Chapter 14
It’s after two in the morning and Knox isn’t sleeping.
Dimitri would know this even without the bond.
He’d know it the way you know a storm is coming, the pressure in the air, the charged stillness, the sense of something building toward a breaking point.
The apartment is thick with it. Tension saturating every surface, seeping through the walls, filling the space between couch and bedroom.
But Dimitri does have the bond, and the bond tells him everything.
Knox is awake. Knox is lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and his mind is a churning current of exhaustion and frustration and something else, something hot and restless that Knox keeps pushing down and that keeps floating back to the surface.
Dimitri can feel the shape of it without being able to name it, a wanting that is tangled up in something more complicated, something Knox is holding with white-knuckled hands and refusing to release.
It presses against the bond with a warmth that makes Dimitri’s skin prickle.
There is a longing in the apartment tonight that Dimitri cannot attribute to either of them with certainty.
It lives in the space between them, in the wall that separates them, in the bond that connects them, and it has no single origin.
It is his and it is Knox’s and it is theirs together, two currents feeding the same river, and Dimitri has been lying on this couch for an hour trying to determine where his wanting ends and Knox’s begins and he cannot find the seam.
He lasts until 2:17.
He gets up. He walks through the hallway. He doesn’t hesitate at the bedroom door, because hesitation is weakness and Dimitri is ancient and has never been weak. He opens it and walks inside.
Knox sits up in bed.
He’s completely awake, not groggy, not disoriented, just instantly upright, green eyes sharp in the dark. The sheets pool around his waist, and the moonlight pouring through the window paints the room in silver and shadow.
Knox is bare to the waist. His hair is down.
Dimitri stands in the doorway and feels the world reorganize itself around those two facts.
The hair falls around Knox’s shoulders and across his collarbones in waves of pale gold, longer than it looks in the ponytail, and the moonlight catches it and turns it luminous.
It frames his face in a way the ponytail never allows, softening the angles of his jaw, falling across one green eye, pooling in the hollow of his throat.
Knox pushes a strand behind his ear with one hand and the gesture is so small and so unconscious and so devastating that Dimitri’s breath leaves him.
His chest is lean and defined, the compact precise musculature of a man who has spent years swinging a mace, and his skin is pale and smooth and faintly radiant in a way that has everything to do with what he is.
The shadows pool in the hollows of his collarbones, in the dip between his ribs, along the narrow taper of his waist where it disappears beneath the sheets.
He is built on a smaller scale than Dimitri in every way, and the delicacy of it is a lie that Dimitri knows better than to believe, because he has seen those narrow shoulders swing a mace through bone, has seen those slender arms haul him out of a fire, but the lie is beautiful.
Knox’s body is a study in contradiction: fragile-looking and impossibly strong, holy and warm-blooded and utterly, devastatingly human in the moonlight, and Dimitri wants to put his mouth on every inch of it.
He was wrong in the canals. He was wrong when he said no one wanted Knox.
When he said unwanted, when he dug for the wound and tried to make Knox bleed.
He was projecting, and he was lying, and he was wrong, because Dimitri wants Knox with a clarity that cuts through every layer of anger and resistance and self-preservation he has built up over years of existence.
The longing is everywhere now. It fills the room, fills the bond, fills the space between the doorway where Dimitri stands and the bed where Knox sits, and Dimitri still cannot tell whose it is.
It feels like his, the deep visceral pull toward this man that has been building since the warehouse.
But it also feels like Knox’s, the restless warmth that has been pressing against the bond all night, the thing Knox keeps pushing down, and the two longings are layered on top of each other so completely that they’ve become one thing, one shared ache that belongs to neither and both.
Dimitri crosses the room.
He presses one knee into the mattress, and the bed dips under his weight, and he brings his face level with Knox’s.
Close. Inches apart. Knox’s green eyes are wide, his lips parted, and the flush is already blooming, rising from his bare chest, climbing his throat, spreading across his cheeks.
Through the bond Dimitri can feel Knox’s heartbeat, rapid and frantic, and his own heartbeat is doing something similar, and the two rhythms are almost synchronized, almost the same, two pulses reaching for a frequency that would lock them together.
“What are you doing?” Knox breathes.
Dimitri looks at him. At the moonlight on his skin. At the pulse hammering in the hollow of his throat. At the way his blond hair falls across one shoulder and catches the light. At his mouth, which is slightly swollen from the split lip that hasn’t fully healed, and which is parted.
“I can’t stop thinking,” Dimitri says, and his voice is low and rough and stripped of every pretense he usually wears, “about how good you would taste.”
Knox flinches back. It’s small, a fractional retreat, his spine pressing against the headboard, but Dimitri is faster. His hand shoots out and catches Knox’s arm, just above the elbow, and the contact detonates the bond between them.
Heat. Immediate, overwhelming heat, pouring through the point where their skin meets and flooding outward.
Knox’s arm is warm under Dimitri’s hand.
Warm and soft, softer than he expected, softer than a Templar’s arm has any right to be, and the muscle beneath is taut with tension but the skin is smooth, and Dimitri’s fingers span it easily, and Knox is gorgeous.
He is so goddamn gorgeous that it’s an act of violence, sitting here in the moonlight with his hair down and his chest bare and his green eyes blown wide with something that isn’t fear.
Knox is red down to his sternum. The flush covers him, and his breathing is heavy, and through the bond Dimitri can feel exactly what Knox is feeling, the racing pulse, the dry mouth, the heat coiling low in his stomach.
Knox is aroused. The knowledge hits Dimitri and the bond amplifies it, mirrors it, feeds it back and forth between them until the wanting is a loop with no beginning and no end, a current that passes through them both and gathers strength with every pass, and Dimitri is drowning in it.
Knox is tense in his grip. Not fighting. Not pulling away. Just held, caught between the headboard at his back and Dimitri’s hand on his arm, and his chest is rising and falling in rapid shallow breaths and his eyes are locked on Dimitri’s and the air between them could ignite.
Dimitri releases his arm. Knox doesn’t move.
Slowly, deliberately, Dimitri lifts both hands and cups Knox’s face.
Knox’s breath stutters. His green eyes go very wide, very bright, and his lips part on a sound that doesn’t quite make it out.
Dimitri’s hands are large enough that his fingers slide into the loose gold hair at Knox’s temples and his palms bracket those high cheekbones and his thumbs rest at the corners of Knox’s mouth, and Knox is looking up at him with an expression that is cracked open, vulnerable in a way Dimitri has never seen from him, every wall down, every defense breached, and the longing pouring through the bond is so vast and so mutual that Dimitri cannot find where his ends and Knox’s begins because they are the same longing, they have always been the same longing.
Knox’s hands come up. Not to push him away.
They land on Dimitri’s wrists, light and trembling, and his fingers curl around the bones there and hold on, and the electricity arcs between every point of contact, wrists to palms to jaw to hair, and Dimitri’s vision narrows to the green of Knox’s eyes and the parted shape of his mouth and the warmth of his skin beneath Dimitri’s palms.
Dimitri leans in.
He tilts Knox’s face up with his hands, gentle, so gentle, gentler than he has been with anything in a millenium, and he brings his mouth close.
Not touching. Not yet. But close enough that they’re breathing the same air, close enough that the heat between their mouths is a tangible thing, and Knox’s eyes flutter half-closed and his fingers tighten on Dimitri’s wrists and through the bond there is nothing except want, shared and enormous and undeniable, and Dimitri is going to kiss him.
He is going to close this distance and put his mouth on Knox’s and find out if the electricity gets better or worse when they stop pretending, and nothing in his many years of existence has ever felt as inevitable as this.
“We can’t.” Knox’s voice cracks on the second word. He swallows and Dimitri feels the movement against his palms. “We’re bound by blood magic. If you—if we—if you accept the bond, it becomes permanent. We won’t be able to reverse it.”
Dimitri doesn’t pull back. Not yet. He stays there with Knox’s face in his hands and his breath on Knox’s lips and the wanting screaming through every nerve in his body, and he processes the words slowly, because his brain has vacated the premises and is only now beginning to return.
A permanent bond. With a nephilim.
The words penetrate the haze of want the way cold water seeps through cracks in hot stone. Permanent. Irrevocable. Not the temporary chain that can be broken with the right spell and the right witch and enough effort. A real bond. A true bond. Soul to soul. Forever.
He would never be free again.
The full weight of it hits him. A thousand years of answering to no one, belonging to no one, being owned by nothing.
His freedom is the only thing he has that has never been taken from him, the one constant across centuries of summoning and binding and trading.
And Knox is telling him, with his face in Dimitri’s hands and his breath on Dimitri’s mouth, that if Dimitri closes this last impossible inch, he will lose the only thing he has ever truly possessed.
Dimitri recoils.
He pulls back as though Knox has struck him, a sharp violent retreat, his hands releasing Knox’s face, his knee coming off the mattress, his whole body recoiling from the bed as if the sheets are made of holy fire.
The wanting doesn’t stop. It claws at him, howling, as he puts distance between them.
But the revulsion is stronger. The revulsion is survival.
The revulsion is instinct screaming that a cage is a cage no matter how beautiful the bars.
The hurt on Knox's face feels like a punch to the ribs.
The brief devastating expression of a man who just had someone hold his face with reverent hands and lean in close enough to taste and then recoil from him in disgust, and who can’t quite keep the wound from showing.
His hands are still raised, still hovering where Dimitri’s wrists were a moment ago, holding nothing.
It lasts less than a second. Knox’s composure closes over it, smooth and seamless, and by the time Dimitri blinks the Templar’s expression is neutral and his green eyes are steady and his hands have dropped to his lap and there is no trace of the hurt except in the bond, where it echoes, small and sharp and aching, and Dimitri can feel exactly how much it cost Knox and he wants to claw his own chest open to get the feeling out.
Dimitri tries not to feel it. He tries so hard not to feel it that the effort is almost worse than the feeling itself.
He turns. He walks out of the bedroom. He pulls the door shut behind him with a click that sounds, in the silence of the apartment, final.
He does not look back.
He drops onto the couch and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes and breathes, and the ghost of Knox’s skin lingers on his palms, the shape of those cheekbones still imprinted in his hands, and the ache in his chest is not the bond.
It is not the wanting. It is the memory of Knox’s empty hands hovering in the air after Dimitri pulled away, holding the space where his wrists used to be, and Dimitri presses his palms harder against his eyes and makes a sound that he will never admit to making.