Chapter 17
Knox wakes in his own bed and doesn’t know how he got there.
The ceiling is familiar. White, blank, unremarkable.
His ceiling. His bedroom. The thin mattress beneath him, the military corners of the sheets now tangled around his legs, the pale morning light filtering through the window.
His boots are off, set side by side on the floor with a precision that is not his own.
His mace is on the nightstand. His coat is still on, unbuckled but not removed, as though whoever put him here got as far as the boots and the weapon and then didn’t know what else to do.
He sits up slowly. The room tilts, steadies.
His body feels hollowed out, not the sharp immediate pain of the bond’s punishments but something deeper, a bone-level depletion, as though his reserves have been drained to the dregs and are only now, sluggishly, beginning to refill.
The war inside him, angelic blood versus demonic bond, has quieted to a dull grinding friction. Tolerable. For now.
He doesn’t remember falling. He remembers the alley.
The demons. Dimitri standing over their remains with blood on his claws and shadows pooling at his feet, barely winded.
He remembers the look on Dimitri’s face when he turned, feral and blazing, and the feeling that had surged through the bond so hot and so bright that Knox’s chest had cracked open with it.
He remembers saying Dimitri’s name. He remembers the way Dimitri’s expression had changed when he heard it, something breaking behind those red eyes, and then pain, white and total, and the ground rushing up.
And arms. Arms catching him before he hit the pavement. A hand behind his head. His weight settling against a broad chest that radiated heat, and the last thing he felt before the dark took him was the bond screaming between them and Dimitri’s heartbeat against his cheek, fast and terrified.
Terrified.
Knox pushes himself out of bed. His legs hold. He takes a breath, tests his balance, and walks out of the bedroom.
Dimitri is standing by the living room window.
He’s silhouetted against the morning light, shoulders rigid, arms crossed, staring out at the street below with the fixed intensity of someone who has been standing in exactly that position for a very long time.
He hasn’t slept. Knox can feel it through the bond, the brittle wired energy of a body running on fury instead of rest.
And the fury. God, the fury.
It rolls off Dimitri in waves, thick and dark and suffocating, saturating the bond until Knox can barely breathe around it.
This is not the hot explosive anger Knox has come to know, not the flash-fire rage of the apothecary or the club.
This is something colder. Something that has been building for hours, compressing, hardening into something dense and sharp and dangerous.
The deliberate void from yesterday is gone.
In its place is a wall of fury so total that Knox can’t feel anything underneath it, and he doesn’t know if that’s because there’s nothing there or because Dimitri is using the rage to hide what is.
Knox crosses the room. He touches Dimitri’s arm.
Dimitri spins.
His hand comes up and knocks Knox’s arm away, not a brush, not a redirect, but a violent strike that sends Knox’s hand flying and leaves a sting across his forearm.
The motion is fast and brutal, and Dimitri’s red eyes are blazing, and his face is a mask of something that looks as though it could burn the apartment down.
Knox feels the flash of hurt before he can stop it. Brief, bright, a flare behind his sternum. He stamps it down. He’s had practice.
“What’s wrong?” Knox asks.
Dimitri stares at him. His jaw is tight, his nostrils flared, his chest rising and falling with the controlled breathing of someone holding themselves together through sheer force of will.
“What’s wrong,” Dimitri repeats. His voice is quiet. The dangerous quiet.
“You’re angry. I can feel it. I don’t understand—”
“You don’t understand.” Dimitri laughs. It’s an ugly brittle sound. “You don’t understand. That’s perfect. That’s absolutely perfect.”
He steps forward. Knox holds his ground.
“You’re weak,” Dimitri says. The word comes out as a condemnation.
“You’re fragile. Your own blood is trying to kill you, and you just collapsed.
In an alley. In the dark. Surrounded by things that want to eat you alive.
” He takes another step. Knox doesn’t move.
“I could break you. Do you understand that? I could snap you in half with one hand. I could crush you.”
He’s close now. Close enough that Knox has to tilt his chin up to hold his gaze, and Dimitri is looking down at him with those blazing red eyes and something shifts in his expression, something predatory sharpening beneath the fury, and his voice drops lower.
“And you want me.”
Knox’s breath stutters.
It’s involuntary, a small hitch in his chest that he can’t suppress, and Dimitri latches onto it in an instant.
His red eyes narrow. His head tilts. The fury is still there, burning hot and dark, but something else joins it now, something sharp and cruel and zeroed in on the fracture Knox just showed him.
“There it is,” Dimitri says softly, and his voice is a knife wrapped in velvet.
“I felt it. Just now. That little catch in your breath, that flutter in the bond.” He steps closer, and Knox’s back is almost against the wall.
“You want me. A Templar, a nephilim, a soldier of the holy Order, and you want to give yourself over to something born from the underworld.”
Knox says nothing. His jaw is locked and his hands are at his sides and his heart is hammering and the bond is carrying all of it across, every ounce of the want he has been hiding, exposed and naked between them.
“How desperate do you have to be?” Dimitri breathes.
He’s close enough now that Knox can feel the heat radiating off his body, can smell the smoke and sulfur underneath.
“How lonely, how starved, to want a demon? To lie in the dark and ache for something that wants only to take you apart? Do you know what I am, Knox? Do you know what my kind does to things they want?”
Knox’s throat works. The words land on every nerve the last two days have left raw, every insecurity he has carried since the bedroom, the rejection and the void and the belief that he was caring about someone who would never care about him back.
Dimitri is confirming everything Knox told himself.
Something that wants only to take you apart. Not care for. Not keep. Take apart.
Dimitri grabs the front of Knox’s shirt.
His fist twists in the fabric, claws extending, pricking through the cotton and into the skin beneath.
Knox feels the sharp points dimple his chest, not breaking skin, not quite, but close enough that a single flex of Dimitri’s fingers would draw blood.
The demon hauls him forward until they’re inches apart, until Knox can see the individual flecks of darker red in those ember irises, until Dimitri’s breath is hot on his face.
“You’re disgustingly naive,” Dimitri snarls. “Trusting a demon. Letting a demon into your home. Falling asleep with a demon in the next room. Falling unconscious in a demon’s arms.” His claws press harder. A pinpoint of pain blooms on Knox’s chest. “You should be terrified of me.”
Knox looks up at him.
He looks at the fury and the fear and the claws in his shirt and the red eyes that are too bright and too close.
He hears the words Dimitri just said, something that wants only to take you apart, and he hears them alongside the memory of Dimitri cupping his face with such devastating gentleness that Knox’s heart had cracked open.
He hears how desperate do you have to be alongside the memory of Dimitri stepping in front of him in a dark alley without thinking, of shadows filling the walls and mine pouring through the bond.
He hears you should be terrified of me alongside the memory of arms catching him before he hit the pavement, a hand behind his head, a heartbeat against his cheek, fast and terrified.
Dimitri’s words say one thing. Everything else about him says another. And Knox has spent years reading the distance between what people say and what they mean, and right now the distance is so vast it could swallow them both.
Knox exhales. It comes out shaky, because his body is still weak and his heart is hammering and Dimitri’s claws are in his skin and his want has been laid bare between them and Dimitri just called him desperate for it. But his voice, when he speaks, is steady.
“Did you carry me home?”
Dimitri’s face goes white.
The fury stutters. Knox watches it happen, watches the rage falter in the way a flame falters in a sudden wind, watches something naked and exposed flash across Dimitri’s features before the demon can catch it and shove it back down.
His grip on Knox’s shirt doesn’t loosen, but the claws retract a fraction, and his red eyes are wide, and for a moment he looks less like a predator and more like someone who has been caught doing something he can’t explain.
Knox reaches up and wraps his hands around Dimitri’s wrists.
The contact sparks. The electricity is there, same as always, racing through the point of connection and lighting up every nerve between them.
But Knox doesn’t flinch. He holds on. His hands are smaller than Dimitri’s, his fingers don’t fully close around those broad wrists, but his grip is firm and sure and unmistakably deliberate.
He can feel Dimitri’s pulse beneath his thumbs, fast and frantic, completely at odds with the mask of fury on his face.
“I’m not worried about you breaking me,” Knox says quietly.
Dimitri stares at him. The bond is a maelstrom, fury and fear and want and the thing that cracked open in the alley when Knox fell, and Knox can feel all of it, and he holds Dimitri’s gaze and lets him feel that Knox can feel it.
No hiding. No pretending. No void and no wall and no careful distance.
Just the truth, laid bare between them in the morning light.
Knox has spent the last two days believing that Dimitri does not care about him.
He has told himself that Dimitri’s wanting is consumption, not tenderness.
He has told himself he is caring about someone who will never care about him back, and he has held that belief with both hands and used it as armor against the thing growing in his chest.
He was wrong.
He knows it now the way he knows his own heartbeat, because the bond is stripped bare between them and what he can feel from Dimitri’s side is not hunger and not ownership and not the impersonal possessiveness of a demon claiming a prize.
What he can feel is terror. Dimitri is terrified of losing him.
Dimitri carried him home and took off his boots and put his mace on the nightstand and stood at the window all night, and the fury is not anger at Knox.
It is anger at a universe that made Knox fragile enough to fall and Dimitri helpless enough to be destroyed by it.
“You should be,” Dimitri whispers. His voice is cracked. His eyes are burning. His claws are fully retracted and his hands are just hands now, fisted in Knox’s shirt, holding on.
“I’m not,” Knox says.
Dimitri’s anger flares. It surges through the bond, hot and desperate, one last attempt to burn away everything that’s building between them, and Knox can feel it for what it is now, not a wall but a plea, not fury but surrender dressed up in armor because Dimitri has never surrendered and doesn’t know how to do it without making it look like a fight.
And then Dimitri pulls Knox to him and kisses him.
It’s not gentle. Dimitri’s hand releases Knox’s shirt and slides to the back of his neck, fingers threading into blond hair, gripping, tilting Knox’s head back.
His other arm wraps around Knox’s waist, spanning it, pulling Knox flush against his chest, and his mouth finds Knox’s with a precision that leaves no room for accident or ambiguity.
The kiss is fierce and consuming and unapologetic.
It is not gentle but it is not cruel, and the bond between them detonates, the electricity and the wanting and the fear and the longing and every feeling they’ve been hiding from each other for days colliding in a single, annihilating point of contact.
Knox gasps against Dimitri’s mouth. And then his hands are in Dimitri’s hair and his body is pressed against Dimitri’s and he is kissing him back with everything he has, with every ounce of the caring he tried to hide and the wanting he tried to bury and the days of hurt he swallowed, and the bond sings between them, whole and bright and unbroken, and Knox kisses him back.