Chapter 10
The next two nights pass in the same miserable rhythm, and Sander's men do not come.
Emery dances. He endures. He performs the version of himself that the Hollow requires, pliant and pretty and available in all the ways that make men reach for their coin purses, and he waits, and the waiting is worse than the work because at least the work gives his body something to do while his mind circles the same drain it has been circling since Bastian walked out of the Hollow and left him here with Hask and a directive and the ghost of an expression Emery still cannot name.
He is good at waiting. Patience is a professional requirement in his line of work, and you do not kill people for a living without learning to sit still for hours in uncomfortable positions while your target decides whether tonight is the night they will finally walk past the window you have been watching since sundown.
But this is a different kind of patience.
This is the kind that requires him to smile while strangers put their hands on him, and the smiling is getting harder.
It has never been hard before. That is the problem, or one of the problems, or possibly the root from which all the other problems grow.
Before Bastian, the hands were tolerable because they were all the same, interchangeable, meaningless, a series of unwanted touches that Emery endured as weather.
You do not take weather personally. You do not lie awake afterward thinking about weather.
The hands came and went and left nothing behind except the occasional bruise and the general, low-grade erosion of something Emery stopped trying to name years ago because naming it would have meant admitting it existed, and admitting it existed would have meant admitting it could be damaged, and he could not afford to be damaged.
Damaged things got discarded. He learned that early and well and built his entire life around the lesson.
But Bastian's hands are not weather. Bastian's hands are specific and deliberate and warm in a way that has ruined him for the generic variety, and now every touch that is not Bastian's feels wrong in a way he can sense but not articulate, too tight in some places and too loose in others, and the wrongness sits on his skin long after the hands are gone.
He does not tell Hask this. He does not tell anyone this.
He dances and he smiles and he redirects groping fingers with the practiced ease of years of doing it long enough to make it look effortless, and if Hask notices that Emery's redirections are getting sharper, his smiles thinner, his tolerance for lingering touches shorter with each passing hour, he does not comment on it.
Hask comments on very little, which is one of the things Emery is beginning to appreciate about him.
The man has an budget of language that borders on miserly, spending his words rarely, deliberately, and never on anything that does not warrant the expenditure.
On the third night, they come.
Emery spots them before they are fully through the curtain.
Two men, both built for the kind of muscle that gets hired to stand behind someone more important and look threatening.
The first is broad across the chest with a jaw that could stop a fist and hands that hang at his sides looking for something to close around.
The second is leaner, sharper, with a smile that shows too many teeth and eyes that move across the room assessing, appraising, pricing everything in sight.
They are dressed in civilian clothes that do not quite hide the weapons underneath, and they move with the swagger of men accustomed to getting what they want in establishments and never given a compelling reason to change their approach.
They ask for him at the bar. For Desi. The name Emery gave Bastian that first night, the name that has apparently made its way through Sander's network in a thread he can now follow back to its source.
The four-armed bartender directs them to a table without looking at Emery, but her upper left hand makes a small gesture below the bar that he catches, two fingers tapped against her forearm, the kind of shorthand that staff in places such as this develop over years of managing men who do not understand the word no.
Emery does not go to them immediately. He lets them order drinks.
He lets them settle into the cushioned booth and survey the room and begin the process of deciding which of the available bodies interest them most. He watches them from across the floor as he moves through the tail end of a dance, noting the way the broad one tracks the dancers with open hunger and the way the lean one tracks the exits with something closer to professional habit.
Muscle and brains in a two-man package, and the broad one will be easy while the lean one will require more care.
He catches Hask's eye across the room. Hask is in his usual corner, drink untouched, and his gaze moves from Emery to the two men and back with unhurried precision, cataloguing a new variable.
His right hand, beneath the table, rests on the hilt of his dagger.
He does not nod. He does not need to. The acknowledgment is in the stillness, in the way his body shifts from resting to ready without any visible change in posture, a blade drawn half an inch from its sheath, still housed, still quiet, but no longer at rest.
Emery adjusts his bangles, pushes his long hair behind his ear, and crosses the room.
He approaches them the way he approaches all marks: sideways.
Not directly to their table but past it, close enough that his hip nearly brushes the edge, close enough that the warm light catches the gold of his earrings and the line of his bare torso and the careful arrangement of his expression into something that suggests he has not noticed them at all and would be delighted to discover they exist. It is a performance.
Everything about this is a performance. But Emery has been performing since he was old enough to understand that the version of himself people want to see is more useful than the version he actually is, and the difference between the two has long since stopped feeling like a distinction.
The broad one notices him first. His eyes track Emery's path with the unsubtle focus of hunger, a man watching a body cross his field of vision and reducing it to a commodity before it has finished moving.
The feeling settles into Emery's stomach and stays there. He swallows it. He has swallowed worse.
"You're new," the broad one says, which is not a question but an opening, an invitation for Emery to perform gratitude at being noticed.
Emery pauses, turns, and lets his eyes widen just enough to suggest pleasant surprise. "Not new," he says, and smiles in a way that makes the word sound shared and secret. "Just hard to find."
He gives them a name. Not Desi, because Desi is who they are looking for, and Emery has no intention of handing himself to them on a plate.
He gives them something else, something soft and unremarkable, the kind of name that slides through the memory and leaves nothing to grip.
He has a collection of these names the way other people have collections of knives.
Each one sharpened for a specific purpose, each one disposable.
He does what he is best at: he makes people feel chosen.
It is not difficult. It is never difficult with men who mistake attention for affection and proximity for intimacy, who are so starved for the feeling of being wanted that they will swallow any lie delivered with enough eye contact and the right tilt of a bare shoulder.
Emery sits at the edge of their booth, close enough to touch but not quite touching, and he asks them questions in a voice that suggests their answers are the most interesting things he has heard all evening.
He laughs at the right moments. He leans in at the right moments.
He lets his knee brush the broad one's thigh under the table and watches the man's pupils dilate, and he thinks about Bastian's hands on his hips in the study and the sound Bastian makes when Emery kisses him, that low, vibrating hum that settles in his bones, and he pushes the thought down because it is not useful right now and he cannot afford the distraction.
Both men are visibly taken with him almost immediately.
The broad one, Brennan he learns, because men who want to impress you always give you their real names, keeps finding excuses to touch him.
A hand on his shoulder. Fingers tracing the line of a bangle on his wrist. The lean one, Royce, offered with the confident ease of thinking his name carries weight, is more restrained but no less interested, his sharp eyes following Emery's movements with an attention that is equal parts desire and assessment.
He is the smarter of the two, and therefore the more dangerous, and Emery makes sure to pay him slightly more attention because smart men are the ones who get suspicious when they feel overlooked.
They tell him they are in the area on business.
Emery does not ask what kind of business because asking too early makes you look like an operative rather than a whore, and the line between interest and interrogation is one he learned to walk with surgical precision a long time ago.
Instead he asks them where they are from.
Brennan says the upper tunnels, a district Emery knows by reputation as a transitional zone between Sander's territory and the no-man's-land that buffers it from Bastian's.
Royce says nothing about where he is from, which tells Emery more than an answer would have.