Epilogue #3
Bastian kept him anyway. Which is either the most romantic thing that has ever happened in the Underground or the stupidest, and the fact that Emery can no longer tell the difference is probably the most honest thing he's learned about love.
He thinks about what it means to be the air in the lungs of a Vesper who breathes violence.
To be necessary to someone whose necessity is not gentle, whose life is not gentle, whose hands break fingers and whose voice unmakes men and whose empire is built on the same foundation of blood and pragmatism that every empire in the Underground is built on.
To be the essential thing in the chest of someone capable of burning down the world, and who has told Emery, in the quiet dark of their room, that the burning would be for him.
It should frighten him. The scope of it, the intensity. It should send him reaching for the nearest exit, which is what every instinct he's spent twenty-five years honing is telling him to do.
It doesn't frighten him.
It feels, instead, like the thing he's been reading about.
The thing the knight found on the other side of the portal.
The thing Guille was writing about when he loved so fiercely that his words made Emery ache in a room above a brothel with someone else's handprints still warm on his skin.
The thing the commoner and the princess had and lost and found again.
It's the thing that lives in stories because it's too large for the real world, except that it's in the real world now.
It's in this bed. It's in the arms around his waist and the breath on his neck and the low, devastating voice that said a necessity, a non-negotiable certainty with the same tone he uses to discuss supply routes.
He buries his face in the crook of Bastian's neck.
The skin there is warm. Always warm, furnace-warm.
Emery presses his face against the heat and closes his eyes and breathes, and the breath goes deeper than any breath he's taken in recent memory, down into the place where the word is sitting, the word he hasn't said, and the breath touches it and the word is warm and the warmth is enough for now.
He holds on.
The holding is not desperate. It's not clinging, not the grip of fear.
It's deliberate and conscious and chosen, and the choosing is the thing that changed everything, because Emery has spent his entire life being held against his will or not being held at all, and the act of choosing to hold on, freely, because he wants to, because the wanting is allowed, is either the bravest thing he's done or the most terrifying. He's going with brave. He's earned it.
Bastian's arm tightens around him. Reflexive, absolute. I am here. I am not going anywhere. You are mine and I am yours.
Above them, impossibly far away and drawing closer with every day that passes, the Upper City turns in its sleep.
The Golden Sparrow perches on its roost, lit and warm and humming with the business of human misery conducted behind gilded walls.
The old money moves through its channels.
The network breathes. The machine turns its gears.
Let it turn.
Let them all turn, every gear and every wheel and every mechanism of the vast, entrenched, generational machinery that has decided Bastian Kane is a problem to be solved.
Let them count their coin and sharpen their blades and send their well-compensated assassins through the tunnels and the corridors and the dark places where they think they can operate unseen. Let them come.
Emery has spent his entire life being underestimated by men who looked at his face and saw something soft.
Who saw the blond hair and the pale skin and the bangles and the bare feet and constructed a story around them that had nothing to do with who he actually was.
Who saw a dancer, a whore, a pretty thing to be used and discarded.
Who didn't see the blade beneath the beauty or the steel beneath the skin.
He's been selling survival since he was old enough to understand what survival costs, and he has, finally, irrevocably, found something worth surviving for.
They will see it now.
He holds on. Bastian holds back. The fire burns.
The Depths hum their ancient, indifferent song beneath them, and somewhere in the deep places the Grith moves through the dark, its black water swallowing light, its current defying logic, its depths holding things that no one catalogs and no one controls.
Emery breathes in the warmth of Bastian's skin and thinks about the thread.
The thread that started with a guild token and a name and a week in a brothel and a pair of dark eyes across a card table.
The thread that led him through violence and desire and the slow, terrifying dismantling of every wall he'd ever built.
The thread that is still pulling, still unspooling, still leading him forward into a future that is dangerous and uncertain and larger than anything he's faced.
He is not afraid. Fear is a luxury, and Emery can finally afford it, and he is choosing to spend his money on something else.