Chapter 8
The hour is late when they leave the Sable, and the city has gone dark and cold around them.
Dimitri stands on the sidewalk and breathes in the night air and tries to quiet the storm inside his chest. It doesn’t work.
The bond is a live wire, humming with everything he’s feeling and everything Knox is feeling, and the two of them are so tangled together right now that Dimitri can’t tell where his anger ends and Knox’s exhaustion begins.
“I need to rest,” Knox says.
Dimitri doesn’t answer. He’s staring at the neon sign above the Sable’s staircase, watching it flicker, thinking about Ruby’s throat in his hand and the way she’d said drain him dry and the thing that had erupted in his chest when she did.
The thing he’s still not going to think about.
The thing he shoved down and buried and that Knox definitely felt, because this fucking link between them doesn't give him one iota of space to breathe–
A hand touches his arm.
It’s gentle. It’s always gentle. Knox touches him the way you’d touch a wounded animal, carefully, without expectation, giving Dimitri every chance to pull away.
His fingers are light on Dimitri’s forearm, just above the worst of the burns, and the contact sends a low warm current through the bond that Dimitri absolutely does not lean into.
“I don’t care,” Dimitri snaps, pulling his arm free. “I’m stuck with you until we figure this out. Do whatever you want.”
Knox’s jaw tightens. Dimitri can feel the retort building behind those green eyes, something sharp, something earned, but Knox swallows it. He always swallows it. Years of discipline and self-control, and Knox uses every minute of it to be patient with a demon who doesn’t deserve it.
It’s infuriating. It’s something else too, something Dimitri doesn’t have a word for, but infuriating will do for now.
Knox leads them north. Dimitri follows.
***
The apartment is the same as they left it.
Small, sparse, monastic. Knox’s wards sting as Dimitri crosses the threshold, a low buzzing burn that crawls across his skin and settles into a persistent itch.
Knox turns on a few of the lights, but it seems like more of a formality than anything.
He moves through the apartment by memory, silent and sure-footed, and Dimitri watches him from the living room doorway because watching Knox is apparently something he does now.
Knox takes his coat off carefully, wincing as he does so, and throws it away.
There's not much left to salvage. He sets the mace on the table by the door and pulls the rings from his fingers, one by one, setting them in a row beside the mace.
The silver is tarnished, the wards dim. Dimitri wonders if he has extras of everything.
Without the coat, the burns on his arms are visible.
Angry red skin, blistered in places, raw and weeping in others, stretching from his elbows to his hands.
Knox looks down at them as though assessing damage to a piece of equipment.
Clinical. Detached. The way he probably looks at every wound he’s ever taken.
Dimitri drops onto the couch and stares at the ceiling and does not think about the burns on Knox’s arms or the fact that Knox got them pulling Dimitri out of a fire.
Knox disappears into the bathroom. Dimitri hears a cabinet open, the clink of bottles, the sound of running water.
When Knox reappears he’s carrying an armful of supplies, both mundane and magical, and he sits on the edge of the coffee table in front of the couch and begins tending his wounds with the quiet efficiency of a man who has done this many times before.
Dimitri watches from the corner of his eye because he is incapable of not watching.
Knox rolls up what’s left of his sleeves and cleans the burns with something from a brown bottle that smells sharp and medicinal.
He doesn’t flinch. His jaw is set and his breathing is even and his green eyes are focused on the task with the same calm precision he brings to everything, and Dimitri can feel through the bond that the pain is significant.
It is not small. Knox is simply choosing not to react to it, the way he has apparently chosen not to react to pain for decades, and something about that, the discipline, the stubbornness, the sheer refusal to give an inch even when no one is asking him to be strong, makes something hot and tight coil in Dimitri’s chest.
Knox applies a salve from a small jar. It’s magical, Dimitri can smell it, something herbal and warm with a faint luminescence that sinks into the blistered skin and begins to work.
Knox wraps his forearms in clean white bandages, winding them carefully, tucking the ends with practiced hands.
The whole process takes maybe ten minutes, quiet and methodical, and when he’s done he flexes his fingers and tests his grip and nods once to himself, satisfied.
Then he looks at Dimitri.
Dimitri looks at the ceiling.
“Your burns are worse than mine,” Knox says.
“No shit.”
Knox is quiet for a moment. Dimitri can feel him choosing his words through the bond, the careful deliberation of a man who has learned that what he says matters less than how he says it.
“Let me help you,” Knox says.
Something hot and ugly twists in Dimitri’s chest. He turns his head and looks at Knox for the first time since they sat down, and Knox is holding the jar of salve and the roll of bandages and his green eyes are steady and sincere, and the bond is humming with his concern.
Concern. For him. For a demon who punched Knox in the mouth less than two hours ago, who had his hand around Knox’s throat against a brick wall, who has done nothing since they met except make his life actively worse.
And Knox is sitting beside him offering to tend his wounds with the same careful hands that just tended his own, and Dimitri wants to put his fist through the wall.
“I don’t need your fucking pity, angel.”
Knox’s jaw tightens at the word, the way it always does, and Dimitri feels the flinch through the bond, the nerve he keeps hitting on purpose because he doesn’t know how else to keep Knox at a distance.
But Knox doesn’t retreat. He never retreats.
He sits there with his bandaged arms and his split lip and his infuriating, patient, boundless kindness, and he reaches for Dimitri’s arm.
His fingers brush the inside of Dimitri’s wrist, just below the burned skin, gentle and careful and so fucking tender that Dimitri’s vision goes white.
He grabs Knox’s wrist.
Not gently. His burned fingers close around Knox’s bandaged forearm and he surges off the couch, hauling Knox with him.
Knox makes a startled sound, his green eyes going wide, but Dimitri is already moving, already driving them both across the living room.
Knox’s back hits the wall between the bookshelf and the hallway door, hard enough to knock the breath out of him, and Dimitri is on him, burned hands braced on the plaster on either side of Knox’s head, his body a cage.
Knox stares up at him. His lips are parted, his breath quick, the split lip still swollen, his pupils blown wide in the dim light of the apartment.
The flinch from the initial grab is gone, replaced by something more complicated.
Wariness, yes. But underneath it, threaded through it, something that makes his pulse jump at the base of his throat.
Dimitri can see it. That pulse. That pale, narrow throat. He’s close enough to count the freckle below Knox’s left ear that he’s never noticed before.
“What the fuck are you playing at,” Dimitri says.
Knox blinks. “What?”
“The fire. The circle. You punched through a holy fire barrier and pulled me out.” Dimitri leans closer.
Knox presses flatter against the wall but doesn’t look away.
He never looks away. “And now you’re bandaging yourself up and coming at me with salve and that look on your face, like I’m something broken you can fix.
You pull me out of a fire and get burned for it and then you sit down next to me and try to tend me. I want to know what game this is.”
“It’s not a game.”
“It’s always a game. Everyone wants something. What do you want?”
Knox’s jaw tightens. Through the bond Dimitri can feel the hurt that lands, the accusation embedded in the question, and Knox doesn’t hide it. He lets Dimitri feel it, lets the bond carry it across, and his green eyes are very bright and very close.
“Nothing,” Knox says. His voice is steady. His pulse isn’t. “You’re hurt and I have supplies and that’s it. It’s not pity. It’s not a game. It’s just what you do when someone is injured.”
“Someone,” Dimitri repeats. “I’m not someone. I’m a demon. I’m the thing you hunt.”
Knox holds his gaze. “I know what you are.”
“You could have been rid of me.” Dimitri’s voice drops low, barely above a whisper.
The living room feels very small. “The witch would have burned me to ash, and you would have walked out free. No more bond. No more leash. No more demon in your apartment and your head and your—” He stops himself.
The sentence has too many endings and none of them are safe.
“You could have let me die and gone back to your life.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
Knox holds his gaze. Those green eyes are steady in the dim apartment, and Dimitri can feel Knox’s heartbeat through the bond, fast and rapid, a staccato rhythm that doesn’t match the calm on his face.
“No one deserves to die like that,” Knox says quietly. “Not even a demon.”
Dimitri makes a sound in his throat. Disgust, maybe, or the precursor to it. “That’s not a reason. That’s a platitude. That’s something you tell yourself to sleep at night. I want the real reason.”
Knox is quiet for a long moment. His pulse is still fast. His breath is still quick. Dimitri is close enough to feel the heat radiating off his body, to see the individual strands of blond hair that have come loose from his ponytail and fallen against his jaw.
“You could have been rid of me too,” Knox says.
Dimitri goes still.
“Ruby offered you a way out,” Knox continues. “Hand me over. Let her daughters have me. Walk away free.” His green eyes don’t waver. “You didn’t.”
The silence in the room is absolute. Dimitri can hear his own breathing. He can hear Knox’s. They’re close enough that the sounds almost overlap.
Dimitri holds the silence for a long, weighted moment.
He holds it because he doesn’t have an answer, or rather he has one and it terrifies him, and Knox is standing there against the wall of his own apartment with his bandaged arms and his steady green eyes, and he just turned Dimitri’s question back on him with the precision of someone who fights with a mace and the gentleness of someone who bandages his enemies, and Dimitri doesn’t know what to do with any of it.
He has consumed the power of demons and brought cities to their knees and stood in the courts of kings and never once in all that time has a five-foot-eight Templar with a ponytail and a wounded mouth made him feel as though the ground beneath him has shifted.
Then Dimitri smiles.
It’s slow. It’s sharp. It’s the kind of smile that shows teeth and means danger, and he leans forward until his mouth is inches from Knox’s ear.
He lifts one hand from the wall and traces a single clawed finger down the side of Knox’s face. Slowly. From his temple to his jaw. The claw is light, barely touching, not breaking skin, and Knox’s breath hitches, and Dimitri feels the hitch echo through the bond.
“Where would be the fun in that,” Dimitri murmurs, “angel?”
Knox knocks his hand away.
The motion is sharp, decisive, the trained reflex of a Templar reasserting control. Knox ducks under Dimitri’s arm and steps around him, putting distance between them, and when he turns back his expression is set in a frown that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Don’t call me that,” Knox says.
He turns and walks down the hallway to his bedroom. The door closes behind him. Not a slam. Knox doesn’t slam things. Knox is constitutionally incapable of slamming things. It’s a firm, deliberate click that says this conversation is over.
Dimitri stands in the living room.
He looks at the jar of salve on the coffee table. At the roll of bandages Knox left beside it. At the careful, precise way Knox had laid out the supplies, everything within reach, everything organized, the habits of a man who expects to take care of people and expects nothing in return.
He presses his hand flat against the wall where Knox’s shoulders were a moment ago. The plaster is warm.
He picks up the salve. He opens the jar.
The smell is herbal and warm, and it’s the same stuff Knox used on his own arms, and Dimitri sits on the couch in the dark and applies it to his burns with clumsy, careful fingers, and he tells himself this means nothing.
This changes nothing. He is a demon and Knox is a Templar and the salve is just salve and the warmth in his chest is just the bond and the ache beneath it is just the burns.
He tells himself he’s grateful Knox didn’t stay.
The salve sinks into his skin. It helps. It helps more than it should, because Knox’s hands were meant to apply it and Dimitri’s were not, and even the ghost of Knox’s intent, the care baked into the making of the stuff, eases something in Dimitri that the medicine alone can’t account for.
He doesn’t sleep. He sits in the dark and feels Knox on the other side of the wall, awake and hurting and stubbornly alive, and he holds the jar of salve in his burned hands and doesn’t think about anything at all.