Chapter 15 #3
The command is quiet, not harsh, not the tone he uses with his crew or his contacts or the men who cross him. It is the tone he uses with Emery alone, the one that lives in the space between request and demand and does not quite land on either.
Emery does not move. "We're discussing the operation."
"We were." Bastian pushes back from the desk. His chair moves on the stone floor and he sits back in it and looks at Emery with an expression that is patient in the way of knowing what he is waiting for will eventually arrive. "Now we're discussing whatever has put that look on your face."
"There's no look on my face."
"There is." Bastian's voice is steady, certain, infuriatingly calm. "There is the look of a man who woke up in my bed and has spent the hours since building a wall between us. I can see you doing it. You are not subtle."
The accusation lands because it is accurate and accuracy, in Emery's experience, is the most effective weapon anyone can deploy against him. He stands beside the desk and his jaw tightens and his arms cross over his chest and he knows the posture is defensive and cannot make himself uncross them.
"Come here," Bastian says again.
Emery goes.
He hates that he goes. He hates that his feet carry him around the desk and into the space beside Bastian's chair without the intermediary step of deciding.
He hates that his body has developed its own relationship with this man, independent of his mind's objections, and that the relationship involves obeying quiet commands and pressing close and wanting to be touched in ways that make his chest ache.
Bastian's hands find his waist. They pull him forward, down, until Emery is in his lap, straddling his thighs in the desk chair, his knees braced on either side of Bastian's hips, his hands catching Bastian's shoulders for balance.
The position is intimate and confrontational.
It puts their faces close and makes eye contact unavoidable and Emery suspects that is entirely the point.
"Tell me," Bastian says. His hands are warm and steady on Emery's waist. "What transpired between Emery in my arms in bed and Emery standing before me with his walls up."
Emery's fingers tighten on Bastian's shoulders.
The fabric of the tunic is warm beneath his grip.
Bastian's body is solid between his thighs and the heat of him radiates upward through Emery's trousers and his hands are on Emery's waist with the same certainty they always carry and it is difficult to think clearly when Bastian is touching him.
It has always been difficult to think clearly when Bastian is touching him. That is part of the problem.
"You're a ruthless killer," Emery says. His voice comes out flat and controlled.
He is choosing each word with precision because precision is the only weapon he has left when his body has already surrendered.
"You make your money off extorting and blackmailing people.
You are the most feared person in the Underground and people tell stories about you in the dark to scare each other. "
Bastian does not flinch. He does not deny. He sits beneath Emery and holds his waist and his expression does not change, does not close off, does not harden into the defensive posture of a man being accused of something he does not wish to acknowledge. He simply listens.
"You're not wrong," Bastian says, mild and conversational, as if they are discussing the weather and not the fundamental nature of the man Emery is sitting on. "That is an interesting point, however, for a man who was hired and trained to kill people to bring up."
The shot lands clean and precise, placed exactly where it will do the most damage, and Emery's jaw clenches because Bastian is right.
The hypocrisy of the accusation is glaring and he knew it was glaring when he made it and he made it anyway because the alternative was saying the real thing and the real thing is harder.
"I've never let anyone get close to me before," Emery says.
The words come out through his teeth, ground between them, each one costing him something he cannot quantify, a piece of the armor he has worn so long he has forgotten what is underneath it.
He is looking at a point over Bastian's shoulder because looking at his face while saying this is more than he can manage.
"And now that I have," Emery continues, and his voice is quieter now, stripped of the flatness, stripped of everything except the raw, uncomfortable truth of what he is saying, "it's the last person I should trust."
Bastian's grip on his waist tightens. Not dangerously.
Not with the force of anger or punishment.
With the force of response, of hearing something that matters and answering with his body before his mind can compose a reply.
His thumbs press into the hollows of Emery's hipbones and his fingers spread across Emery's lower back and the hold is firm and warm and absolute.
"Look at me," Bastian says.
Emery looks.
Bastian's expression is open. Not the composed professionalism of the crime lord, not the fondness that unsettles Emery with its patience, but something rawer, something that lives closer to the surface than anything Emery has seen him show, an exposure that mirrors the exposure Emery just offered and meets it with equal weight.
"Whatever you think this arrangement is," Bastian says, and his voice is low and carries the vibration that settles in Emery's stomach, not the weapon but its shadow, the reminder of what this instrument is capable of and the choice not to deploy it, "I have no intention of letting it stay transactional. "
Emery's fingers are digging into his shoulders. He can feel his own grip, white-knuckled, the tendons in his hands straining.
"You are not a plaything." Bastian's right hand leaves his waist. It travels up, slowly, along his ribcage, his chest, the side of his neck, until it cradles his jaw.
His thumb traces the line of Emery's cheekbone, the same gesture he has made a dozen times, and the repetition of it does not diminish its effect.
"You are not something pretty to warm my bed. "
Bastian's left hand pulls him closer. The chair creaks. Their bodies press together and Bastian's mouth is close to his, close enough that Emery can feel the warmth of his breath.
"You are the sharpest, brightest thing I have ever seen in a lifetime in the dark," Bastian says.
Emery cannot breathe. The words sit in his chest and expand, pressing against the walls he has built, testing the structure, finding the seams. He tells himself not to believe them.
Tells himself that men say things to the people they are sleeping with, that endearments are currency spent to maintain access, that no one has ever meant the beautiful things they said to him because beautiful words have always been a prelude to abandonment.
But Bastian's expression is open, raw, undefended in a way that makes Emery's stomach clench with something that is not desire and not fear and is closer to the feeling of standing at the edge of a very high place and looking down.
Emery takes Bastian's face in his hands.
Both hands. His palms against the sharp jaw, his fingers in the white hair at his temples, his thumbs resting on the cheekbones, one tracing the jagged line of the scar. He holds Bastian's face and looks at him and kisses him.
Not the way he kissed him last night against the door, desperate and cracking open.
Not the way they kiss in bed, hungry and consuming.
This is different, deliberate and passionate and full of something Emery does not have a name for but can feel moving through him with a force that makes his chest ache and his eyes burn.
He kisses Bastian and means it. Means all of it.
Does not perform or calculate or hold anything in reserve.
Bastian makes a sound against his mouth, low and almost pained.
His hands grip Emery's waist and pull him flush and he kisses back with the same force, the same honesty, and the kiss goes on for a long time in the quiet of the study with the maps spread on the desk and the lamp burning low and nothing between them except the truth of what this is.
They break apart. Emery's hands are still on Bastian's face. His breathing is unsteady. His heart is pounding. He looks at Bastian's black eyes and says, with the last piece of bravery he has available to him today:
"I can't stand anyone's hands on me but yours."
The admission falls between them, simple and devastating and true in a way that nothing Emery has said in years has been true.
Not a performance. Not a strategy. Not a weapon deployed for tactical advantage.
Just the raw, indefensible fact of what Bastian has done to him, spoken aloud where it cannot be taken back.
Bastian's grip tightens. His jaw clenches beneath Emery's palms and his eyes go dark, heated, carrying a quality of intensity that makes the air between them vibrate.
When he speaks his voice is low and rough and the vibration of something unnatural settles in Emery's stomach, not threatening but present, a reminder of what he is, of what lives beneath the surface of the man Emery is sitting on.
"Then tell me to touch you," Bastian says.
The command is quiet and absolute, carrying the weight of something being offered rather than taken, a reversal that Emery feels in his chest. Bastian is giving him the power, giving him the words, the direction, the control.
Telling Emery that his hands belong where Emery puts them and nowhere else.
Emery swallows. His throat is tight. His hands are still on Bastian's face and his body is in Bastian's lap and the study is quiet around them and this is either the bravest or the stupidest thing he has ever done.
"Touch my neck," Emery says.