Chapter 23
Newt seems to grow more comfortable once they’re inside his space.
The flinching stops. His shoulders come down from where they’ve been hovering near his ears.
He moves through the house with the efficiency of someone on familiar ground, pulling supplies from shelves and drawers with muscle memory, chalk and jars of dried components and the same leather-bound book Knox remembers from the warehouse.
He’s still wary of Dimitri, giving him a wide berth, never turning his back, but he stands a little straighter.
Speaks a little more clearly. The stuttering terrified witch from the street is being replaced by something more solid.
Knox watches him and wonders how the coven treats him.
Xela’s words echo in his mind, the boy caught between being valuable and being a threat, and he sees it in the way Newt moves.
The habitual smallness. The instinct to be unobtrusive, to apologize before anyone’s asked him to.
Knox recognizes it. He’s seen it in recruits who came to the Order from hard places.
He’s seen it in the mirror, in the early years, before he learned that being small didn’t mean being less.
Newt clears a space in the living room, pushing furniture aside, rolling up a rug to expose the hardwood floor, and begins sketching chalk lines with the same trembling precision Knox remembers from the warehouse.
He works from the leather-bound book, open on the floor beside him, cross-referencing symbols with a second smaller notebook filled with his own handwriting.
Dimitri lounges in an armchair.
He is draped across it in the way that only Dimitri can drape across things, legs spread like he has to take up as much space as possible, his head tilted back, his red eyes half-lidded with the deceptive laziness of a predator at rest. He is simmering.
Knox can feel it through the bond, impatience cycling beneath the surface, hot and restless.
Dimitri wants this done. Dimitri wants this over.
And underneath the impatience is something else, something Dimitri is working very hard to keep buried, and Knox has learned enough about the architecture of Dimitri’s feelings to know that the things he buries hardest are the things that matter most.
Knox crosses the room.
He steps between Dimitri’s legs, positioning himself in the space between Dimitri’s sprawled knees, and looks down at him.
Dimitri’s eyes open fully. They trail up Knox with slow unabashed appreciation, from his boots to his hips to his waist to his face, and one hand lifts from the arm of the chair and finds Knox’s thigh.
His fingers trace along the outside of it, a lazy possessive drag through denim that makes Knox’s skin prickle.
“What’s wrong?” Knox asks.
“Nothing’s wrong.” Dimitri’s fingers continue their path along Knox’s thigh. “I’m just sitting here wondering how spectacularly bad this is going to go.”
Knox looks at him. Dimitri looks back, expression casual, the mask firmly in place.
“You’re lying,” Knox says.
“I’m not—”
“I can feel it. The bond doesn’t let you hide fear any better than it lets me hide pain.”
Dimitri’s eyes flash. His fingers stop moving on Knox’s thigh, and the mask cracks, something sharp and irritated surfacing beneath it. “Being in my head doesn’t mean you get ownership of my thoughts, angel.”
The words have teeth, but Knox doesn’t flinch.
He is learning to read the difference between Dimitri’s anger and Dimitri’s fear, and right now the anger is a shell over something softer.
He leans forward. His hands settle on Dimitri’s shoulders, gently, the way he always touches Dimitri, the way that makes the demon go still, and he brings his face close enough that the conversation belongs to no one but them.
“It feels like fear,” Knox says quietly. “And I don’t know who it’s coming from.”
The fury flares through the bond, hot and defensive, and Knox’s concern spikes, a flash of worry that he’s pushed too far.
But then the fury turns inward. Dimitri isn’t angry at Knox.
He is angry at himself, angry at the feeling, angry at the vulnerability, angry at the fact that he’s sitting in a witch’s armchair with a nephilim’s hands on his shoulders and he’s afraid and he can’t hide it.
Knox’s hands tighten on his shoulders. Not pulling. Not pushing. Just holding.
“What if it’s the bond,” Dimitri says.
The words come out low and rough and reluctant, dragged from somewhere he didn’t give them permission to leave. His jaw works. His red eyes are fixed on a point somewhere past Knox’s shoulder.
“What do you mean?” Knox asks.
“What if all of this—” Dimitri gestures between them, a sharp motion that encompasses the hand on Knox’s thigh and the bond humming in his chest and the last week of his life and every feeling he can’t name.
“What if it’s the bond. What if we break the tether and it goes away. What if I’m free and I don’t—”
He stops. He can’t finish the sentence. Knox can feel the shape of the ending through the bond, the fear that what Dimitri feels is the magic and not the man, that the wanting and the caring and the mine will evaporate the moment the tether does, and the terror of that possibility is so naked and so vast that Knox’s throat aches with it.
Knox is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “What does it mean, to belong to you?”
The fury ebbs. It doesn’t vanish, still banked and smoldering, but something else rises through it, something warm and vast that softens the sharp edges.
Knox feels it pour through the bond and into his chest, a deep spreading heat that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the way Dimitri is looking up at him right now.
Fondly. Dimitri is looking at him fondly.
It transforms his face. The sharp angles soften. The predatory gleam in his red eyes becomes something closer to wonder, and for a moment Dimitri looks less like an ancient demon and more like a man who has stumbled onto something precious and can’t quite believe it’s real.
Knox’s breath catches. He opens his mouth.
Someone clears their throat.
They both look over.
Newt is standing at the edge of the living room, chalk in one hand, notebook in the other, staring at them with an expression of acute mortified embarrassment.
His freckled face is pink. His eyes dart between Knox’s hands on Dimitri’s shoulders and Dimitri’s hand on Knox’s thigh and the approximately two inches of space between their faces, and he looks as though he is considering whether the window is large enough to escape through.
“I—sorry, I just—” Newt stammers. His flush deepens. He grips the chalk with both hands. “I need to ask you something. Both of you. And it’s—it might be a bit personal.”
Knox straightens. He pulls back from Dimitri, not far, not fast, but enough that there’s daylight between them. “Go ahead.”
Newt’s blush intensifies. He fidgets with the chalk, turning it over in his fingers, and his gaze fixes on a point somewhere between Dimitri’s left horn and the ceiling.
“Have you two—” He swallows. Tries again. “Have you been—I mean, since the binding, have you—” He takes a visible breath and forces the words out in a rush. “Have you been intimate with each other?”
“Repeatedly,” Dimitri says flatly.
Newt’s face goes scarlet. The chalk snaps in half in his grip, one piece rolling off the edge of a side table and hitting the floor, and he stares at the remaining half in his hand as though it has personally betrayed him.
Knox rolls his eyes. “Yes,” he says, with the measured patience of someone who has spent a lifetime fielding situations with grace. “We have. Is that relevant?”
Newt groans. It is a deep, pained sound, the groan of someone who has just received the worst possible answer to a question he didn’t want to ask. His shoulders sag, eyes closing, chalk hand dropping to his side.
Knox’s stomach tightens. “Newt. What’s the problem?”
Newt opens his eyes. He looks at them, at the bond shimmering in the space between their bodies, at whatever it is that witches with magical sight can see when they look at two souls that have been stitched together, and his expression shifts from embarrassment to something much heavier.
“The problem,” Newt says slowly, “is that if you’ve crossed that line, then we’re not working with blood magic anymore.”
The room goes quiet. The wind chimes in the hallway fall silent.
“We’re working with sex magic,” Newt says.
Dimitri’s hand, still on Knox’s thigh, goes still. The wicked grin vanishes. Through the bond, Knox feels the shift, the sudden total silence that descends when Dimitri processes something genuinely bad. Not annoying-bad. Not inconvenient-bad. The kind of bad that changes the shape of the problem.
“Sex magic is a different discipline entirely,” Newt continues.
He is talking faster now, his nervous energy channeled into explanation.
“Blood magic I can work with. I cast it, I understand the framework, I can reverse-engineer my own circle. But when a soulbind is consummated, the anchors shift from blood to something deeper. The magic rewrites itself around the intimacy. It’s not just in your blood anymore, it’s in your—” He gestures vaguely, miserably. “Everything.”
“Can you undo it?” Knox asks. His voice is calm. His heart is not.
Newt hesitates. That hesitation says more than any words could.
“Not alone,” Newt admits. “I don’t have the knowledge. Sex magic is old and complicated, and my coven has practitioners who specialize in it, but I—” He swallows. “We’re going to need the coven’s help.”
The room goes very still.
Dimitri’s hand clenches on Knox’s thigh.
The grip is sudden and hard and possessive, fingers digging into the muscle through denim, and through the bond Knox is hit by a wave of dread so intense it nearly buckles him.
Anxiety and resistance and something fierce and territorial, all tangled together, flooding through the tether.
Knox doesn’t know who it’s coming from. He suspects it’s both of them.
He presses his hand over Dimitri’s on his thigh. The demon’s knuckles are white. Through the bond, the dread swells, and Knox can feel his own heart racing in tandem, and neither of them speaks. The silence in the witch’s living room is absolute.
Newt looks at them with an expression that is equal parts sympathy and fear.