Chapter 13
The compound is quiet in the way that it is always quiet at this hour, not silent, because the Depths are never silent, but muted, the sounds of habitation banked to their lowest setting.
A distant murmur of voices from the common room.
The scratch of charcoal on canvas from behind Corvin's door, because the half-giant apparently keeps the same hours Emery does, which is to say terrible ones.
The faint, rhythmic creak of someone pacing in a room Emery cannot identify, back and forth, back and forth, the sound of a person working through something that will not let them be still.
Emery moves through the corridor quietly. His feet are bare. His long hair is down, still mussed from gentle hands. He is just a man walking through a hallway in the middle of the night, trying to get from one end of his thoughts to the other without falling into the gap between them.
The gap is Bastian.
The gap is always Bastian now, and the consistency of it is its own kind of problem, because Emery has spent his entire life navigating around gaps, gaps in his safety, gaps in his resources, gaps in the basic human infrastructure of care and connection that most people take for granted, and he has gotten very good at stepping over them, walking around them, pretending they are not there.
He cannot step over Bastian. Bastian is too large, too warm, too devastatingly present, and the gap he occupies is not a gap in Emery's circumstances but a gap in Emery himself, a space that has been empty for so long Emery forgot it was there until someone stood in it and he felt, for the first time, what it was like for it to be full.
He is thinking about this, about fullness, and absence, and the fact that Bastian said you are not a whim with the calm certainty of stating a law of nature, when he rounds the corner and collides with Fredan.
It is not a gentle collision. Fredan is coming from the opposite direction, moving with the heavy, purposeful stride of a man who has been drinking and has decided that the alcohol has given him both courage and permission to take up more than his allotted space, and the impact sends Emery back a step, his shoulder hitting the stone wall.
Fredan is taller than Emery, broader, and his eyes are glassy with drink and they take in Emery with a slow, deliberate assessment that makes him want to punch in his teeth.
Emery watches Fredan's gaze travel. Down from his face, across his chest where the linen shirt is loose and untucked, over his hips, to his bare feet and back up again.
Fredan takes in the mussed hair, the flush that Emery knows is still on his skin, because Bastian's touch apparently lingers the way his voice does, long after the source has withdrawn, and the direction Emery is coming from, which is the corridor that leads from the deeper part of the compound where Bastian's room is.
"Well," Fredan says, and the word comes out slurred at the edges and weighted with the contempt that small men reserve for people they cannot understand and have decided to despise instead. "Look who's taking the walk of shame."
Emery's jaw tightens. He says nothing. He has learned, through years of practice, through the accumulated weight of a thousand interactions with men who mistake cruelty for strength, that the first response is rarely the right one, and the right one is usually silence, because silence forces the other person to fill it, and what they fill it with tells you everything you need to know about what you are dealing with.
Fredan fills it exactly the way Emery expects him to.
"Must be nice," he says, stepping closer.
The corridor is narrow here, the walls close, and Fredan's bulk makes it narrower.
He smells of cheap spirits and something sour underneath, the smell of a man who has been stewing in his own resentment for days and has decided tonight is the night he lets it boil over.
"Having a warm bed to crawl into whenever you want.
All you have to do is spread your legs and the boss rolls out the red carpet. "
Emery keeps his voice level and flat, the voice he uses when he is calculating how many moves it will take to end a confrontation and has not yet decided whether the ending will be verbal or physical. "Keep your hands and your thoughts to yourself, Fredan."
Fredan does not keep his hands to himself.
He grabs Emery by the arm. The grip is hard, the fingers digging in with the dull, bruising pressure of a man who does not know his own strength or does not care, and Emery's body reacts before his mind does, a flash of heat up his spine, a clenching in his stomach, the instinctive jerk of someone who has been grabbed too many times by too many people and whose tolerance for uninvited contact has, as of tonight, reached a threshold he did not know he had.
He does not jerk free. He stills. He looks at Fredan's hand on his arm and then he looks at Fredan's face and the look he gives him is very calm and very cold and carries the clarity of having already decided how this ends and giving the other person one final chance to change the outcome.
Fredan does not take the chance.
"Maybe I should find out what all the fuss is about," he says, and his voice drops, thickens, takes on the texture of something that is no longer posturing but promising.
His grip tightens. His other hand comes up and his fingers close around the front of Emery's shirt, bunching the fabric, pulling him closer.
"You're obviously good at it. Must be, to keep his attention this long.
I've never seen him keep a whore around for more than a night. "
Emery's knee connects with Fredan's groin.
The strike is precise, targeted, efficient, delivered with the full force of a body that has been trained to weaponize every part of itself, and the effect is immediate.
Fredan's hands release. His body folds. He drops to his knees with a strangled sound that might be a gasp and might be a curse and is definitely the sound of discovering that the person he was threatening is not the kind of person who waits for permission to defend himself.
Emery steps around him. His pulse is elevated but his hands are steady as always. He does not run. He walks. He walks away from Fredan with the measured, unhurried pace of having ended a conversation and having no intention of reopening it.
He makes it four steps.
Fredan recovers faster than he should. Faster than a man who just took a knee to the groin has any right to recover, which means the pain was not as debilitating as Emery calculated, or Fredan's rage is overriding his body's attempts to keep him down.
Either way, Emery hears the scramble of boots on stone behind him and has just enough time to register what is happening when the full weight of Fredan's body slams into him.
His chest hits the wall. The impact drives the air from his lungs and sends a crack of pain through the front of his skull where it connects with stone.
Fredan's hand is at the back of his neck, grinding his face into the wall, and the other hand is on his shoulder, pinning him.
Emery kicks, a hard, backwards strike aimed at Fredan's knee, but the angle is wrong and the blow glances off his shin instead and Fredan barely flinches.
He cannot breathe. Fredan's grip on the back of his neck is crushing, his thick fingers wrapped around the column of Emery's throat from behind, and the pressure is compressing his airway in a way that turns the world grey at the edges.
The stone is cold against his cheek. He can smell Fredan's breath behind him, hot and sour and close, and the closeness is the worst part, worse than the pain, worse than the pressure, worse than the tactical disadvantage of being pinned face-first against a wall by a man who outweighs him by fifty pounds.
The closeness is the thing that reaches into the part of Emery that he keeps locked and armored and drags something out of it that feels as though it holds every hand that has ever held him down, every body that has ever pressed against his without permission, every moment of his life when he was smaller and weaker and trapped and the only option available to him was to endure.
"You're not special," Fredan says, and his mouth is close to Emery's ear and his voice is low and ugly and intimate in a way that makes Emery's skin crawl. "You think you are but you're not."
Emery gets his dagger free.
The blade is at his thigh, it is always at his thigh, even in the compound, even when he is barefoot and mussed and walking hallways in the middle of the night, because he is an assassin and an assassin without a blade is just a body waiting to be used, and his hand finds the hilt by muscle memory.
He does not think about it. He does not weigh the consequences.
He does not calculate the political implications of burying a knife in a member of Bastian's crew in Bastian's own compound.
He stabs Fredan in the hip.
The blade goes in clean, four inches of steel through fabric and flesh and into the muscle beneath, and Fredan screams. The sound is high and ragged and gratifying in a way that Emery does not have the emotional bandwidth to feel guilty about.
Fredan's hands release. He staggers back, his own hand going to the dagger buried in his hip, and Emery spins away from the wall.
He does not pull the dagger out. The dagger is in Fredan's body and Emery's hand is empty and for a moment they stand in the corridor looking at each other, Fredan hunched and bleeding and furious, Emery against the opposite wall with his chest heaving and a red mark on his throat that will be a bruise by morning.
Emery runs.