Chapter 18 #2
Bastian's hands find the hem of Emery's shirt. He holds it, his fingers resting against the blood-stiffened fabric, and waits.
Emery lifts his arms.
Bastian undresses him with unhurried care.
The shirt comes off first, peeled away from tacky skin.
The trousers next, Bastian kneeling to unlace them, and the act of kneeling, of the most powerful man Emery has ever met lowering himself to undress a blood-stained assassin in front of a bathtub, sends something through Emery's chest that he does not have a word for.
It is not arousal. It is the feeling of being tended to, of having someone else's hands do the work that Emery's hands have always done alone, and the having is so foreign that his body does not know how to receive it without shaking.
He steps into the tub. The heat soaks through his skin and the muscle beneath goes slack in a way that is almost painful, the sudden release of tension held so long the holding has become structural, and he exhales, long and ragged, and the exhale takes something with it.
Bastian pulls a stool to the side of the tub and begins to clean the blood from Emery's shoulders.
The cloth moves in slow, methodical strokes, and he works down Emery's arms, lifting each one, turning it to reach the blood that has dried in the creases.
He cleans Emery's hands, one finger at a time, and the attention to detail says he understands that the blood between the fingers is the blood that stays longest and that the staying is its own kind of damage.
Emery sits in the water and lets himself be taken care of.
The letting is the hardest part. Harder than the killing, harder than the charming, harder than the weeks of performing desire for men who touched him as though he were an object.
Letting someone take care of you requires trust, and trust requires vulnerability, and vulnerability requires the belief that the person you are vulnerable with will not use the vulnerability against you.
Emery does not believe this. He has never believed this.
But Bastian's hands are on his shoulders, warm and careful and asking nothing, and the asking-nothing is its own argument, and Emery does not have the strength tonight to argue back.
Bastian washes his hair. The soap works through the blond strands, loosening the blood at his temples and nape, and Bastian's fingers move through his hair with a gentle, repetitive motion that is grounding, anchoring Emery in his body and in the present and in the warm, steam-filled alcove.
Emery asks about Avery.
He does not plan the question. It surfaces the way things surface in the aftermath, loose, unmoored, rising from the place where he has been holding it down with the determination of keeping a promise and now asking a question that exists adjacent to the secret without touching it.
Bastian is quiet for a moment.
The silence is not strategic. It is careful, carrying the weight of choosing words not for their effect but for their accuracy, because what he is about to say matters and he wants it to be right.
"Hask bought Avery at auction four years ago," Bastian says.
Emery stills.
The water goes quiet around him. The ripples from his breathing settle and the surface becomes a mirror, and in it Emery can see his own face and the expression on it, which is not shock but comprehension.
The pieces of something he has been observing without understanding clicking into place with mechanical finality.
He turns to look at Bastian. The movement sends water lapping against the sides of the tub, and Bastian's face is serious, not grim but serious in the way that means what follows is not a casual disclosure.
It is a trust. He is giving Emery something that belongs to Hask and Avery both, and the giving is not idle.
"Hask went to a silent auction," Bastian says.
His voice is low, measured, the cadence of recounting a story he has told very few people and which costs him something each time.
"He was there to purchase a ruby necklace.
A piece we needed to acquire, moved through one of our channels.
The auction was mixed, goods and flesh, and Hask was there for the goods. "
He pauses. The fire crackles beyond the screen. The lamplight shifts.
"A young boy was hauled on stage. Barely dressed.
Malnourished. His ribs were showing and his wrists were raw and he had been beaten recently enough that the bruises were still bright.
" Bastian's voice does not waver, but the steadiness of it is effortful, the controlled, deliberate cadence of holding something volatile with both hands.
"He was eighteen. They had cleaned him up enough to be presentable, but not enough to hide what had been done to him, and they were not trying to hide it, because the kind of men who buy at those auctions are not deterred by evidence of prior use. They are encouraged by it."
The water is still. Emery is still. The compound hums around them, distant and muted, and in the alcove there is nothing but the steam and the lamplight and Bastian's voice and the story it is building.
"Hask told me later that the boy stared out at the crowd and looked ready to bite the first person who touched him," Bastian says, and something in his expression deepens, the attention of remembering something told to him by someone who matters enough for the secondhand to feel firsthand.
"He was terrified. He was furious. He was standing on a stage in front of a room full of men who were deciding what he was worth, and he was looking at them with the defiance of tearing out their throats with his teeth if his hands were free. "
Emery thinks of Avery. Of the fine features and the dark eyes and the softness of face that he deploys as effectively as a blade.
Of the way Avery carries himself, the squared shoulders, the lifted chin, the refusal to be small even though he is the smallest person in any room he enters.
Of the wound in his side that he would rather bleed out from than show to the people whose opinion of him matters most, because being seen as fragile is worse than being seen as dead.
He thinks of Avery at eighteen. Barely dressed on a stage. Ribs showing. Wrists raw.
"Hask bought him," Bastian says, and the sentence is plain and unadorned and carrying the full weight of what it means. "He had the coin for the necklace and he spent it on the boy instead, and he brought him to me, and he asked me to give him a place."
Another pause. Longer this time. Bastian's forearms are resting on the edge of the tub, his fingers laced together, and his dark eyes are on Emery's face with the attention of watching for a reaction and being willing to accept whatever the reaction is.
"Hask has never asked me for anything," Bastian says.
"Before that night, or since. He does as he is told.
He goes where I send him. He crosses any line I ask him to cross and he does not question it.
In all the years I have known him, that is the only time he has ever asked me for something that was his and not mine. "
The words settle into the water and the steam and the warm, close air of the alcove, and Emery holds them the way he holds all the things that people in this compound keep giving him, carefully, with the bewildered attention of years spent empty-handed and now, suddenly and without warning, being given things he did not ask for and does not know where to put.
"I did not hesitate," Bastian says. "I brought the boy in. I gave him a room. I gave him clothes and food and a place at my table, and I offered him his freedom."
The word freedom hangs in the air. Emery waits.
"Avery begged to stay." Bastian's voice is quiet, steady, carrying the memory of a moment that clearly marked him, that sits in his catalogue of defining events alongside the death of his owner and the building of his empire.
"He begged me to let him stay and prove himself.
He said he would do anything. Run messages, clean floors, carry crates.
He said he did not care what the work was. He said he just wanted a purpose."
Emery's throat tightens. He knows what it is to want to be useful.
He knows the desperate arithmetic of believing that value is contingent on utility, that the moment you stop being useful is the moment you become disposable, that the only thing standing between you and the door is your capacity to serve a function.
He has lived inside that arithmetic for twenty-five years.
It is the framework of his entire identity, the assassin's skill, the dancer's face, the sharp tongue and the sharper blade, all of it built on the foundation of I am useful, therefore I am kept.
Avery begged to be useful because useful was the only kind of safe he knew, and the knowing makes Emery's eyes sting in a way that he blinks away because he does not cry, he has not cried in years, but the not-crying is getting harder.
"He has done nothing but prove himself since," Bastian says. "He is one of my best. He is sharp and he is brave and he is loyal, and the loyalty is not because he was bought, but because I gave him the choice and he chose to stay."
The distinction matters. Emery hears it and understands it and holds it: the distinction between being kept and choosing to remain.
Between a cage and a home. Between a door that is locked and a door that is open and a person who walks through the open door every day not because they cannot leave but because they do not want to.