He goes down hard, hitting the alley floor with a thud that Dimitri feels through the soles of his boots. He does not get back up.
The alley goes quiet.
Knox stands over him for a moment, breathing evenly, then hooks the mace back onto his hip and straightens his coat. He tugs the hem down, smooths the front where the man's grip wrinkled the wool, and pulls his ponytail back over his shoulder. As though he's just tidied up after a minor inconvenience and not dropped something three times his weight in under thirty seconds.
He looks up at Dimitri.
Dimitri is still leaning against the wall, but his posture has changed and he knows it and there is nothing he can do about it. The lazy amusement is gone. In its place is something he's trying very hard to suppress, but the bond doesn't lie, and he can feel Knox reading whatever is bleeding across from his side of the connection. He watched this compact, pretty, absurdly polite Templar take apart a creature that outweighed him without breaking a sweat, and Dimitri's mouth has gone dry and his pants are strangely tight and the part of his brain that catalogues threats has quietly reclassified Knox from nuisance to dangerous.
Dimitri is not going to think about it.
"This witch," Knox says, as though nothing happened. "The one Ruby mentioned. Where do we find her?"
Dimitri blinks. Pushes off the wall. Clears his throat. "Not far. Few blocks east."
"Then let's go."
They walk.
The Old City unfolds around them in narrow streets and leaning buildings, lit by the intermittent glow of streetlamps and neon signs. Knox keeps pace with Dimitri, which requires him to stretch his stride to match Dimitri's longer legs, and they settle into an uneasy distance, close enough to satisfy the bond, far enough to maintain the pretense that they are not together.
Dimitri watches him.
Not constantly. Not obviously. But his gaze keeps drifting sideways, pulled by something he'd like to blame on the bond and can't entirely. Knox walks with the quiet efficiency of someone who has spent a lifetime being underestimated and has learned to move through the world without inviting attention. His blond hair has started to come loose from its ponytail again, pale strands falling against his neck, and Dimitri thinks about reaching over and tucking them behind his ear and then thinks about breaking his own hand for entertaining the idea.
Every time Knox turns to look at him, Dimitri is already looking away. At the street. At a building. At absolutely nothing, with the forced casualness of a creature who has been alive for forever and should be considerably better at this.
Knox doesn't call him on it. Dimitri doesn't know if that's mercy or strategy or something worse.
The bond hums between them, low and constant, and at the edges of it Dimitri can feel Knox's emotions lapping against his own. Exhaustion, mostly, but also other things. Things that feel complicated and emotional, like what a Templar would probably feel about having to morally compromise himself towork alongside a demonic being who devours human souls for a living. Maybe. He’s just guessing.
Dimitri walks faster. Knox keeps up.
They reach the east side and the apothecary, a narrow storefront squeezed between a shuttered tattoo parlor and a shop selling what appears to be taxidermied cryptids. The lights are off. A closed sign hangs in the window, crooked and definitive.
Dimitri tries the door, but it’s locked.
He glances at Knox, who is standing beside him in the streetlight looking pale, shadows under his eyes that weren't there an hour ago. The fight in the warehouse, the binding, the blessing that rebounded, the brawl in the alley. It's all there in the set of his shoulders, and Dimitri can feel the depth of the exhaustion bleeding through the bond, a bone-deep weariness that goes beyond the physical and into something closer to spiritual.
"Closed," Dimitri says. "We'll have to come back tomorrow."
Knox doesn't look pleased, but the fight has gone out of his posture. His shoulders are low, and he nods once, reluctant and resigned.
"My apartment isn't far," Knox says, and Dimitri can hear what it costs him to offer it. The implication hangs between them, obvious and uncomfortable: they have to stay together. Fifty feet. That's the leash they're both wearing, and sleeping arrangements are going to have to account for it, and Knox is inviting a demon into his home because neither of them has a better option.
"Lead the way," Dimitri says, and if his voice comes out less caustic than usual, he blames it on the hour.
Knox leads. Dimitri follows, watching the way he moves through the streets with that tired straightness in his spine that refuses to give even when the rest of him is clearly running onfumes. The walk is short. The apartment building is old and modest, and Knox lets them in without ceremony, climbing two flights of stairs and unlocking a door that opens into a space that is small and clean and so aggressively ordinary that Dimitri almost laughs.
He wanders through it instead. A living room with a worn couch and a shelf of books, most of them old, some of them religious, a few of them surprising. A kitchen that is tidy and bare. A hallway with two doors, one open to a bathroom and one closed, presumably the bedroom. Everything is neutral and sparse and carefully maintained, and it tells Dimitri almost nothing about the man who lives here, which tells him everything. Knox keeps the surfaces of his life as clean and unremarkable as the surface he presents to the world. Whatever is underneath, he's not in the habit of leaving it where people can find it.
Knox hangs his coat on a hook by the door and sets the mace on the table beside it. Without it he's smaller, the breadth of his shoulders revealed to be more wiry than broad, a simple dark shirt over a frame that is lean and compact and, Dimitri notices, very well made. Knox pulls the tie from his ponytail and his blond hair falls loose around his jaw, and he doesn't look at Dimitri before he disappears into the bathroom.
The door locks behind him. The sound of running water follows a moment later.
Dimitri drops onto the couch and stares at the ceiling and, because there’s nothing to stop him, thinks about it.
He thinks about every image, every angle, every invented detail, because he's alone on a couch in a dark apartment and no one is monitoring his thoughts and he deserves one goddamn indulgence after the night he's had. He thinks about Knox wet and bare and breathing hard. He thinks about what Knox would look like pressed against the shower wall with Dimitri's hand onhis hip. He thinks about the sound Knox would make if Dimitri put his mouth on the pulse point under his jaw, the one that's been jumping all night, the one Dimitri has been staring at since the warehouse. He thinks about Knox's hands in his hair. He thinks about Knox on his knees on that tile floor, water running down his face, looking up at Dimitri with those impossible green eyes.
