Epilogue #2
He waits for the fear to show up. It doesn't. Which is either growth or stupidity, and Emery has never been entirely sure where the line between those two falls.
***
The compound has gone quiet. Avery left first, headed to his room with the document's implications sitting behind his eyes and his jaw set with focused determination, already planning the next move before the current one has finished.
Hask followed, though followed isn't quite the right word.
He didn't so much leave the room as become absent from it, his departure so quiet and so complete that Emery registered the absence before he registered the leaving, which is either an Umbra trait or a Hask trait and is probably both.
Their room is warm. The fire is burning.
The four-poster bed is a dark shape in the amber light, the quilts turned back, the pillows arranged in the configuration that means Bastian made the bed, which he doesn't always do and which Emery has come to understand is its own kind of communication.
A tending. A preparation. I am making this space ready for you.
It is the domestic equivalent of Bastian's hand on the back of his neck, and it undoes him in roughly the same way, and he will never, ever say this out loud.
They are in the bed. The lamp is out. The only light is the fire, low and amber, and in the dark the boundaries between their bodies are indistinct: Emery's pale skin against Bastian's dark, the white of the sheets and the white of Bastian's hair and the blond of Emery's, all of it blurred into a single warm shape that doesn't need to be seen clearly to be understood.
Bastian is behind him. The position they've settled into, Emery on his side, Bastian at his back, arm around his waist, face in the curve of his neck, has become their default, the configuration their bodies find without discussion, as natural and as inevitable as water pooling in a hollow.
Bastian's breath is warm against the back of his neck.
His arm is heavy and present and holding on because holding on is what his body does in sleep and the doing is not conscious.
Emery is awake.
He is awake and he is thinking, which used to be a combination that could keep him up until morning, spiraling through threat assessments and exit strategies and the corrosive cycle of anxiety that characterized every night he spent alone in rooms that weren't his.
The thinking is different now. It isn't circling.
It's moving forward, which is new enough to still feel strange and strange enough to still feel uncomfortable and uncomfortable enough that he trusts it, because anything that felt natural would probably be a lie.
"Am I a liability?" he asks.
The question is quiet. It enters the dark room and sits there, and it's an old question, the oldest one, the one he asked Hask at the Hollow on the first night, the one he's been asking in various forms and various silences since he arrived at the compound and began the slow, terrifying process of becoming someone who could be lost. He asks it the way you press on a bruise: not because you expect it to feel different, but because you need to know it's still there.
Bastian's breathing changes. Not abruptly, because Bastian doesn't startle, but gradually, the rhythm shifting from rest to attention. His arm tightens around Emery's waist. Not a correction. A response. I am here. I heard you.
The silence stretches. Bastian is choosing his words, which Emery has learned to recognize as its own kind of care, because the choosing means the answer matters to him and mattering means precision and precision means Emery is about to hear something that will rearrange his internal architecture, again, and he braces for it the way you brace for a wave you can see coming and can't avoid.
"You are a liability," Bastian says, "in the same way that my lungs require air."
The words arrive in the dark and settle into Emery's chest and stay there.
He turns them over. A liability in the way that lungs require air.
Not a weakness. A vital organ. Not a vulnerability but a function, something without which the system doesn't operate, the body doesn't breathe, the man doesn't live.
Bastian isn't calling him a soft spot. He is calling him essential.
He is saying that the risk of Emery, the exposure, the danger, is a risk that doesn't factor into his calculations because the alternative is suffocation, and suffocation is not an option, and the not-being-an-option is not a choice but a law of nature.
Emery lies in the dark and stares at nothing and thinks, with dry, exhausted wonder, that this is the most absurd and devastating thing anyone has ever said to him.
More than you are not a whim. More than I have wanted you since the first night I saw you.
Because those were declarations. This is a diagnosis.
This is Bastian stating, with the calm factual tone he uses for supply routes, that Emery's existence is a biological requirement.
He thinks about the Golden Sparrow.
He thinks about the door it opens onto something larger and more dangerous than anything they've walked into yet.
A network in the Upper City, operating behind the facade of civilized commerce, trading in flesh and influence and the poisonous currency of human ownership.
Old money, old power, the kind of entrenched institutional strength that has survived for generations by being too large to challenge and too ruthless to defy.
He thinks about the fact that Bastian has kept him without hesitation from the first day they met.
From the card table in the Hollow, from the hallway outside the bedroom, from the moment Bastian's hand settled on his hip and the touch was electric and the warmth was impossible and the man behind the warmth was the most dangerous person Emery had ever encountered and also, somehow, the safest. Bastian has not hesitated.
Has not wavered. Has not recalculated or reconsidered or done any of the things that people do when the cost of keeping someone exceeds the benefit of having them.
The cost has always exceeded the benefit.
Emery knows this, has always known this, because the cost of keeping an assassin sent to kill you is incalculable and the benefit of keeping said assassin is nothing more than the assassin himself, and the assassin himself is a man with three books and a dagger and a lifetime of damage that manifests as cynicism and sharp words and the exhausting refusal to believe that anyone could want him for reasons that aren't transactional.