Chapter 16
Dimitri is angry.
He has been angry since last night. He has been angry since he walked out of Knox’s bedroom and closed the door and pressed his palms against his eyes and felt the shape of Knox’s cheekbones burning in his hands.
He has been angry since the bond carried Knox’s hurt across the wall between them, quiet and sharp and aching, and Dimitri had felt it land in his chest and done nothing about it.
He has been angry through the sleepless hours and the silent morning and the coffee he drank without tasting and the walk to the warehouse where he kept his eyes on the street and his side of the bond sealed shut because the alternative was feeling what Knox was feeling, and what Knox was feeling was devastating, and Dimitri could not afford to let it in.
He does not care about Knox.
He doesn’t. He tells himself this with the conviction of a man nailing boards over a door that is already breaking.
He tells himself this while the bond bleeds hurt from Knox’s side, a slow persistent seep that Dimitri can feel even through the wall he’s built, the way you can feel rain through a coat that isn’t thick enough.
He tells himself this while Knox addresses the kitchen counter instead of him and buckles his coat with shaking hands and can’t look him in the eye, and Dimitri tells himself he doesn’t care, doesn’t care, doesn’t care, and the fury grows.
It grows because the alternative is something else.
The alternative is acknowledging that he held Knox’s face in his hands and it felt reverent and that the word reverent has never once in a years applied to anything Dimitri has done.
The alternative is acknowledging that he pulled away not because he was disgusted by Knox but because he was terrified of what wanting Knox that badly would cost him.
The alternative is acknowledging that the void he’s projecting through the bond is a lie, and that what’s actually underneath it is so big and so unfamiliar that Dimitri would rather burn his own side of the connection to ash than let Knox see it.
Fury is easier. Fury is familiar. Fury is years of armor and Dimitri puts it on and walks to the warehouse and does not look at Knox and does not feel the hurt bleeding through the bond and does not care.
***
The meat packing plant looks worse in daylight. Ugly, rusted, sagging. Knox’s partner is waiting outside with his necromancer.
Vale. The not-boyfriend. The brother. The man who has known Knox for decades and fought beside him and earned the kind of trust that lets Knox close his eyes in combat and know that someone will be there.
Dimitri looks at Vale and the fury tightens another notch, because the correction Knox made on the cathedral steps, the like a brother, the never once thought of him that way, should have defused the jealousy entirely and instead it has only refined it.
Dimitri is no longer jealous of what Vale might have.
He is jealous of what Vale does have: History.
The easy shorthand of two people who have shared enough blood and silence to build a language out of it.
August is kind to Knox. He keeps his distance, something about their natures being incompatible on contact, but his warmth is genuine and his smile is bright and he says it’s been too long with the voice of someone who means it.
Dimitri watches Knox soften at the edges around August, the rigid morning posture loosening a fraction, and the fury grows because Knox has people.
Knox has a life full of people who care about him and touch his shoulder and say his name with warmth, and Dimitri has no one, has had no one his entire life, and the asymmetry of that is so vast and so old that the anger he feels about it has nothing to do with Knox and everything to do with the shape of Dimitri’s existence.
He does not care about Knox. He is angry about something else entirely.
August closes his eyes and begins to work on the dimensional scar. The temperature drops. The scar pulses. And the rifthounds come.
Six of them. Bigger than the ones in the canal, older, better fed, pouring out of the shadows with the desperate fury of creatures whose lifeline is being severed. Dimitri lets the shadows thicken around his hands and goes to work.
Knox and Vale fight together.
Dimitri has seen Knox fight. He has fought beside Knox, in the canals, and the bond had filled in the gaps between them and it had worked, seamless and wordless and right.
But watching Knox fight with Vale is something else.
Something worse. They move in tandem, two halves of a single engine, years of partnership compressed into a choreography so precise that communication becomes redundant.
Vale swings high, Knox ducks low. Knox drives a creature toward the wall, Vale is already there to finish it.
They orbit each other with the gravitational certainty of bodies that have been in each other’s pull for decades, and Dimitri watches them and the fury grows and grows and grows.
He hates it.
He hates that someone knows Knox that well.
He hates the wordless trust, the seamless coordination, the way Knox’s body relaxes into the partnership the way it relaxes into nothing else.
He hates that Vale has earned something Dimitri cannot buy or steal or take by force, which is the knowledge of what Knox will do before he does it, the privilege of being the person Knox turns his back to in a fight without flinching.
He hates that he hates it. That is the worst part. Years of not caring about anything or anyone and now he is standing in a warehouse killing demons and burning alive with jealousy over a Templar’s partnership, and he is supposed to not care, and he doesn’t care, and the fury grows.
Dimitri fights alone. He fights brilliantly, savagely, tearing through rifthounds with shadow and claw, and he fights alone, and through the bond he can feel Knox noticing, and he buries the observation under violence and kills the next creature with his bare hands.
The last rifthound falls. The breach seals. The warehouse goes silent.
***
Dimitri retreats to the far wall while Knox and Vale and August say their farewells.
He stands with his back to them and his arms crossed and broods, and the bond stretches between him and Knox like a wire about to snap, and he does not care what they’re saying, he does not care about the warmth that surfaces on Knox’s side of the connection, he does not care.
Knox crosses the warehouse toward him and says his name and Dimitri walks away before he can finish the sentence.
He pushes off the wall and heads for the loading dock at a pace his long legs make punishing for Knox to match, and he stays as far ahead as fifty feet allows, and he does not look back.
The hurt bleeding through the bond from Knox’s side is a constant now.
Not sharp, not dramatic, just there. A low frequency hum of pain that sits underneath everything else, and Dimitri tells himself it’s the angelic rejection, that Knox is suffering physically and not emotionally, and he knows he’s lying because he told Knox he wanted him last night and then he pulled away in disgust and the hurt started then and has not stopped since.
He does not care. He doesn’t. He doesn’t.
***
They turn down an alley. A shortcut through a block of condemned buildings, narrow and unlit, and Dimitri feels them before he sees them.
Demonic energy. Two signatures, strong, approaching from the far end of the alley. He rolls his eyes at the intrusion and keeps walking.
Knox feels it too. His hand goes to his mace, but he doesn’t draw.
Two men step out of the shadows at the other end of the alley.
They’re big and too attractive to be human, built on a scale that marks them as something older and more dangerous than the rifthounds.
The taller one has a smile that belongs on something that feeds at night, wide and delighted and full of too many teeth, and his eyes find Knox immediately with the unerring precision of a predator locating wounded prey.
“Well, well,” the tall one says. He leans against the alley wall, arms crossed, entirely at ease.
“We’ve been looking for you two. Word travels fast in the Old City, and when we heard a demon in Haven had leashed himself a Templar, we just had to come see for ourselves.
” His gaze slides over Knox from boots to ponytail, slow and savoring. “Oh, he’s pretty. Isn’t he pretty.”
Knox tenses beside Dimitri. His hand is on his mace but he doesn’t act. Through the bond, Dimitri can feel Knox’s readiness, coiled and waiting, and beneath it the exhaustion, the depleted reserves, the body that is burning itself alive from the inside.
Dimitri projects calm. “You’re looking in the wrong place. My pet human and I are just out for a midnight stroll.”
The shorter one laughs. He’s broader than the tall one, thicker through the chest and neck, and his eyes haven’t left Knox since he stepped into the light.
“He reeks of holy power. I can taste it from here, all that divine energy sitting right under his skin.” He takes a step forward, nostrils flaring, and his tongue runs across his lower lip.
“You know what holy blood does to our kind? What it tastes like on the way down? I’ve heard it’s addictive. One taste and you can’t stop.”
“We thought you’d be amenable to sharing,” the tall one says. He pushes off the wall and takes a step closer, and his eyes drop to Knox’s throat with a hunger that is openly grotesque. “Let us have a few hours with him. We’ll give him back when we’re done. Probably. Depends on how much fun he is.”
Dimitri’s claws extend.