Chapter 2 #2
The touch is hot. Bastian's palm is broad and his fingers wrap around the curve of Emery's hip with a certainty that is not possessive but is absolute.
The heat bleeds through the thin fabric of his pants and into his skin and Emery has to consciously prevent himself from leaning into it.
He has been touched a hundred times this week.
A thousand times in his life. None of them felt this way.
None of them carried this weight, this voltage.
"You're warm," Emery says, because he has to say something and his usual arsenal of vapid flattery feels inadequate for the man beneath him.
"Vesper blood runs hot." The thumb on Emery's hip moves, a slow arc across the bone, idle and devastating. "You'll get used to it."
The presumption in that statement. You'll get used to it.
Not a transaction but an assumption of continuity, of time enough for Emery to acclimate to the furnace heat of this man's hands.
There will not be time. There will be a knife in the dark and a body on the floor and a token returned to the guild and nothing else.
Emery smiles. It does not reach his eyes but it does not need to. Bastian is not looking at his eyes. He is looking at Emery's mouth, briefly, before his gaze lifts again and settles somewhere that feels more dangerous than any single feature.
"Do you usually choose the chair?" Bastian asks. "Or am I special?"
"You haven't barked at me yet." Emery shifts in Bastian's lap, a small adjustment that presses their bodies closer and lets the line of his waist curve into the arm resting behind him on the chair back. "So you're quite special."
"That’s a low bar, beautiful."
"The bar is where I've set it based on extensive experience."
"Mm." Bastian's gaze flickers, something unreadable passing through it, and Emery wonders if that was too much honesty.
If the bitterness underneath the flirtation was visible.
He arranges his expression more carefully.
But Bastian does not press. He picks his cards back up with his free hand, holding them at an angle that, Emery realizes, allows him to see the hand.
He is being shown Bastian's cards. He is being included in the game.
"Do you play?" Bastian asks.
"Not well enough to be caught at it."
Another almost-smile. The well dressed man at the table across from Bastian clears his throat, impatient, and Bastian plays a card without looking at it.
The game continues. Bastian plays left-handed with Emery on his right, his thumb still tracing that maddening arc across Emery's hipbone, and he speaks to his contact about something logistical and dull that Emery files away for later analysis.
Trade routes, a shipment delayed, nothing urgent.
Then, low enough that only Emery can hear, his lips near Emery's ear: "You haven’t been working here long."
Emery keeps his body loose. "What makes you say that?"
"Your comments about the patrons." Bastian plays another card. His tone has not changed. He is still speaking in that low register that seems reserved for the space between them. "You’re still spirited enough to have an opinion about the clientele."
"The clientele here are paying for a service." His voice comes out flatter than he intends. He adjusts. Softens. Tilts his head so his mouth is closer to Bastian's ear and his lips brush the pointed shell of it. "I don't mind."
"Oh, I think you do."
The quiet, unassuming certainty in those words. Bastian has looked at Emery for all of ten minutes and already seen something that Emery spends every waking hour trying to obscure. It makes something cold move through his stomach. He is here to kill this man. He cannot afford to be seen by him.
He deflects. Pulls back enough to meet Bastian's gaze and arches one eyebrow. "Are you always this observant with the entertainment?"
"I can’t help but want to test you," Bastian says. His dark eyes are impossible to read and impossible to look away from. Then, without any apparent shift in tone or intent, he says: "'The heart asks first for beauty, then for proof that beauty is not merely what it seems.'"
Emery goes still.
He knows that line. He knows it bone-deep and immediate, the same certainty he has for the weight of the blade against his thigh.
Guille, the eastern kingdom poet whose work Emery has read so many times the pages have gone soft and the binding has cracked.
Guille, who writes about longing and beauty and the cruelty of wanting things that exist just past the reach of one's hands.
Guille, who no one in the Underground reads, because poetry does not keep you alive and the people down here are largely concerned with staying alive.
"You know Guille," Emery says. He cannot keep the surprise from his voice. He does not try as hard as he should.
"You recognize it," Bastian says, and his expression shifts into something that Emery can only describe as interested. Not the way the patrons are interested, with their hands and their hunger, but genuinely so, with the sharpness that comes from finding a door where you expected a wall.
"I read," Emery says. It comes out defensive, and he hates it.
"So do I." Bastian's thumb presses into the hollow of Emery's hip, just once, a brief increase of pressure that sends a current up his spine. "What else do you read?"
He should lie. He should give a vague, dismissive answer that maintains the dancer persona and keeps the conversation on the surface where it belongs.
He should not talk about books with his target because books are the one thing he has that is real and giving a mark access to something real is a mistake he cannot afford to make.
"Everything," he says. "Anything. Whatever I can get my hands on."
He needs to stop talking.
"But adventure stories, I think," Bastian says. His voice is warm and his gaze steady and the hand on Emery's hip hasn't moved and Emery is furious at how easily this man has found the thread and is pulling it. "Stories where the hero gets lost in a fantastical world and does not come back."
Emery lets out a laugh. A real one. It escapes before he can catch it and the sound surprises him, light and unguarded in a way he has not been in weeks.
He presses his lips together immediately but it is too late.
Bastian heard it. His expression shifts, goes softer at the edges, and his hand tightens on Emery's hip in a way that should alarm him and instead makes heat pool low in his stomach.
"Is it that obvious?" he asks. He means it to sound self-deprecating. It sounds, instead, genuine. "That I'd like to have an escape?"
"I find the desire relatable," Bastian says.
Emery studies him. The scar, the tattoos, the calm unhurried authority that radiates from him, banked and constant. "You need to pretend to be someone else for a while?"
"On occasion."
"That seems strange. Anyone in the Underground would give their arm to be you."
Bastian hums. The sound is low and resonant and Emery feels it vibrate through the chest pressed against his side. His thumb traces across Emery's hipbone again and his eyes hold Emery's with something that is not amusement and not desire and not anything Emery has a name for.
"If I saw myself now," Bastian says, "I might be jealous too."
The air between them thickens. Emery does not know what to do with the statement, does not know where to put it, because it sounds for all the world as though Bastian Kane, the most feared man in the Underground, is saying he envies himself.
For having Emery in his lap. The thought is absurd.
It is flattery. It is the kind of thing men say to people they want to take to bed, and Emery knows this, and he knows not to trust it, and his heart is still beating too fast.
"What's your name?" Bastian asks.
"Desi," Emery says, without hesitation. The lie is comfortable. He has been using it all week, a name soft enough to belong to a dancer and forgettable enough to be discarded later. It tastes sour in his mouth tonight, but that is a problem for later.
"Desi." Bastian repeats it, turning the syllables over. He does not say whether he believes it.
His attention shifts back to the card game and his hand plays a card and the contact across the table makes a displeased noise at the result. The game continues and Bastian does not let go of Emery's hip.