Chapter 5
The bag smells of burlap and sweat and someone else's fear.
Emery catalogues this with detached efficiency, the practiced calm that comes from surviving bad situations, though at the moment he's having difficulty assembling a specific list of when those situations were worse than this one.
His wrists are bound behind his back with rough cord that bites into skin every time the shoulder carrying him shifts, which is often, because whoever is carrying him has never been asked to handle anything with care and it shows in every graceless step.
He is barefoot. He is wearing dancer's pants and nothing else except the bangles on his wrists, which clink softly with each jarring step and which are, at present, the most useless accessories in the history of the Underground.
The knife strapped to his thigh is gone.
They found it immediately, which means they are not amateurs, which means this is worse than he'd initially calculated.
He counts the turns.
Left, then straight for a long time, long enough that the ambient noise of the Underground's mid-levels fades into something deeper and quieter, the silence that means either nobody lives here or nobody lives here anymore.
Right. Down a set of stairs, the man's boots ringing on stone in a rhythm that Emery memorizes because he memorizes everything, because his brain does not stop working even when his body is slung over a stranger's shoulder with his face full of burlap.
Another right. The air changes, cooler and drier.
They are deep, deeper than the Hollow, deeper than most of the places Emery has ever had reason to go, the depth where lamp oil costs more than the rent and people don't end up by accident.
He is dropped onto a stone floor.
His shoulder hits first, then his hip, and the impact rings through him with the indignity of being handled by people who do not consider him a person. He has been handled by a lot of people who do not consider him a person. The indignity is familiar. That doesn't mean it doesn't sting.
The hood is ripped off.
He squints in the lamplight. The room assembles itself in pieces.
Stone walls, close and rough-cut, stonework that was never meant to be seen by anyone whose opinion mattered.
A desk with papers on it, heavy and scarred, pushed against the far wall.
Two lamps burning low on either side, their light the color of weak tea.
A chair behind the desk, empty. The floor is cold beneath his bare knees and the palms of his bound hands and the thin fabric of his dancer's pants, which were designed for atmosphere and not for kneeling on stone in a room that smells of damp and old iron.
Four men stand at his periphery. The ones who carried him, plus one he hadn't accounted for, which is sloppy on their part because they should have let him hear the full count or not let him hear any of it. A fifth man stands directly in front of him.
The fifth man has one arm.
His remaining hand rests on the pommel of a sword at his hip with easy familiarity, years of compensating for an absent limb refined into instinct.
He is human. Emery clocks this immediately by the dullness of his skin and the ordinary mechanics of his breathing, no ambient hum, no strange refraction of light, nothing that suggests he is anything other than what he appears to be.
Short blond hair and a gaunt face carved by hunger and paranoia in equal measure and a persistent scowl that seems less an expression than the default architecture of his features.
He looks as though he was born frowning and has been refining the technique ever since.
Emery does not recognize him.
That is the first problem. He has been in the Underground long enough to know its power players by face if not by name, and this man is neither.
A one-armed crime boss with enough resources to hire guild assassins and enough ambition to target Bastian Kane should have been on someone's map.
The fact that he isn't means he is either very new or very careful, and the depth of this room and the efficiency of his men and the fact that Emery is currently on his knees with no knife and no shoes suggest the latter.
"Sander," the man says, by way of introduction.
His voice is flat, deliberately so, stripped of anything useful by years of practice, which Emery recognizes because he does the same thing. The difference is that Emery strips his voice to charm and this man strips his to threaten, but the tools are different and the principle is the same.
"I was hoping we'd meet on better terms," Sander continues.
He doesn't move. Doesn't pace, doesn't posture, doesn't do any of the performative things that small men with big operations tend to do when they have someone on their knees.
He just stands there, one hand on his sword, and lets the room do the work.
"Once the contract was fulfilled. But we're having to meet on much less favorable terms now. "
His eyes travel the length of Emery. The bare chest. The dancer's pants.
The bare feet, dirty from the alley behind the Hollow where he'd been grabbed.
The bangles on his wrists, catching lamplight above the cords that bind him.
Sander takes his time with the looking. Not the way the patrons at the Hollow look at him, appraising flesh, calculating cost. This is a man looking at a tool that has not performed its function and deciding whether to salvage it or break it down for parts.
"Because you have failed me," Sander finishes.
The word sits in the room. Failed. Emery's jaw tightens.
His knees ache against the stone and his wrists burn where the cord digs in and his ribs hurt from the way he was carried and he has not failed.
He has never failed. Fourteen tokens taken and fourteen tokens returned and not a single mark still breathing, and this man, this one-armed stranger standing in a room Emery didn't know existed twelve hours ago, is calling him a failure.
"I am not finished," Emery says. His voice is steady. He makes sure of it, because steady is the only thing he can control right now and control is the only currency he has left. "Bastian is a difficult target. If you'd done any research before you posted the contract, you would know that."
Sander moves.
Fast for a man missing a limb. His hand leaves the pommel and catches a fistful of Emery's long blond hair at the crown, wrenching his head back hard enough that his neck pops and his vision flashes white at the edges.
The pain is sharp and immediate and Emery's jaw clenches but he does not make a sound.
He trained that out of himself a long time ago, the sounds, the flinching, all of the involuntary signals that tell an attacker they're getting to you.
Silence is a weapon too. It's one of the first ones he learned.
Sander leans down. His breath is stale with cheap spirits and not enough food, and his eyes are pale and cold and very, very close.
"Maybe it would have been easier to kill the Vesper," he says, delivering each word with careful precision, a verdict being handed down, "if you were not letting the man put his cock in you."
The flush hits Emery's face before he can stop it.
Not shame. Anger, white-hot and immediate and entirely unhelpful, flooding up from somewhere in his chest and settling in his cheeks, burning there.
At being watched. At the confirmation that someone had been close enough to see, or to hear, or to be told, and he hadn't known.
He had been careful. He had been so goddamn careful, and this man is standing over him with a fistful of his hair and the specific knowledge that Emery had fucked his mark, and the worst part, the absolute worst part, the part that makes the anger curdle into something closer to nausea, is that Sander isn't wrong to be furious about it.
Because Emery had been in that room with Bastian.
Naked. Unarmed. The knife tossed off the bed as though it were nothing.
And he had not killed him. He had not even tried to kill him, not really, not the way he should have.
He had lain there and let himself be taken apart by a mouth that could unmake him and hands that could break him and a voice that could boil the blood in his veins, and he had liked it.
He had liked it so much that for a full, shining, catastrophic stretch of time he had forgotten what he was there to do.
And someone had been watching.
"I am not done with the contract," Emery says through his teeth.
"You have had your chance." Sander releases him with a shove that sends him swaying on his knees.
He steps back, resettles his hand on his sword pommel, and regards Emery with dispassionate assessment, weighing the cost of patience against the satisfaction of disposal.
"And you wasted it. Now I have to consider the possibility that you've been compromised.
That you'll run back to him and tell him someone's put a price on his head.
" He pauses. Lets the words find their weight.
"Which makes hiring another assassin that much harder. Which makes you a loose end."
Emery has never in his life been a loose end.
He has been a tool, a body, a blade for hire and a pretty face in someone's lap and a convenient fiction people tell themselves when they need someone disposable.
But he has never been loose. He has never been the frayed thread that someone needs to snip to keep the garment from unraveling.
He is both insulted and aware that insult is not a particularly useful emotion when the man delivering it is reaching for his boot.