Chapter 6 #4
Bastian approaches.
His boots are quiet on the stone. He moves with unhurried confidence, never needing to rush because the things he's walking toward have the good sense to wait.
The blood on his hands has dried. His braid has come partially loose, white strands falling around the sharp planes of his face, and his black eyes find Emery in the dark with the precision of not needing light to see what he is looking for.
His expression shifts.
It opens. Softens. Becomes the thing that Emery has only ever seen directed at him and that he does not have a name for, the thing that lives in the space between the crime lord who just collapsed a stronghold and the man who is now looking at Emery and seeing nothing else worth the effort.
The two versions exist without apparent seam and Emery cannot reconcile them and that, he is beginning to realize, is going to be a problem.
Bastian stops in front of him. Close enough that Emery can feel the heat radiating from him, the Vesper warmth that runs beneath the skin.
He looks down at Emery, at the cloak and the bare feet and the rope marks on his wrists, and something moves in his expression that is not soft at all, something that catalogues the damage and files it under a heading that Emery suspects is going to have consequences for someone.
His voice, when he speaks, is low and smooth and silk-dangerous, which is apparently its default setting.
"Here is what is going to happen," Bastian says.
Emery should stand up. He should get off the ground and meet this man at something closer to eye level and not sit here in a borrowed cloak looking up at him.
He stays where he is because his legs are not currently accepting requests and because standing would put him closer to Bastian and closer to Bastian is a place where his decision-making becomes unreliable.
"You are going to help me find Sander," Bastian continues.
His voice does not rise. It does not need to.
It fills the space between them with quiet authority, not making a request. "You are going to help dismantle his operation from the inside.
And then you are going to report to your guild that Sander is dead. "
The word guild lands in the air between them, sharp and final.
Emery's chest tightens. His face doesn't change, because he has spent years training his face to not change, but something inside him goes very still and very cold in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the fact that Bastian just said guild with the specific intonation of knowing exactly what guild he means.
"I don't know what guild you're referring to," Emery says.
His voice is steady. He is a dancer at the Hollow.
That is what he is. That is the lie he built and the lie he lived and the lie that got him into a bedroom with this man and the lie that is apparently, at this moment, worth nothing at all.
"I'm a dancer at the Velvet Hollow, remember? "
He puts a curl of suggestion into the last word because charm is the last weapon he has left and he might as well use it.
Bastian's smile widens. It is not a comforting smile. He is enjoying himself enormously and wants Emery to know it.
He reaches into his tunic and pulls something out and Emery's blood goes cold before his brain has identified the object, because his body knows.
His body recognizes the weight and the shape and the sound of it before his eyes do, the instinct older and faster than sight.
Bastian takes Emery's hand, turns it palm-up, and places the object in it and closes his fingers around it.
A contract token. Emery's contract token. The one he kept in his spare shirt, the one with the kill order stamped into the back in cipher, the one that says Bastian Kane, Vesper, approach with extreme caution.
The metal is warm from Bastian's skin.
Emery goes rigid. The weight of it in his palm is the most familiar thing in the world and the most damning, and he cannot breathe.
He cannot think. He is holding the proof of his assignment in a hand that Bastian placed it in, which means Bastian has been to his room, which means Bastian has known, which means everything.
Bastian leans down. His lips graze the shell of Emery's ear, and his breath is warm, and his voice is so low it barely qualifies as sound.
"I remember that night very well," he murmurs. A pause. Deliberate. Timed with the precision of always having understood what his voice can do. "Emery."
His real name. Not Desi. Not the fiction. His real name in Bastian's mouth.
The sound of it in that voice, against his ear, does something to Emery that he will not examine.
He will not examine the way his pulse hammers or the way his skin prickles or the way his hand tightens around the token hard enough that the metal edges bite into his palm.
He will not examine any of it because examining it means acknowledging it, and acknowledging it means admitting that this man has known who he was from the very beginning, from the dance and the lap and the card game and the hallway and the bedroom and the mouth and the hands and everything that followed.
He knew from the beginning.
He kissed Emery knowing Emery was there to kill him.
He fucked him knowing. He tossed the knife off the bed because it was nothing, because a knife in the hands of a human assassin was nothing to a Vesper who could unmake bone with a whisper.
He took Emery apart slowly and carefully, with exacting attention, savoring something precious, and all along he knew that the pretty dancer in his lap was holding a token with his death written on it.
Emery turns his head. Just enough. Just far enough to catch the black of those depthless eyes, inches from his own.
Bastian's face is close enough to kiss. Close enough to kill, if Emery had anything to kill him with and if killing him were possible, which tonight has established it comprehensively is not.
Bastian's expression is heated. There is no other word for it. The warmth in his eyes has an edge to it, something possessive and wanting and entirely unashamed, and it is directed at Emery with focused intensity, having decided exactly what he wants and being patient enough to wait for it.
He pulls back. Straightens. Steps away from Emery with controlled ease, choosing to create distance and wanting it understood that the choice is his.
"Hask will show you to your quarters in the compound," he says.
And then he walks out of the alley, casual and unhurried, having just rearranged the entire shape of Emery's situation without apparent effort, having revealed that he has known everything from the start and rescued him anyway and is now offering him a room in his own compound, the compound that Emery was supposed to be finding a way to infiltrate.
The most notorious crime lord in the Underground has handed an assassin the proof of his own contract and told him where he'll be sleeping and walked away with his back turned, which is either the most arrogant thing Emery has ever witnessed or the most trusting, and he can't tell which is worse.
Emery stays where he is.
The token is a small, warm weight in his clenched fist. His wrists ache. His feet are cold. The cloak that isn't his smells of leather and blood, and somewhere behind him, at the far end of the alley, Hask is waiting.
He sits for a long moment, long enough for the silence to settle, long enough for the weight of everything that has just happened to press down on him and for him to push back against it, because that is what he does, that is what he has always done.
He does not crumble. He does not fold. He sits with the wreckage and he sorts through it and he decides what is useful and what is not and he keeps moving.
He stands. His legs cooperate, barely. He pulls the cloak tighter and walks to where Hask is waiting at the end of the alley, his pale-and-dark patterned skin almost invisible in the shadows, his mask a dark line across the lower half of his face, his light-swallowing eyes tracking Emery's approach with calm patience, having waited a long time without considering it a hardship.
Hask falls into step beside him without comment. They walk in silence for a dozen paces before he speaks, and when he does, his voice has the dry, measured quality of an observation being offered rather than a conversation being started.
"Our boss does not usually employ the assassins sent to kill him," Hask says.
Emery almost asks if Bastian fucks all of them or if he's the exception.
He does not. He pulls the cloak tighter and follows Hask into the dark, and the token burns in his fist, small and accusatory, and the shape of his life, which was already strange, has just become something he no longer recognizes.
He keeps walking anyway. He has never known how to do anything else.