Chapter 19 #3
Bastian sits behind his desk. He does not raise his voice.
He does not posture or threaten or perform the kind of theatrical intimidation that lesser men use to compensate for power they do not actually have.
He is quiet. He is still. He asks questions in a voice that is low and measured and clinically calm, precise, methodical, without emotion, because the emotion is irrelevant to the task and the task is the only thing that matters.
The man talks. The man explains. The man, predictably and inevitably, begs.
The begging starts small, excuses, justifications, the narrative gymnastics of constructing a version of events in which the betrayal was reasonable, and escalates into open pleading as the conversation progresses and it becomes clear that Bastian is not interested in excuses or justifications or narrative gymnastics.
He is interested in information, and once the information has been extracted, he is interested in consequences.
Bastian breaks every finger on the man's right hand.
He does it with his bare hands. No tools, no blades, no ceremony.
He takes the man's hand and he breaks the fingers one at a time, index, middle, ring, little, and the breaking is methodical and unemotional and accompanied by sounds that Emery hears from the doorway where he is standing and that he will remember for a long time.
Not the sounds of the breaking. The sounds the man makes.
Then the left hand. The same process. The same sounds.
Bastian produces a knife from his desk drawer. It is a small blade, clean and sharp, the kind designed for detail work rather than combat. He sets it on the desk between them. He asks the man which hand he wants to keep.
The man pleads. The man begs. The man calls on gods and contracts and mercy and every other thing that men call on when they are on their knees in front of the person who can end them and has the inclination to exercise it.
Bastian listens to the begging with patience, with attention, with the complete absence of urgency, and when the begging exhausts itself he makes his decision.
Emery watches from the doorway.
He waits for himself to feel differently about the man he has been sleeping with.
He waits for the revulsion, the horror, the recoiling that a person should feel when they watch someone they care about break another person's fingers one by one with the detached efficiency of sorting correspondence. He waits for it to arrive.
It does not arrive.
He watches Bastian's hands, the same hands that washed blood from his hair, the same hands that cupped his face and brushed his cheek and held him against a door and kissed him sweetly, break a man's fingers and produce a knife and administer consequences with surgical, unsentimental precision, and he does not feel differently about the man those hands belong to.
He is not sure what that says about him.
He is an assassin. He has killed people for money, not for justice, not for principle, not for the greater good, but for coin.
He has walked into rooms and ended lives and walked out and eaten dinner and gone to sleep, and the going-to-sleep was not troubled, not because he did not care but because caring was a luxury that the economics of his existence did not permit.
He has done terrible things. He has done them efficiently and without hesitation and for reasons that were entirely mercenary, and the doing of them has not made him a monster but has made him a person who understands that the line between monster and survivor is drawn by the people who have the luxury of never having to cross it.
He is not exactly innocent himself. He files this alongside the growing, accumulating, undeniable evidence that the man who breaks fingers and the man who kisses foreheads are not two men but one, and the one is someone Emery has chosen, and the choosing was not despite the violence but inclusive of it, because you cannot love half a person and call it love.
The word is there again. It fell off the shelf a while ago and he keeps picking it up and putting it back and it keeps falling, and one of these days he is going to stop picking it up and let it stay where it lands.
Bastian finishes with the merchant. Hask escorts the man out, or what is left of him, hunched and ruined and carrying his hands against his chest, the fingers curled and broken and held with the ginger desperation of protecting things that can no longer protect themselves.
The study door closes. Bastian sits behind his desk and wipes the blade clean with a cloth and returns it to the drawer and closes the drawer and looks up and finds Emery in the doorway.
His expression shifts. The shift is the one Emery knows, the seamless, invisible transition from the crime lord to the man, from the public to the private, from the version of Bastian that the Underground fears to the version that only Emery sees.
The transition happens in his eyes first, a warming, a softening, the replacement of flat, clinical attention with focused tenderness, and then in his mouth, the hard line of it easing, and then in his posture, the authority settling into something more open, a man putting his weapons down because the person in front of him is not a threat but a refuge.
"How long have you been standing there?" Bastian asks.
"Long enough," Emery says.
Bastian holds his gaze. The question in his eyes is not spoken but it is there, legible, the question of having just been observed doing something violent and waiting to see if the observation has changed anything.
Waiting to see if Emery's face will close, if his posture will stiffen, if the distance he spent weeks building will reassert itself now that the seamless man has shown both his seams.
Emery pushes off the doorframe. He crosses the study. He does not sit in the chair on the other side of the desk. He rounds the desk and Bastian's chair turns to follow him and Emery stops in front of him, close enough to touch, and he does not look away.
"You have blood on your hand," Emery says.
Bastian looks down. There is, in fact, a smear of blood across his knuckles, the merchant's, left behind by the work, overlooked in the wiping. He reaches for the cloth on the desk. Emery takes his hand instead.
He holds Bastian's hand and looks at the blood and wipes it away with his thumb, slowly, deliberately, the gesture practical and intimate and carrying a weight that neither of them comments on because the weight speaks for itself.
He cleans the blood from Bastian's knuckles carefully, completely, without judgment, and when the blood is gone he holds the hand a moment longer, his pale fingers wrapped around Bastian's dark ones.
Emery returns to the doorway. He pauses there, one hand on the frame, and looks back over his shoulder at the man behind the desk, the crime lord, the monster, the lover, the man who breaks fingers and kisses foreheads and exists without seam between the two, and he thinks about the word on the shelf and the word that keeps landing, and he lets it land.
He does not say it. Not yet. But the landing is its own kind of saying, quiet and internal and irrevocable, and when he leaves the study and walks down the corridor to the room that is Bastian's room and also his room, the word walks with him, and it does not go back on the shelf.