Chapter 17 #3
He kills the guard anyway. Not out of cruelty, out of pragmatism. A living guard behind him is a guard who can raise an alarm once the blade leaves his throat, and Emery cannot afford the alarm. The kill is quick and clean and the guard slides down the wall and Emery steps over him and heads east.
He finds the blue door.
It is closed but not locked, a detail that tells Emery the room was intended as a waiting area, not a prison, and the distinction matters because it means whoever put Avery here expected him to stay willingly. Expected the dancer to sit and wait and be grateful for the opportunity.
Emery pushes the door open.
The room is small and lit by a single brazier. Two bodies are on the floor.
The first is crumpled near the door, face down, a pool of dark blood spreading beneath his chest from a wound Emery cannot see from this angle.
The second is against the far wall, slumped sideways, his head at an angle that suggests his neck met something sharp at speed. Both are guards. Both are very dead.
Avery is alive.
He is standing at the basin against the left wall, hunched over it with his back to the door, one hand braced on the basin's rim and the other pressed hard against his side.
The bangles on his wrist are smeared with blood.
His dark hair has fallen loose from whatever arrangement he had it in and hangs around his face in damp strands, and the line of his back is taut with tension.
Something is not right.
Emery moves into the room. It is a testament to his ability to be quiet, and to the degree of Avery's distraction, that Avery does not hear him.
The younger man is focused on whatever is happening at the basin, his breathing audible and controlled in the way that breathing is controlled when managing pain he does not want to acknowledge, and the hand pressed against his side is pressing hard enough that the knuckles are white.
Emery touches Avery's shoulder.
Avery spins. The motion is fast, combat fast, reflex fast, and the blade that appears in his hand is up between them before Emery can blink, the point of it an inch from his throat.
Avery's eyes are wide, his mouth parted in the sharp inhale of a body reacting before the mind can intervene, and for one suspended moment they stand there, Emery very still, Avery's blade at his throat, the brazier casting long shadows on the walls.
Recognition floods Avery's face. His mouth closes. The blade drops. His expression shifts through a rapid sequence, relief, embarrassment, and then something that is not fear of Emery but fear of what Emery has seen.
He flinches back. His free hand moves from the basin to his side, pressing the fabric of his clothes tight against his ribs, and the movement is a concealment, an attempt to angle the injured side away from Emery's line of sight, to shield whatever is underneath the hand and the blood-darkened fabric before Emery can get a good look at it.
He is not fast enough.
Emery sees it before Avery can hide it. The blood soaking through Avery's clothes on his left side, dark and wet, spreading from a point beneath his ribs in a pattern that is too large and too saturated to be superficial.
A deep slash, from the look of the blood spread, a blade dragged across his ribs, the kind of wound that happens when someone gets close enough to cut but not close enough to kill, and the guard on the floor near the door has blood on his blade that matches the blood on Avery's side.
"How bad?" Emery asks.
"It's nothing," Avery says. The words come out steady, controlled, and carrying the conviction of trying very hard to believe what he is saying. "Just a scratch."
Emery looks at the blood soaking through Avery's clothes. He looks at the hand pressed against Avery's side, the white knuckles, the tremor in his fingers that the pressure cannot quite hide. He looks at the basin behind Avery, where a rag sits in water that has turned pink.
"That is very clearly not a scratch," Emery says.
Avery's jaw tightens. The muscles in his face work, a rapid, visible calculation, the kind that happens when pride and pragmatism collide and the person caught between them has to decide which one costs less. The calculation takes two seconds. Pride loses.
"Let me help," Emery says.
Avery turns back to him. His dark eyes are bright with something that is too complicated to be one emotion, pain and fear and shame and frustration braided together into a single expression that makes him look, for the first time since Emery has known him, his age.
He is twenty-two. He is twenty-two years old and bleeding in a dead man's room in the stronghold of a human trafficker and the thing he is most afraid of is not the wound or the blood or the men who are coming.
The thing he is most afraid of is being seen.
"If Bastian or Hask see this," Avery says, and his voice cracks on the sentence, a fracture in the composure that he cannot quite seal, "they're going to think I can't hold my own."
The words land in Emery's chest with the force of a blade.
He knows this fear. He has lived inside this fear for his entire adult life.
The fear of being perceived as a burden rather than an asset, of being protected rather than trusted, of being the person that people have to worry about rather than the person they can rely on.
He knows what it costs to carry it. He knows the damage it does, the way it makes you hide your wounds and swallow your pain and push yourself past every limit your body sets because the alternative is admitting that you need help, and admitting you need help means admitting you are not enough on your own, and not being enough on your own means being disposable.
Avery is not disposable. Emery knows this with the same certainty he knows the weight of a blade. But Avery does not know it, not in the deep, bone-level place where it needs to be known, and the not-knowing is written all over his face.
"I'm the youngest of the crew," Avery says, and the words are tumbling now, loosened by pain and fear and the vulnerability of defenses breached by a blade that cannot hold the rest of it back.
"The smallest. They already watch me too closely.
I've spent years proving I can handle myself and a wound on a mission this important–" He stops.
His jaw clenches. His hand presses harder against his side and the pain flares visibly across his features and he breathes through it the way Emery has seen soldiers breathe through field injuries, controlled and deliberate and not quite sufficient.
"I would rather gut myself than give Hask a reason to look at me as something fragile. "
Hask.
Not Bastian. Not the crew. Not the abstract concept of professional credibility.
Hask. The name comes out of Avery's mouth involuntary and raw, and it tells Emery everything that Avery did not say in the carriage when Emery asked him and he looked at his lap and went silent.
It tells him that the locked door is not just fondness.
It is the specific, devastating terror of wanting someone's respect so badly that the idea of losing it is worse than bleeding to death in a stranger's room.
"No one has to know," Emery says. He keeps his voice steady and level, making a promise and meaning it. "I am very good at keeping secrets."
Avery searches his face. The searching is thorough and suspicious and carrying the scrutiny of having been lied to enough times to distrust kindness on principle, and Emery lets him search because he has nothing to hide. He means it. No one will know.
Something in Avery's expression breaks. Not dramatically, not a collapse, not a crumbling, but a loosening, a release, the letting go of a tension that has been held so long the holding has become invisible. He takes his hand away from his side.
The wound is bad. Not fatal, Emery has seen fatal and this is not it, but bad.
A deep slash across his ribs, four inches long, the edges ragged in a way that means the blade that made it was not sharp and had to work for the cut.
The blood is flowing freely, dark and steady, soaking through the torn fabric and running down Avery's hip in thin streams that catch the brazier light.
Emery works quickly. He drops to his knees beside one of the dead guards, the one near the door, the one with blood on his blade, and pulls the man's shirt free from his belt and tears a strip from it with his dagger.
The fabric is rough and not clean, but it is what he has and what he has will do.
He has dressed his own wounds in worse conditions with worse materials, in alleys and safe houses and the backs of carriages, alone and silent and pressing cloth against his own bleeding body because there was no one else to do it.
He knows how this works. He has been his own medic for years.
He returns to Avery and presses the folded strip against the wound, hard, and Avery hisses through his teeth and grips the edge of the basin.
His knuckles go white. His jaw locks. The pain is visible in the cords of his neck and the set of his shoulders, and he does not cry out, and the not crying out is its own kind of bravery that Emery recognizes and respects.
"Hold this," Emery says, and Avery's hand replaces his, pressing the wadded fabric against his ribs with the grim determination of deciding that if he must bleed he will at least bleed on his own terms.
Emery tears another strip. He wraps it around Avery's torso, pulling it tight across the makeshift bandage, and ties it off at his back. The dressing is crude but functional. It will hold the wound closed and slow the bleeding long enough for them to get out of here. Long enough is all they need.