Chapter 16 #2
The fury that has been building in him all day, the shapeless roiling mass of it that has been looking for a target since he walked out of Knox’s bedroom, finds one.
The wall he built over the bond cracks. The void he has been projecting gives way to what is underneath, and what is underneath is not nothing and not rage and not anything he has a name for.
These two demons are looking at Knox the way Ruby’s daughters looked at Knox, the way every predator in this city looks at Knox, as though he is something to be consumed and used and thrown away, and the feeling that detonates in Dimitri’s chest is so violent and so total that it obliterates every lie he has told himself today.
Mine.
The word doesn’t form in language. It forms in the place beneath language, in the place where Dimitri is not an ancient demon with armor and pretense and a carefully maintained void, but something older and simpler and more honest than any of that.
It is possessive and it is protective and it is furious, and when the taller demon takes another step toward Knox, Dimitri doesn’t think. He steps in front of him.
The demons exchange a look. The shorter one grins. “Oh, he’s possessive. That’s adorable. We won't break him too bad, promise.”
Knox bristles behind him, hand on his mace, and Dimitri can feel through the bond that Knox is ready to fight, that Knox could take them, that this compact stubborn exhausted Templar would drag himself through a brawl on depleted reserves before he’d let anyone fight for him.
Dimitri considers letting him, just to watch their faces as they’re taken apart by someone half their size.
But this one is his. This fight belongs to him. These creatures put their eyes on what is his and spoke about him as though he were something to be passed around and used, and the fury in Dimitri’s chest is no longer shapeless. It has a form now. It has a purpose.
“Fucking try me,” Dimitri says, and his voice is the quiet voice, the voice that precedes annihilation, and the shadows at his feet stretch and thicken and begin to climb the alley walls.
The demons hesitate. They can feel what he is now, the age and the depth and the power pressing outward, and the taller one’s grin falters for the first time.
One second too long.
Dimitri hits the tall one first.
He crosses the distance between them in a blur of shadow and rage, and his clawed hand closes around the demon’s throat and lifts him off his feet and drives him backward into the alley wall hard enough to crater the brickwork.
The demon’s head snaps against the stone and his eyes go wide and his hands come up to claw at Dimitri’s grip, but Dimitri is not the kind of demon you claw your way free from.
Dimitri is the kind that swallows things whole.
He tightens his grip and feels the cartilage compress beneath his fingers and leans in close, close enough to see his own red eyes reflected in the demon’s widening pupils.
“You think you could break him?” Dimitri says softly. “You're pathetic.”
He rips the demon’s throat out with his bare hand.
The body drops. Dimitri turns. The shorter demon is already moving, lunging at him with claws extended and panic replacing bravado, and Dimitri catches his wrist mid-swing and snaps it sideways.
The crack of bone echoes off the alley walls.
The demon screams, and Dimitri grabs him by the face, one hand spanning his entire skull, claws digging into his temples, and drives him into the ground.
The pavement cracks beneath the impact. Dimitri straddles the demon’s chest and brings his fist down once, twice, three times, and each blow is punctuated by the wet concussive sound of something breaking that was not designed to break, and the shadows that pour off Dimitri fill the alley until the streetlights at both ends dim and flicker.
He stops when there is nothing left to hit.
His chest is heaving. His claws are slick with dark blood.
The alley is painted with it, walls and pavement and the pooling remains of two demons who looked at Knox and thought the word share, and Dimitri stands over what is left of them and breathes, and the fury is not sated.
The fury is a living thing and it is still hungry and it wants more, wants to find every creature in this city that has ever looked at Knox with anything other than the respect he deserves and tear them apart with his hands.
He turns to Knox.
Knox is staring at him. The mace is in his hand and his green eyes are wide and his lips are parted and there is an expression on his face that Dimitri has never seen before.
It is open and raw and utterly unguarded, and through the bond it hits Dimitri with the force of a physical blow, a wave of wanting so intense it goes straight to his gut and straight to his groin, and Knox is looking at him as though Dimitri just did something terrible and beautiful, and Dimitri’s chest is cracking open, the boards over the door splintering.
He reminds himself that touching Knox would mean being bound forever. He reminds himself of the cage, the bars, the years of freedom he would lose.
He's finding it harder and harder to care.
Knox takes a step forward. His lips part, and he says, “Dimitri,” and his voice is quiet and wondering and full of something that Knox has been hiding from him for days, and the bond sings with it, and then the color drains from Knox’s face.
It happens in a single second. The green eyes lose focus. The mace clatters from his hand. His knees buckle, and Knox says Dimitri’s name again, softer, a breath, barely there, and he is falling.
Dimitri catches him.
He moves on instinct, the same instinct that caught Knox’s wrist in the warehouse, the same instinct that stepped in front of him moments ago.
His arms close around Knox before he hits the ground, one hand behind his head to keep it from striking the pavement, and Knox’s weight settles against his chest, light and warm and terrifyingly small, and the bond is screaming and Knox is unconscious and Dimitri is holding him and the void he spent all day building collapses entirely.
Concern. Genuine, ungovernable, obliterating concern, flooding through Dimitri with a force that wipes out the fury and the pretense and the thousand years of armor in a single, devastating wave.
He is holding Knox in a dark alley and Knox won’t wake up and the bond is thin and stuttering between them and Dimitri is terrified.
He is genuinely, viscerally terrified for the first time in his existence, not for himself but for the man in his arms, and the feeling is so vast and so undeniable that the lie, the I don’t care, the mantra he has been repeating all day, disintegrates.
He cares. He cares so much it might kill him.
Knox won’t wake. Dimitri shakes him, once, carefully, and calls his name, and Knox’s head lolls against his shoulder and his blond hair falls across Dimitri’s arm and his face is pale and slack and peaceful in a way that makes Dimitri want to scream.
He picks him up.
Knox weighs nothing. Or close to nothing, for a demon who has carried heavier things across longer distances, but the lightness of him is wrong.
Knox should not be this light. Knox should not be this fragile.
Knox is the man who cleared a warehouse of rifthounds and punched through holy fire and dropped a creature three times his weight in an alley, and he should not fit this easily in Dimitri’s arms, his head tucked against Dimitri’s shoulder, his loose blond hair brushing Dimitri’s neck.
Dimitri carries him home.
Through the dark streets and up the stairs and through the warded door that stings his skin, and he lays Knox on his bed and pulls off his boots and sets the mace on the nightstand and stands there in the dark bedroom looking down at the unconscious Templar and feeling the bond pulse weakly between them, thin and fragile, a thread that could snap.
He does not leave.
He stands at the window and watches the street and feels Knox’s heartbeat through the bond, faint and steady, and the fury is gone.
All of it. Every scrap and shred and remnant, burned away by the ten seconds it took Knox to collapse and Dimitri to catch him, and what’s left in its place is something Dimitri has never felt before and cannot outrun and cannot wall off and cannot lie about anymore.
He does not sleep. He stands in the dark and guards the door and tells himself nothing and waits for Knox to wake up.