Chapter 17 #2
"Hey." Brennan's voice sharpens. The lazy expectation curdles into something harder, the tone of not being accustomed to being ignored and interpreting the ignoring as an insult. "I said come here."
Emery fixes a smile on his face. The smile is the last one he is going to give these men and it is the best one he has, warm, inviting, slightly coy, the expression of playing at reluctance because the playing makes the yielding sweeter.
He sets the untouched glass of wine on the table.
He walks to the bed, and the walk is the dancer's walk, hips loose, steps light, the controlled sensuality of years spent learning to turn the crossing of a room into an offering.
He climbs onto the bed. He straddles Brennan's thick thighs, his knees sinking into the mattress on either side of the man's hips, and the position is familiar because he has been in this position a hundred times before, in the Hollow, in the rooms above the Hollow, in the dozen other places where he has used his body as a tool for getting close enough to do what he was actually there to do.
Brennan's hands find his hips immediately, heavy and hot, the grip tight with an eagerness that borders on aggression.
Normally he only has the dagger at his thigh. But he is working tonight, and he has come prepared.
Brennan is talking. Something about how long he has been waiting for this, something about Emery's body, the kind of talk that men produce when they believe the person in their lap exists for their consumption and when the alcohol and the anticipation have dissolved whatever thin membrane of civility was holding their basest impulses in check.
Emery does not hear any of it. The words are static.
His focus has narrowed to three points: the comb in his hair, the man beneath him, and the angle of the strike.
He reaches up.
His fingers find the comb, decorative, metallic, woven into the blond strands above his left ear, and he pulls it free in a single smooth motion.
The hair it was holding falls loose around his face.
The comb in his hand is no longer a comb.
It is four inches of honed steel, slim and sharp and designed for exactly this purpose, and his hand knows the weight of it intimately, completely, without hesitation.
He stabs Brennan in the throat.
The blade enters below the jaw, to the left of the windpipe, and Emery does not stop there.
He drags the blade to the right with a sharp, fluid motion, a lateral cut that opens the throat from one side to the other, severing the carotid and the jugular and everything between them in a single stroke that comes within a finger's width of decapitation.
The technique is clean, efficient, and learned from years of practice on targets who were not expecting to die in the lap of someone who looked ready to give them a good time.
Brennan does not scream. He cannot. The cut has taken his airway along with everything else, and the sound that comes out of him is not a sound at all but a wet, gurgling rush as blood floods his open throat and his mouth and the bed beneath him. His hands clutch at his throat uselessly.
It feels retributive.
The thought arrives without Emery's permission, vivid and visceral and resonating in the part of him that has spent years being pulled into laps and grabbed by the waistband and touched by hands that assumed the touching was their right.
Every slimy, entitled, salivating man who has ever put his hands on Emery is in this room right now, concentrated in the body beneath him that is pumping blood onto dark sheets, and the killing of this one feels as though it is the killing of all of them, symbolic, cathartic, insufficient, and necessary.
Across the room, Royce screams.
The sound is high and sharp and carries the frequency of genuine terror, the sound of watching his partner's throat opened by the person they were planning to fuck, and Emery barely hears it over the gurgling of blood in front of him.
Royce is scrambling, the wine glass shatters on the floor, the chair scrapes back, and his hand is going for the knife at his belt with the frantic urgency of an evening that has just become a fight for survival.
Emery is already moving. He vaults off Brennan's lifeless body, his bare feet hitting the stone floor in a controlled landing, and the hair comb leaves his hand before his second foot touches down.
The throw is instinctive, a flick of the wrist, the blade spinning end over end, aimed at the center mass of a man standing six feet away and reaching for a weapon.
Royce is faster than Emery expects. The knife at his belt clears its sheath and comes up in a defensive sweep that deflects the spinning comb-blade with a sharp metallic ring, sending it skittering across the stone floor.
But the deflection costs him his guard, his arm is extended, his weight shifted, and the half-second it takes him to recover his stance is half a second too long.
Emery's thigh dagger is in his hand. The motion is seamless, hand to thigh, fingers around hilt, blade free, and he crosses the six feet between them in two strides that are silent and fast and carrying the full lethal intent of needing to be somewhere else and needing these men out of the way.
Royce tries to bring his knife back around.
He is not unskilled. The knife comes up in a thrust aimed at Emery's ribs, and Emery reads the angle and sidesteps it, close enough that the blade whispers past his bare skin, and in the same motion his own dagger comes up from below and enters Royce's skull through the soft tissue beneath his chin.
The blade pierces upward, through the floor of the mouth, through the palate, into the brain, in one clean stroke that ends every electrical impulse in Royce's body simultaneously.
His eyes go wide. His knife falls from fingers that no longer receive instructions.
His body follows, crumpling, and Emery rides the collapse down with his hand still on the dagger and pulls the blade free as Royce hits the floor.
The room is quiet.
Emery is blood-stained and breathing heavily. The blood is on his bare chest, his arms, his trousers, warm and wet and darkening as it cools. The comb-blade is somewhere on the floor. The thigh dagger is in his hand, slick and red.
He has to find Avery.
He retrieves the comb-blade from where it skidded against the base of the far wall. He wipes both blades on the bedsheet, a quick, efficient swipe for each, and returns the comb to his hair and the dagger to his thigh.
He goes to the door. Listens. The corridor beyond is quiet, which means either no one heard the scream or everyone who heard it is deciding whether it is worth investigating.
In a safehouse run by a paranoid crime lord, screams from private rooms are probably not unusual enough to warrant immediate response.
He has minutes, maybe, before someone comes to check.
He opens the door and steps into the corridor and heads for the junction where they were separated.
The stronghold's layout is less complicated than it appeared on entry.
Emery moves through the corridors with the map he built in his head, left at the junction, right at the first turn, straight past three closed doors, and the map holds.
The corridors are empty. The guards who were posted at the receiving area are not visible, which means they have either been redeployed or are stationed at the exterior, and either way the interior is thinner than it should be for a man as paranoid as Sander.
He encounters a guard at the second turn.
The man is leaning against the wall with the bored posture of pulling a shift in a corridor where nothing ever happens, his sword sheathed at his hip and his attention on the piece of dried meat he is chewing.
He looks up when Emery rounds the corner, and there is a moment, a single, suspended beat, where the guard takes in the blood-stained dancer with two blades and tries to reconcile the image with his expectations.
Emery does not give him time to act.
The comb blade is already in his left hand.
He covers the distance between them in three steps, silent, fast, his bare feet making no sound on the stone, and the guard's hand is still reaching for his sword when Emery's right hand clamps over his mouth and the blade enters the soft space below his ear and angles inward.
The guard stiffens. His eyes go wide. His hand falls from the sword hilt.
Emery holds him against the wall and waits for the tension to leave his body, and when it does he lowers him to the floor and pulls the blade free and keeps moving.
He could probably charm a guard if he were not covered in blood, but he is covered in blood, so he does the next best thing: he finds the next one and threatens him with violence.
The second guard is younger, positioned at a door at the end of the corridor, and the youth is an advantage because young guards are not yet numb to the threat of death the way veteran guards are.
Emery pins him to the wall with the dagger at his throat and asks him, in a voice that is quiet and calm and carrying the authority of having already killed three people tonight and not being opposed to making it four, where they took the other dancer.
The guard talks. They always talk. The brave ones hesitate and the stupid ones lie and the young ones talk, because they have not yet accumulated enough reasons to die for someone else's secrets.
The other dancer was taken to a room at the end of the east corridor, the one with the blue door.
Sander has not arrived yet, he is in his office, two doors further, and the dancer was put in the room to wait for him.
The information slots into Emery's map, the final piece finding its place. East corridor, blue door, Sander's office two doors past. He has what he needs.