him get back to work. Or maybe she doesn't believe it but lets him go anyway, because she recognizes someone performing survival and knows better than to pull the thread.
He goes back to work. He dances. He lets himself be touched by people he doesn't want touching him and thinks about anywhere else.
The days that follow are quieter, or maybe he's just gotten better at the numbness.
He catalogues the Hollow's layout while he works, because he is an assassin even when he's dressed in bangles and silk, and assassins never stop mapping a room.
Three exits: the front curtain, a back door through the kitchens, and a narrow servants' passage that leads to the alley behind the building.
The bar has a mirror angled so that Vella can see every table from her usual seat.
The alcoves along the far wall have curtains that don't reach the floor, which means privacy is an illusion and anyone paying attention can see the feet of whoever is inside and count how many there are.
He learns the names of every dancer and every server and every guard, because names are tools and Emery hoards every one of them.
He charms the regulars. He laughs at their jokes and touches their arms and looks at them with the version of his face that makes people feel important.
He has spent years weaponizing his looks because the world gave him nothing else to work with.
His face, his body, the way he tips his chin down and looks up through his lashes so that something vulnerable appears in his expression, something that makes people want to protect him or fuck him or both. It works. It always works.
Kelsi, one of the other dancers, takes a liking to him.
She is short and bright-eyed and red-haired and she asks him where he's from during a lull in the evening and Emery gives her a version of the truth that's more fiction than fact and she accepts it without pressing.
She tells him which patrons tip well and which ones to avoid and where the cook hides the good bread, and Emery files all of it away and thinks that in another life, one where he wasn't here to kill someone, he might actually enjoy her company.
Three more days pass. Three more nights of sweat and smoke and hands that feel as though they're trying to take something from him he doesn't want to give.
The Hollow is beautiful and its clients are wealthy and its matron is kind, and Emery hates every second of it with the quiet, corrosive resignation that comes from enduring things he hates for so long he's forgotten how to do anything else.
He doesn't think of it as suffering anymore.
He thinks of it as the job. He thinks about how, without it, he would be back on the streets, hungry and cold and vulnerable.
The real job, the one involving a blade and a crime lord, hasn't started yet.
He is waiting. He is patient because patience is one of the few things that doesn't cost him anything.
Bastian Kane frequents the Velvet Hollow, according to every source he's found, but he has not appeared. Emery dances and smiles and endures.
At the end of each night, Emery takes a bath that's length is increasing with its frequency.
The bath at the Hollow is the nicest thing that has ever happened to him on a daily basis.
Hot water, heated by some mechanism in the walls that Emery doesn't understand and doesn't question because questioning good fortune has never done anything useful for him.
He strips off the bangles and the clinging trousers and lowers himself into the basin and stays there until the heat has leached the memory of strangers' hands from his skin.
He scrubs himself clean. He scrubs harder than he needs to, sometimes, but that's between him and the washcloth.
He doesn't think about the hands, doesn't let himself dwell on which ones were worse than others.
That way lies a kind of accounting that serves no purpose except to make the next night harder.
Instead he sinks lower into the water and lets the heat do its work and thinks about nothing at all, which is its own kind of luxury.