Chapter 3 #4
Softly, so softly, his mouth brushing Emery's with a tenderness that has no place in a transaction, no place in a brothel room, no place between a crime lord and the whore he just purchased for the evening.
His hand comes up and cups the side of Emery's face and his thumb traces the line of his cheekbone and Emery melts against him because his body has given up pretending it does not want to.
A knock sounds at the door.
Emery flinches. Bastian does not. His hand stays on Emery's face, steady and warm, and his eyes flicker toward the door with mild annoyance, interrupted during something he considers more important than whatever is on the other side.
"Bastian." The voice is muffled, male. "We've got the manifest situation downstairs."
Bastian exhales. His thumb strokes Emery's cheek once more. He kisses him again, unhurried, thorough, making it clear that kissing Emery outranks whatever business matter is demanding his attention. Then he pulls back.
"I have to go," he says. His voice is quiet, carrying the edge of an apology without quite arriving at one.
Emery is boneless and useless. His body is still humming with aftershocks and his mind is a wreck and he does not trust himself to speak so he nods.
Bastian eases him off his lap and onto the bed with a care that makes Emery's chest ache.
He watches Bastian stand. Watches him dress with efficient, practiced movements: pants, tunic, sash, the red tassels falling into place at his hip.
He does not look like he was just buried inside someone.
He looks composed, dangerous, exactly what he was when he walked into the Hollow tonight.
Emery lies on the bed with the evidence of what they just did still wet between his thighs and watches him become the crime lord again. The transformation is seamless and total. He looks for the man who traced his cheekbone with his thumb and whispered his name and cannot find him anymore.
Bastian turns back. He crosses to the bed and leans down and kisses Emery one more time and the gentleness of it makes something sharp twist behind Emery's sternum.
His hand rests on the side of Emery's neck, his thumb at the hinge of his jaw, and the touch lingers for a moment longer than it needs to.
Then he straightens. Crosses to the door. Opens it.
The masked man from the table is on the other side.
He glances past Bastian into the room, and Emery registers the brief flicker of his gaze: assessing, neutral, unsurprised.
His eyes meet Emery's. He nods, a small, polite gesture that acknowledges Emery's existence without commenting on his current state, which is naked and flushed and wrecked in a rumpled bed.
Emery feels heat flood his face.
Bastian steps into the hallway. The door begins to close behind him. In the narrowing gap Emery sees the masked man fall into step beside his boss, sees them turn, sees Bastian's white braid swing against his back as he walks away. The door clicks shut.
Emery stares at the ceiling.
The room is quiet. The lamp on the bedside table casts warm shadows across the draped walls.
The sheets beneath him smell of Bastian's skin, that deep resinous warmth with the edge of smoke, and the oil, and sex.
His body is loose and sated and still trembling faintly at the edges.
He can feel Bastian leaking out of him. He can still feel the phantom pressure of him inside.
He turns his head and looks at the floor. The knife is there, a thin glint of metal on the dark rug, exactly where Bastian tossed it.
He had the man naked. He had the man on his back, underneath him, distracted, vulnerable.
He had every opening he could have asked for and more besides.
Fourteen successful contracts. Fourteen clean kills.
Not once has he hesitated. Not once has his hand failed to reach for the blade when the moment arrived.
He covers his face with both hands. Presses his palms into his eye sockets until he sees sparks.
"Fuck," he says, into the dark of his own hands. "Fuck."
He is in deep trouble.
He is in the deepest trouble of his life.
He drops his hands. Stares at the ceiling again.
His body is heavy and warm and satisfied in a way it has never been and his chest is tight with something that is not satisfaction at all.
It is the cold, creeping understanding that he has just failed, spectacularly and completely, to do the one thing he has never failed at.
And worse. Far worse. He failed because he did not want to succeed.
Because somewhere between Bastian's mouth on his throat and Bastian's hands on his hips and Bastian's voice murmuring at the shell of his ear, Emery stopped wanting to kill him and started wanting something else entirely.
That something else is a vulnerability he cannot afford.
It is a crack in the armor and cracks in the armor are how people end up dead.
He knows this. He has always known this.
He has built his entire life on the principle that wanting things is a liability and needing people is a death sentence and the only person who will ever keep Emery alive is Emery.
He sits up. His body protests. He ignores it. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands and crosses to the knife on the floor and picks it up. It is cold in his hand, familiar. The weight of it is supposed to ground him. It does not.
He straps it back to his thigh. He gathers his clothes, such as they are, and dresses.
The vest, the pants, the bangles. He catches his reflection in the mirror across the room: flushed, disheveled, bite marks visible on his neck and collarbone.
He looks exactly what he just was. He does not look like an assassin.
He looks like a man who has been taken apart and put back together wrong.
He has to get out of this room. He has to think.
He has to figure out what happens next because the contract is still active and the token is still in his jacket pocket downstairs and Bastian Kane is still alive and Emery's record is still, for the first time in his career, on the verge of a blemish he cannot explain away.
He lets himself out of the room. The hallway is empty. The sounds of the Hollow drift up from below: music, laughter, the clink of glasses. Normal sounds. The sounds of a world that has not rearranged itself in the last hour the way Emery's has.
He goes to the bathing room at the end of the hall.
He fills the tub. He sinks into the water and scrubs himself clean and does not think about the way Bastian said his fake name or the way Bastian's thumb traced his cheekbone or the way Bastian kissed him at the end, soft and unhurried, giving them all the time in the world.
He sinks lower in the water and closes his eyes and presses his fingers against the bruise Bastian's mouth left on his throat and thinks, with bleak clarity, watching the architecture of his certainty collapse around him: Fourteen. And then you.