Chapter 5
Knox doesn't sleep.
He lies in the dark on his narrow bed and stares at the ceiling and feels the two forces warring inside him.
The bond sits beneath his sternum, dark and ancient and insistent, reaching toward the demon on the other side of the wall with a pull that has settled from the desperate agony of the warehouse into something steadier but no less relentless.
And his blood, the angelic inheritance he didn't ask for and can't give back, is fighting it.
Rejecting it. Treating the bond as an infection, a foreign body, marshaling every divine resource at its disposal to burn the thing out.
The result is a friction he can feel in the spaces between his cells.
His skin is wrong, stretched too thin, pulled too tight.
There's a grinding, cellular discomfort that he can't locate or name because it's everywhere and nowhere at once, a deep wrongness in his blood that has everything to do with the fact that his body is tearing itself apart trying to reject the thing that tethers him to Dimitri.
He presses a hand to his sternum and feels the bond pulse against his palm.
On the other side of the wall, Dimitri is awake.
Knox can feel him, a coiled restless presence pretending to be at rest, and the awareness of him is constant and intrusive and strangely, infuriatingly grounding.
As though having Dimitri close quiets something in the bond even as Knox's blood screams against it.
Then the bond shifts.
It comes without warning. One moment Knox is lying in the dark cataloging the dull ache in his bones, and the next something hot and liquid pours through the tether between them and floods his chest. It’s so unfamiliar and strong that it almost knocks the breath out of him.
His breath catches and his hands fist in the sheets and for a disorienting, vertigo-inducing second he doesn't know whose feeling this is, can't sort the signal from the noise, because it is everywhere at once, rushing through him with a heat he’s never felt before.
It’s desire. Raw, undisguised, unapologetic desire, rolling through the bond in waves, and it is not his–he knows it is not his–but his body doesn't know that.
His body doesn't care about the distinction between self and other when the sensation is this immediate, this consuming. He feels himself responding before he can stop it, blood moving south, his pulse climbing, a flush spreading across his skin in the dark of his own bedroom, and for three terrible seconds he is hard and aching and the thoughts in his head are not his own but they feel like his own, don’t they?
It’s not like he doesn’t find Dimitri attractive. He’s a demon. Of course he’s attractive. It’s not hard to feel the desire pooling in his stomach, the want coursing through his veins, and think of redirecting it towards the demon laying on his couch in tight pants and a low cut shirt.
There are no images. The bond isn’t a screen.
But he can feel the edges of what Dimitri is thinking about him, about an idea of what Dimitri wants to do to him, and being confronted by that knowledge by someone he has known for less than a day is disorienting and is threatening to upend every careful wall he’s built around himself.
There have been people in his past, of course there have, but he’s never been inside their heads.
He’s never felt someone want him with their entire soul.
Knox slams the door shut before it’s even fully open.
Not literally. There is no door to slam, no mechanism in the bond that allows him to simply refuse incoming transmissions.
But he has spent a lifetime controlling himself, controlling his reactions, controlling the parts of him that the world is not allowed to see, and he throws every ounce of that discipline at the wall between his mind and the bond and pushes.
He thinks about laundry. He thinks about acid-dripping rifthounds and the way their skulls caved under his mace.
He thinks about Sanctus Cael's face, five hundred years old and deeply unattractive, the skin like a paper bag that someone crumpled up and then tried to smooth out again, and that does it.
That kills whatever was building in him with the efficiency of a bucket of cold water.
He lies in the dark, breathing hard, and stares at the ceiling, and reminds himself of what Dimitri is.
A demon. A creature whose kind have spent millennia perfecting the art of seduction, of lure, of want deployed as a weapon.
The desire pouring through the bond is not affection.
It is not tenderness. It is not anything that comes from a place Knox can afford to trust. Demons want the way fire wants fuel, consuming and indiscriminate and ultimately destructive, and being wanted by one is not flattering.
It is dangerous. It is a blade pressed against the throat by a hand that's still deciding whether to cut.
Knox knows this. He has always known this.
He does not sleep.
Morning finds him in the bathroom, gripping the edges of the sink, staring at a face he barely recognizes.
His skin is pale. Not the fair, clean paleness of his usual complexion but something sallower, thinner, with a faintly translucent quality that makes the veins at his temples visible.
His green eyes are bloodshot. His blond hair hangs tangled around his jaw, and when he splashes cold water on his face the cold doesn't register the way it should.
Everything is muted, slightly distant, as though he's experiencing the world through a pane of glass.
He scrubs his face. Ties his hair back into a ponytail with practiced hands.
Pulls on a clean shirt and buckles his coat to his chin and puts the mace at his hip and slides the blessing rings onto his left hand.
The routine is decades old and it steadies him the way it always does, each step a rung on a ladder that leads back to himself.
When he leaves the bathroom, Dimitri is sitting on the couch watching him.
The demon looks better than he has any right to.
The fracture lines from the summoning have faded to faint silver traces on his skin, and his red eyes are alert and sharp and tracking Knox's movements with an intensity that makes Knox's neck warm.
The duster is draped over the arm of the couch, and the shirt is low enough to show the line of his collarbones, while the ridged horns curving back from his temples catching the thin morning light from the kitchen window.
Knox catalogs this information under irrelevant and moves on.
Dimitri's gaze drags down his body and back up again, slow and deliberate, and then he grins.
It's not the sharp, defensive grin from the warehouse or the all-teeth provocation from the top of the stairs at The Sable.
This one is wicked and knowing and edged with something private, the grin of a man who knows exactly what he sent through the bond last night and exactly what it did.
His red eyes hold Knox's and the grin widens, just slightly, just enough, and the message is unmistakable: Have a rough night?
Knox gives him a flat look, turns back to the door and says, "The apothecary should be open. Let's go."
Dimitri unfolds from the couch with the languid ease of something that has nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there. "After you, angel."
"Don't call me that."
Dimitri's grin doesn't waver. Knox opens the door.
They walk south toward the east side, and Knox can already feel himself flagging and it’s not even ten in the morning.
It starts a few blocks from the apartment.
His stride shortens, just slightly, a half-step less than the night before.
The mace at his hip feels heavier. There's a tremor in his left hand that comes and goes, barely perceptible.
The angelic rejection is a constant low-grade hum beneath his skin now, a grinding friction that saps his stamina and thins his reflexes, and he knows it's going to get worse.
He's known since last night, lying in his bed and feeling his blood war against the bond, that this is not a static condition.
It is a progression. And if they don't break the bond soon, he doesn't know where it ends.
By the time they're halfway there, he's winded.
Not gasping, not doubled over, but breathing harder than the pace warrants, a slight hitch at the top of each inhale that he can't smooth out no matter how carefully he controls his breath.
The distance is nothing. He's walked ten times this far on a routine patrol without noticing.
But the rejection is eating his reserves from the inside, and his body is spending so much energy fighting the bond that there's less and less left for everything else, and he can feel the deficit widening with every block.
Dimitri glances at him. Those red eyes track the slight unevenness of Knox's breathing, the thinning of his stride, the way he has to focus on keeping his posture straight.
Knox waits for the comment. The barb. The scathing observation about the angel who can't walk ten blocks without needing a rest.
Dimitri says nothing. He slows his pace, just slightly, just enough that Knox doesn't have to stretch to match his longer legs, and looks away.
Knox doesn't mention it. There's nothing to be done about it except break the bond, and that's what they're on their way to do.
The apothecary is open. The wards are dormant, the door unlocked, and a hand-lettered sign in the window has been flipped to OPEN. Dimitri pushes through without hesitating, a bell chiming overhead, and Knox follows.