Chapter 11
Hask goes to report to Bastian. Emery knows this because he watches him disappear down the corridor toward the study, and because the lamp beneath the study door is burning the way it always burns when Bastian is awake and working, which is to say: late, and always.
Emery takes a bath.
The water is hot, which is a luxury he has not stopped being grateful for even after days in the compound, because hot water in the Underground is not a given.
In the guild house the water came lukewarm on good days and glacial on bad ones, and in the places he lived before the guild, the boarding houses and rented corners and rooms he shared with strangers whose names he never learned, hot water was something that happened to other people.
People with coin and roofs that did not leak and doors that locked from the inside and the casual security of knowing that the place they slept tonight would still be available to them tomorrow.
He sinks into the basin and lets the heat work at the knots in his shoulders and the tension in his jaw.
He scrubs his arms where Brennan's fingers rested and his neck where Royce's breath landed and the hollow of his collarbone where someone, he cannot remember who, one of the earlier patrons, pressed a mouth against him in a gesture that was probably intended as affection and landed as intrusion.
He scrubs until the touches are gone, or at least until they are something he can set aside, which is not the same thing but is the closest he is going to get tonight.
He dresses in clean clothes, not the dancer's outfit, which is folded and set aside for tomorrow and which he does not want to look at, but the clothes Bastian gave him when he first arrived at the compound.
A dark linen shirt, soft from washing, that fits him better than anything he has ever owned, and trousers that do not have holes in them.
He catches himself in the small mirror above the basin and thinks he looks as though he lives here, which is a dangerous thought, because he does not live here.
He is a guest, or an asset, or a temporary fixture in a place that will not remember him once his usefulness expires.
He goes to the kitchen, because the alternative is lying in his room with his thoughts, and his thoughts are not currently good company.
The compound at night is quiet in a way that should feel oppressive but does not.
The corridors are lit by lamps turned low, their flames guttering in the faint draft that moves through the stone, and the walls carry the residual warmth of the hearth fires that burn in the common rooms during the day.
Emery's bare feet are silent on the flagstones.
He passes closed doors, Corvin's room, where a faint scratch of charcoal on canvas is audible if he holds his breath, and Tessa's, where the light is already out, and turns the corner into the kitchen.
It is large, for a kitchen in the Depths.
A long wooden table runs down the center, scarred with knife marks and burn rings and the accumulated evidence of years of meals prepared and consumed and argued over.
Iron pots hang from hooks above a stone counter.
A hearth dominates the far wall, its coals banked for the night but still glowing, casting the room in the kind of amber half-light that makes everything look warmer than it is.
Dried herbs hang from the ceiling beams, bundles of rosemary and thyme and something Emery does not recognize that smells faintly of anise, and the air carries the ghost of whatever Jivaldi cooked for dinner, something with root vegetables and game, layered beneath the permanent ambient scent of woodsmoke and bread.
A plate is waiting for him on the table.
Jivaldi, who told him on his first day that he would leave a plate out for late arrivals, has covered it with a cloth.
Emery lifts the cloth and finds bread, cheese, sliced meat, and a small bowl of stewed vegetables that are still faintly warm.
He sits at the table and picks at his food and tries to sort through what he is doing.
The sorting does not go well.
He starts with the practical: Sander's men are hooked.
They will take the offer to their boss. If Sander agrees, and Emery is almost certain he will, because he's the kind of man who thinks he's owed gifts, then the next step is an invitation to wherever Sander is hiding, and then the next step after that is a blade in his ribs and the closing of a contract that Emery was never actually given but has adopted through a series of increasingly questionable decisions that he does not have the energy to regret.
That is the practical. The practical is manageable. The practical has edges and corners and a shape that Emery's mind can wrap around without slipping.
The sorting keeps arriving at Bastian.
It arrives at the way Bastian looked at him in the study, standing between his legs with his hands on Emery's hips, saying things that should not have had the effect they had.
It arrives at Bastian's mouth on his throat, and the question he asked, and the contract token he placed in Emery's hand back in the alley with a smile that said he already knew the answer.
It arrives at the books on the bedside table, carried through the Underground by someone who understood what three dog-eared books meant to a man who has never owned anything else worth keeping.
He does not trust people. He has never trusted people. Every person who has ever been given access to the unguarded parts of him has used that access to hurt him, and the pattern is so consistent that he long ago stopped blaming the individuals and started blaming himself for letting them.
Bastian is different. He knows Bastian is different.
He knows it in the place beneath rational thought where the body keeps its own counsel.
Bastian is different because he knew Emery was there to kill him and did not flinch.
Because he returned his books. Because he does not chase and does not demand and does not punish, and every interaction between them is structured around a choice he keeps placing in Emery's hands: stay or go, come closer or pull away, and either way I will still be here.
The problem is not that Bastian is different. The problem is that different still ends.
He is lost in the spiraling, uselessness of his own thoughts when he hears quiet footsteps.
He knows the sound. He knows it because his body has catalogued it without his permission, filed it away in the part of him that tracks threats and has apparently reclassified Bastian as something other than one, which is either the most dangerous mistake he has ever made or the most honest thing his instincts have ever told him.
Bastian enters the kitchen.
He crosses to the other side of the room, pours himself a cup of water from the clay pitcher on the counter, and sits across from him at the table.
The chair scrapes against the stone. The coals in the hearth shift and settle.
The lamplight catches the white of his unbraided hair and the black of his tattoos and the sharp, scarred line that cuts across his left eye, and Emery looks at him and thinks, with the resigned clarity of having fought a losing battle long enough to stop pretending otherwise, that this man is going to destroy him.
Not with his voice. Not with the power that lives in his throat and can reduce a human body to ash.
With the quiet, persistent, unbearable fact of showing up and not leaving.
Goosebumps break out across the back of Emery's neck. He swallows and says nothing.
Bastian does not look uncomfortable. He never looks uncomfortable. He drinks his water with unhurried ease, having decided that this moment, the kitchen, the low light, the two of them across a scarred table in the middle of the night, is exactly where he wants to be and requires no improvement.
He begins talking through the plan going forward.
His voice is low and matter-of-fact, stripped of the honeyed edge it carries when they are alone and touching, and the absence of that edge is its own kind of intimacy, the intimacy of choosing, right now, to speak to Emery as an equal and not as something he wants to devour.
The plan: they will use the in Emery has built with Sander's men to get an invitation to wherever Sander is staying. Emery will go as himself, the dancer those men have come to trust. He will bring a friend of Bastian's choosing. Bastian and his crew will follow at distance and wait for the signal.
"A friend? Hask?" Emery asks. He tears a piece of bread and does not eat it, just holds it between his fingers while his pulse does something obnoxious.
Bastian shakes his head. "Hask is not going to pass as a pretty dancer.
" He says it with the faintest tilt of his lips, the ghost of amusement, and Emery pictures Hask in bangles and low-slung trousers, that too-wide mouth and those bone-white teeth on full display, and finds the image so incongruous that something in his chest loosens despite itself.
"We need someone who can blend in. Someone they will believe you would bring. "
"Someone small and pretty and non-threatening," Emery says.
"Someone capable who happens to be those things as well."
Emery knows who he means before he says it. "Avery."
Bastian inclines his head. "He is one of my best. Together the two of you should have no trouble holding your own until the signal is given.
" He pauses, and something in his expression shifts, not softer exactly, but more careful, the attention of a man about to say something he knows will land on bruised ground.
"I would not send you somewhere I did not believe you would come back from. "