Chapter 15
Knox tries to feel nothing.
He lies in the dark after the door clicks shut and he tries to feel nothing, and he fails so completely and so immediately that the failure itself becomes another thing to feel.
The rejection sits in his chest, not the clean sharp rejection of a blow or a wound but the slow, spreading kind, the kind that seeps into soft tissue and stains everything it touches.
Dimitri had held his face in his hands. Dimitri had leaned in until they were breathing the same air and Knox could feel the ghost of his mouth and the wanting pouring through the bond had been so vast and so shared that Knox had thought, for one brief and stupid and devastating moment, that this was it.
That the distance between them had finally become too small to maintain. That someone was going to cross it.
And then Dimitri had looked at him, truly looked, and the wanting had turned to disgust, and he had pulled away as though Knox were something contagious.
Knox stares at the ceiling and feels the shape of Dimitri’s palms on his face.
They are still there, the phantom pressure of large hands and careful fingers, and his skin remembers the warmth of them even though the warmth is gone.
His own hands are in his lap, holding nothing.
He’d held on to Dimitri’s wrists and Dimitri had pulled away and Knox’s hands had stayed up, hovering in empty air, reaching for something that was already gone.
He didn’t sleep. He is not going to sleep.
The bond hums between them, thin and taut, and from Dimitri’s side there is nothing.
Not anger, not frustration, not the usual roiling darkness that Dimitri wears the way Knox wears his coat.
Just nothing. An empty, deliberate void, as though Dimitri has walled off his side of the connection and left only silence.
Knox has felt Dimitri’s rage and his hunger and his reluctant amusement and his sharp-edged grief, and this is worse than all of them.
This is the sound of someone choosing to feel nothing rather than feel what they actually feel, and Knox recognizes the technique because he’s been using it his entire life.
He lies in the dark and does not sleep and tries to reconcile the man who cupped his face with the man who recoiled from him.
He fails at that too.
***
Morning is a landscape of silence.
Knox makes coffee. He pours it into the single mug and sets it on the counter for Dimitri, same as every morning, and the routine is the only thing holding him together.
His hands move through the familiar motions, kettle, grounds, pour, and the normalcy of it is a rope he grips with both hands.
He fills a glass of water for himself and stands at the sink and does not drink it.
He is not hungry. His stomach is a closed fist. The angelic rejection is grinding through his blood with a ferocity that is worse this morning, as though the almost-kiss activated something, as though his body registered the nearness of the bond sealing and responded by fighting harder to prevent it.
His skin feels paper-thin. His pulse is visible at his wrists, and when he grips the edge of the counter his fingers shake.
Dimitri takes the mug without acknowledgment and sits on the couch and doesn’t look at him.
This is new. Before last night, Dimitri always looked at him.
It was the one constant Knox could rely on, those red eyes tracking him across every room, studying him, wanting him, the gaze that made Knox’s neck warm and his pulse kick and his discipline strain.
Now there is nothing. Dimitri stares at the wall with the rigid focus of someone determinedly not staring at something else, and the absence of his attention is louder than anything he has ever said.
Knox leans against the kitchen counter and stares at his untouched water and feels the rejection sitting behind his sternum.
He is frustrated at himself. Furious, even, in the quiet internalized way that Knox does fury, turned inward, compressed, examined from every angle until it either yields to reason or becomes a permanent fixture.
He barely knows Dimitri. They’ve been bound for days, not years.
Dimitri is a demon. A literal demon. An ancient entity who feeds on contracts and has promised to destroy a twenty-year-old kid and who has spent the better part of a week antagonizing Knox with every breath and calling him half nothing and unwanted and angel as though the word is a weapon.
Knox should not want to mean anything to him.
The look on Dimitri’s face, the disgust, the recoil, the way he’d pulled away as though Knox were the contamination, should not hurt like this.
It should not sit behind Knox’s sternum like a bruise that won’t fade.
They are mortal enemies. They are bound against their will.
The only reason they are in each other’s lives is a witch’s mistake, and when the mistake is corrected Dimitri will leave and Knox will return to his life and they will never see each other again, and that is how it should be.
Knox tells himself this. He tells himself this while he buckles his coat and pulls his hair back and puts the mace at his hip, and none of it sticks, because underneath the logic and the reason and the years of discipline there is a truth he can’t quite smother.
He cares about Dimitri, and Dimitri does not care about him.
He knew this. He told himself this on the couch last night with Dimitri’s arm in his lap and his feelings bleeding through the bond, that wanting is not caring, that Dimitri’s possessiveness is ownership and not tenderness, that Knox is caring about someone who will never care about him back.
He told himself and he believed it, and then Dimitri walked into his room and cupped his face and leaned in with such devastating gentleness that for one moment Knox forgot everything he knew.
The gentleness was the cruelest part. Because it felt real.
It felt, through the bond, as though Dimitri were handling something precious, something he was afraid to break, and Knox’s heart had cracked open for it, had unfolded toward it the way a plant unfolds toward light, and then Dimitri had looked at what was being offered and broken it anyway.
Knox tries to keep all of this from filtering through the bond.
He compresses it, tamps it down, layers discipline over it the way he’d layer bandages over a wound.
But the bond is wide and the hurt is deep and some of it bleeds through, he can feel it leaking from his side of the connection, and he can’t tell if Dimitri registers it because Dimitri’s side is still that empty deliberate void.
The void is maddening. Knox has grown accustomed to the noise of Dimitri, the constant dark weather system of his emotions pressing against the bond.
Rage and hunger and sharp amusement and the grudging, complicated thing that surfaced when Knox touched him gently.
Now there is nothing, and the nothing is so complete and so intentional that it feels like a wall built specifically to keep Knox out, and Knox stares at his water glass and thinks: this is what he chose.
This is what he chose over me. Silence. Void.
Nothing. Rather than feel what he felt last night, he would rather feel nothing at all.
Which is fine. Knox has spent eighty years being the person other people feel nothing about.
He is very good at being easy to leave. He is very good at watching people walk away and telling himself it was always going to go this way, because it was, because it always does, because Knox is the kind of man people care about in principle and leave in practice.
He is not going to fall apart over a demon who held his face and then was repulsed by the thought of being with him forever.
His phone buzzes. A message from Vale. It's still a little weird that his technologically incapable partner has a phone now. Oh, the wonders of dating a younger man.
August is available. Meet at the warehouse.
Knox texts back. On our way.
He looks across the apartment at Dimitri, who is staring at the wall with that terrible emptiness radiating through the bond.
Knox opens his mouth to speak and finds that the words, any words, stick in his throat.
The idea of looking Dimitri in the eye, of addressing him directly, of standing in his line of sight and being seen by those red eyes that last night had been so close to his and so full of wanting before they filled with disgust, is more than Knox can manage this morning.
He is held together with discipline and routine and the thin, fraying thread of his pride, and direct eye contact will snap all three.
“August can close the rift,” Knox says to the kitchen counter. “We need to go.”
Dimitri stands without a word. He walks to the door without a word. He waits in the hallway without a word.
Knox sets down his untouched water. He puts on his blessing rings, one by one, silver bands on scarred fingers, and each one feels heavier than the last. He checks his coat, checks his mace, checks the routine, and the routine holds him upright the way scaffolding holds a wall that is crumbling from the inside.
They leave. They don’t talk. The bond stretches between them, thin and taut and silent, and Knox walks beside the void where Dimitri used to be and tells himself he doesn’t miss the noise.