Chapter 19 #2
The gate is iron, heavy, set into the rock face at the end of the dead-end corridor that leads to Bastian's domain.
It looks unremarkable, the kind of door you walk past without a second thought, designed to be invisible to anyone who does not know what is behind it.
Emery knows what is behind it. He knows the warmth of the interior and the smell of the hearth fires and the sound of voices in the common room and the impossible comfort of a place that was supposed to be temporary and has become, without his consent and with his whole heart, the only place he wants to be.
He stands there for a long time.
The Depths hum around him. The bioluminescence on the walls casts thin blue light across the stone, and in the blue light his shadow is long and solitary and still.
He is alone in the corridor. He has been alone for most of his life, and the aloneness has been a companion so constant and so familiar that he stopped noticing it.
It is only now, standing outside a door that leads to the opposite of alone, that the aloneness becomes visible, heavy, exhausting, a weight he has been carrying without realizing it because the carrying has been his default state for so long that he forgot there was another option.
There is another option. It is behind the door. It is warm and it is waiting and it will not lock behind him.
He goes in.
Bastian is in his study.
The desk is covered in correspondence. The fire is burning. The chair behind the desk is occupied by a man who has not changed out of his working clothes and who probably has not slept since before the operation and who is, despite this, as alert and as present as he has ever been.
Bastian looks up when Emery enters.
"Emery," he says.
His name and nothing else, no question, no greeting, no demand for explanation, spoken in the low, warm register that Bastian reserves for him, the one that carries no authority and no silk-danger and no weapon, the one that is just a man saying the name of someone he wants to see, and the sound of it crosses the room and reaches Emery and settles into his chest. A key turning in a lock.
Emery crosses the room and kisses him.
He kisses him first, which is becoming a habit.
Usually Bastian has been the one to initiate.
Bastian has leaned in, or stepped forward, or pulled him close, and Emery has responded, has been the one who is kissed rather than the one who kisses, because kissing first requires choosing first and choosing first requires admitting first and admitting has always been the hardest thing.
He kisses Bastian first. He leans across the desk and takes Bastian's face in his hands, both hands, framing his jaw, his thumbs against the sharp planes of his cheekbones, and he brings his mouth to Bastian's mouth and kisses him with everything he has.
Not performance, not strategy, not the calculated deployment of physical contact for a purpose, but the uncalculated, unstrategic, honest act of kissing someone because he wants to.
Because he has come back. Because coming back was a choice and the choice was his and the choosing is the bravest thing he has ever done.
Bastian makes a low sound against his mouth.
The sound travels through the point of contact, lips to lips, bone to bone, and down Emery's spine, and the vibration of it settles in the base of his stomach and radiates outward.
It is the sound of receiving something he was not certain he would receive, and the receiving is its own kind of relief.
Bastian's hands find him. One on the back of his neck, fingers threading into his hair.
The other on his waist, pulling him around the desk, pulling him closer, until Emery is standing between Bastian's knees and Bastian is looking up at him from the chair with an expression that is open and dark and carrying the quiet devastation of having just been kissed by the person he was afraid might not come back.
Emery does not explain. He does not say I closed the contract or I left the guild or the people in the Upper City have reopened the hit on you and there are private assassins who are not bound by guild law and who have been paid to kill you and I am terrified in a way that I have never been terrified because the terror is not for myself but for you.
He does not say any of this because the saying can come later, in the study with Hask, in the operational register where threats are catalogued and responses planned.
Right now, in this moment, the only thing that needs to be said is what the kiss has already said: I came back. I chose you. I am here.
Bastian seems to understand this, because he does not ask. He holds Emery against him and breathes him in and lets the kiss linger, and the lingering is patient and unhurried and carrying the quality of having been given what he wanted and being in no rush to put it down.
Later, Hask tells him about Fredan.
They are in the common room. Sera is dealing cards, a game Emery has learned over the past weeks.
, that he knows she's going to cheat at.
The evening is quiet, the compound settled into its nighttime rhythm, and Hask is sitting across the table from Emery with his half-mask pulled down and a hand of cards he is not looking at and a drink beside him that he is not touching.
"Bastian dealt with Fredan," Hask says.
The words are casual, conversational, delivered with the nonchalance of sharing information he considers unremarkable.
Hask's pale eyes are on his cards, or aimed at his cards, which is not the same thing, and his tone suggests he is commenting on the weather rather than delivering information that sends a spike of heat through Emery's chest.
"When?" Emery asks.
"Day after you ran." Hask moves a card from one side of his hand to the other.
The movement is idle, purposeless, the gesture of hands needing to be occupied while his mouth does work that his hands are not involved in.
"He did not wait for an explanation. He did not ask Fredan for his version. He dealt with it."
The word dealt carries a weight that Hask does not elaborate on, and the not-elaborating is its own kind of elaboration.
Emery thinks about the clean dagger returned to him at the Hollow.
About Bastian's voice in the rented room, low and dark: you should want him dead for touching you.
About the question he asked, did you kill him?
, and the kiss that Bastian gave him instead of an answer.
"Not because Fredan attacked one of his crew," Hask says, and now there is something in his voice, a precision, a deliberateness, the emphasis of wanting to make sure the point lands where it needs to land.
"If it had been anyone else, he would have questioned Fredan.
Heard both sides. Made a judgment. That is how he handles internal disputes.
" Hask pauses. His pale eyes lift from the cards and find Emery's across the table, and the finding is direct and unhesitating and carrying the quiet weight of having known Bastian for longer than Emery has been alive and choosing, now, to tell him something that matters.
"He did not question Fredan. He did not hear both sides.
He did not make a judgment. Because it was you. "
The words settle into the space between them. Sera is dealing the next hand and does not look up, but something in her expression, a softening at the corners of her mouth, a stillness in her dark eyes, says this is not news to anyone in the room except the person it concerns most.
Emery sits with it. The knowledge fills a space inside him that he did not know was empty until the filling began.
Bastian dealt with Fredan not because of protocol, not because of the operational hierarchy, not because Fredan had violated a rule that the structure of Bastian's organization required him to respond to.
Because it was Emery. Because the person Fredan put his hands on, the person he shoved into a wall and called a whore and pressed his weight against with the ugly confidence of believing the person beneath him was less than, that person was Emery, and Emery is not less than.
Emery is the person Bastian will burn the world for, and the burning started with Fredan.
He does not know what to do with the knowledge, because in his experience the good things come before the taking.
Every warmth he has ever had has been followed by the cold: the room at the guild trashed, the books scattered, the safety pulled out from under him.
The pattern is so consistent that he is sitting in a warm room playing cards with people who care about him and waiting for the floor to drop, because the floor always drops.
But he does not push it away. He does not analyze it or qualify it or construct a defense against the loss he is certain is coming. He sits with the warmth, close enough to feel it, close enough to be changed by it, knowing that fires die and choosing to be warm anyway.
Emery watches Bastian work.
Not the private version, not the man who washes blood from his hair and kisses his forehead and holds him in the dark with patient, devastating tenderness. The other version. The one the Underground fears.
A man is brought in. One of Bastian's merchants, a middle-tier supplier who runs goods through the eastern tunnels and who has, it becomes clear over the course of the next hour, been skimming product and selling the excess through a rival's network.
The evidence is documented in the ledger that Hask sets on the desk, annotated in his angular handwriting, thorough and damning.