Chapter 2
The seventh night starts the way the others have.
Emery puts on his bangles and his trousers and goes downstairs and lets the music and the lamplight fold around him. Same room. Same faces. Same careful performance of desire wrapped in silk and served with a smile he doesn't mean.
He dances for a table of off-duty mercenaries who are loud and cheerful and whose hands are rough but not cruel.
He lets one of them kiss his cheek and the man blushes about it afterward, which is almost endearing.
He sits in the lap of a woman with tusks and a laugh that shakes the table and she tells him he's pretty and he says thank you and means it, because she said it as a compliment and not a claim.
He works the room. He smiles. He moves. He thinks about the token hidden in the lining of his spare shirt upstairs.
He's calculating the angle of approach on a table of gem traders near the back when Kelsi catches his arm near the bar. She is bright-eyed and practically vibrating, which is unusual for her. Kelsi runs at a constant low hum of quiet competence and rarely ventures above it.
"Your night just got interesting," she says, leaning close so he can hear her over the music.
Emery raises an eyebrow.
Kelsi tips her chin toward the entrance.
Emery turns.
The curtain parts, and four people come through.
All of them are armed. All of them wear the expression of competence that says they are not decoration. But Emery barely sees them because his eyes have gone to the man at the center and stayed there.
He is tall. Not towering, but tall enough that the room adjusts around him, pulling inward, getting warmer.
His skin is charcoal dark, smooth and rich, covered in black tattoos that crawl along his arms and across the exposed expanse of his chest in patterns that blend so seamlessly into his complexion they seem less drawn than grown.
His hair is white, startlingly, impossibly white, braided in a thick rope that hangs over one shoulder.
A long jagged scar runs over his left eye.
His ears are pointed and studded with piercings that catch the lamplight, and his eyes, when they sweep the room, are black.
Not dark brown, not deep hazel, not any shade that belongs to a natural spectrum of eye color.
Black, the depth of the Grith, the depth of the Depths, the kind of darkness that doesn't absorb light so much as swallow it whole.
He is wearing a black tunic, open at the chest, and gray trousers, and a red sash at his waist with braided tassels that move when he moves.
Muscular without being bulky, built for efficiency rather than show, and he carries himself with unhurried authority, every line of him saying he has never once needed to prove he belongs somewhere.
Emery's first coherent thought is that his mark has arrived.
His second, arriving so close behind the first that they practically collide, is that Bastian Kane is unfairly, ridiculously attractive in a way that makes his professional composure work harder than it has ever had to.
He needs to focus. Bastian is a contract, a token, a dead man who doesn't know it yet.
Except nothing about Bastian Kane suggests a man approaching his end. Everything about him says he has been alive for a very long time and plans to continue indefinitely and would find the notion of his own mortality mildly amusing.
The crew fanning out around him are not afterthoughts.
Emery clocks them automatically, the same instinct that clocks the exits of every room he enters.
A woman with copper hair and an outfit with more buckles and pockets than seems structurally necessary.
A half-giant who has to angle his shoulders to clear the doorframe and whose head nearly brushes the draped fabric of the ceiling.
And, at Bastian's right shoulder, a man in a half-mask that covers everything below his eyes. Short white hair with the sides buzzed. Armed extensively: a short sword, a jagged dagger, and a collection of throwing knives all hanging from criss-crossed leather belts at his waist. His eyes are what’s visible above his mask and the skin around them is black and the pupils are a void of white.
Bastian takes a table in the corner, not the center, which is interesting, choosing the position with the best sightlines and the most defensible angles despite having his pick of the room.
His crew settles around him with practiced efficiency.
A server appears at Bastian's elbow within seconds.
Drinks are poured. Cards are produced. One of the crew pulls up an extra chair for a man Emery doesn't recognize, someone in a fine coat who is probably a contact or a business associate or someone who owes money. They begin to play.
He shows no visible interest in the services the Hollow offers.
He does not glance at the dancers or let his gaze linger on the bodies moving through the room.
He accepts his drink and arranges his cards and leans back in his chair, settled and unconcerned, because no one would be stupid enough to bring trouble through that door.
Emery is patient. He doesn't rush. Rushing would be eager and eagerness is suspicious and Emery did not survive this long by being stupid.
He works the floor for another twenty minutes.
He lets a man at a nearby table pull him close.
He laughs at something that isn't funny.
He dances between the lamps with the other dancers, their bodies moving in loose synchronization, and he uses the movement to drift closer.
Close enough that the periphery of Bastian's vision would catch him if the man were looking.
He turns in the light. The bangles catch and scatter warm flecks of gold across his skin.
He tips his head back, exposes the line of his throat, lets his body do what it knows how to do.
It is all performance, the careful construction of something desirable enough to draw a man's eye without being obvious enough to raise suspicion.
He keeps dancing, keeps his body fluid and deliberate, and when he finally allows his gaze to drift toward the corner table, Bastian Kane is looking at him.
Emery's stomach drops.
It is not fear, exactly. Or it is fear, but not the kind he prepared for.
He prepared for the cold, calculating assessment of a predator evaluating a threat.
What he gets instead is focus. Pure, undiluted focus.
Bastian's eyes are depthless and unreadable and fixed on him with an intensity that makes his skin tighten and his breath catch in a way that is entirely unprofessional.
The man is devastating up close, Emery thinks, and the thought arrives with a surge of irritation because he did not account for this.
He accounted for danger, for power and cruelty and the menace of a voice that can unmake flesh.
He did not account for the dark skin and the white hair against it and the scar that should mar his face but instead gives it a quality of severity that borders on mesmerizing.
He did not account for any of it hitting him this hard.
He has a job to do. This is no different.
It is, he is already beginning to suspect, very different.
He moves closer. He is within arm's reach of the table now, close enough to see the cards in Bastian's hand, close enough to smell him. He smells of something deep and resinous, with an edge of smoke. It is not perfume. It is just him.
The others at the table are aware of him. The redhead glances up and her eyes flick down Emery's body and away, bored, having seen a hundred dancers in a hundred brothels and found none of them interesting. The masked man does not even look up from his cards. Bastian does not look away from Emery.
He stops. He stands beside the table with one hip cocked and his weight on one leg, a posture that elongates his body and makes the low-slung waistband of his pants slip another half inch. He tilts his head. He lets the lamplight hit his face. He smiles.
Bastian puts down his cards.
"Are you going to stand there all night," Bastian says, "or take a chair?"
Emery was not prepared for his voice. It is low and quiet and textured, not loud enough to carry past the table, and yet it moves through Emery's chest and settles somewhere behind his ribs.
There is nothing overtly threatening about it.
There does not need to be. The threat is in what it is, in the knowledge that this instrument could crack him open from the inside if its owner wished.
And yet the tone is mild. Almost amused. Almost warm.
Emery needs to get it together.
He tilts his chin up. "Is the chair the best you can do?"
Something moves in Bastian's expression. His lips curve, not quite a smile, not quite anything else. The scar over his eye shifts with the movement of his brow, and his dark gaze holds Emery's and does not let go.
"The chair is what I'm offering. Anything beyond that is up to you."
That is the opening he needs. The invitation, couched in controlled nonchalance that tells him Bastian is interested but not desperate, attracted but not unhinged.
He will not grab. He will let the thing come to him.
The most dangerous kind of mark, because Emery cannot use desperation against someone who does not appear to have any.
He doesn't take the chair. He slides into Bastian's lap with one smooth movement, settling sideways across his thighs, and loops one bangled wrist around the back of his neck.
The position is intimate and deliberate.
It puts his face inches from Bastian's and his body against the solid warmth of Bastian's chest.
For a moment, Bastian does not touch him. Emery is acutely aware of the pause, the deliberateness of it, Bastian letting the contact be entirely Emery's choice before he responds.
Then his hand settles on Emery's hip.
Emery's breath stutters.