He thinks about all of it, and then he thinks, with a grim and self-preserving humor, that he'd probably get holy chlamydia from fucking an angel. Some divine sexually transmitted punishment, a righteous burning in his dick courtesy of the Almighty.Touch the nephilim and your cock falls off.He'd deserve it, honestly, for even entertaining the idea.
He snorts quietly in the dark apartment. Scrubs a hand over his face.
The pull in his chest has settled into something constant and low, the hooks no longer dragging but resting, satisfied by the proximity. It's the calmest the bond has been since it formed.
He ignores it.
He lies on the Templar's couch in the Templar's apartment and listens to the water shut off and the sounds of Knox moving through his home on the other side of the wall, and he tells himself this is temporary. A problem to be solved. The witch in the apothecary will know how to unpick whatever that boy stitched into them, and Dimitri will be free, and he will walk away from this city and this man and never look back.
He is very good at lying to other people. He's finding he's less good at lying to himself.
Chapter 5
Knox doesn't sleep.
He lies in the dark on his narrow bed and stares at the ceiling and feels the two forces warring inside him. The bond sits beneath his sternum, dark and ancient and insistent, reaching toward the demon on the other side of the wall with a pull that has settled from the desperate agony of the warehouse into something steadier but no less relentless. And his blood, the angelic inheritance he didn't ask for and can't give back, is fighting it. Rejecting it. Treating the bond as an infection, a foreign body, marshaling every divine resource at its disposal to burn the thing out.
The result is a friction he can feel in the spaces between his cells. His skin is wrong, stretched too thin, pulled too tight. There's a grinding, cellular discomfort that he can't locate or name because it's everywhere and nowhere at once, a deep wrongness in his blood that has everything to do with the factthat his body is tearing itself apart trying to reject the thing that tethers him to Dimitri.
He presses a hand to his sternum and feels the bond pulse against his palm. On the other side of the wall, Dimitri is awake. Knox can feel him, a coiled restless presence pretending to be at rest, and the awareness of him is constant and intrusive and strangely, infuriatingly grounding. As though having Dimitri close quiets something in the bond even as Knox's blood screams against it.
Then the bond shifts.
It comes without warning. One moment Knox is lying in the dark cataloging the dull ache in his bones, and the next something hot and liquid pours through the tether between them and floods his chest. It’s so unfamiliar and strong that it almost knocks the breath out of him. His breath catches and his hands fist in the sheets and for a disorienting, vertigo-inducing second he doesn't know whose feeling this is, can't sort the signal from the noise, because it is everywhere at once, rushing through him with a heat he’s never felt before.
It’s desire. Raw, undisguised, unapologetic desire, rolling through the bond in waves, and it is not his–he knows it is not his–but his body doesn't know that. His body doesn't care about the distinction between self and other when the sensation is this immediate, this consuming. He feels himself responding before he can stop it, blood moving south, his pulse climbing, a flush spreading across his skin in the dark of his own bedroom, and for three terrible seconds he is hard and aching and the thoughts in his head are not his own but they feel like his own, don’t they?
It’s not like he doesn’t find Dimitri attractive. He’s a demon. Of course he’s attractive. It’s not hard to feel the desire pooling in his stomach, the want coursing through his veins, and think of redirecting it towards the demon laying on his couch in tight pants and a low cut shirt.
There are no images. The bond isn’t a screen. But he can feel the edges of what Dimitri is thinking about him, about an idea of what Dimitri wants to do to him, and being confronted by that knowledge by someone he has known for less than a day is disorienting and is threatening to upend every careful wall he’s built around himself. There have been people in his past, of course there have, but he’s never been inside their heads. He’s never felt someone want him with their entire soul.
Knox slams the door shut before it’s even fully open.
Not literally. There is no door to slam, no mechanism in the bond that allows him to simply refuse incoming transmissions. But he has spent a lifetime controlling himself, controlling his reactions, controlling the parts of him that the world is not allowed to see, and he throws every ounce of that discipline at the wall between his mind and the bond and pushes. He thinks about laundry. He thinks about acid-dripping rifthounds and the way their skulls caved under his mace. He thinks about Sanctus Cael's face, five hundred years old and deeply unattractive, the skin like a paper bag that someone crumpled up and then tried to smooth out again, and that does it. That kills whatever was building in him with the efficiency of a bucket of cold water.
He lies in the dark, breathing hard, and stares at the ceiling, and reminds himself of what Dimitri is.
A demon. A creature whose kind have spent millennia perfecting the art of seduction, of lure, of want deployed as a weapon. The desire pouring through the bond is not affection. It is not tenderness. It is not anything that comes from a place Knox can afford to trust. Demons want the way fire wants fuel, consuming and indiscriminate and ultimately destructive, and being wanted by one is not flattering. It is dangerous. It is a blade pressed against the throat by a hand that's still deciding whether to cut.
Knox knows this. He has always known this.
He does not sleep.
Morning finds him in the bathroom, gripping the edges of the sink, staring at a face he barely recognizes.
His skin is pale. Not the fair, clean paleness of his usual complexion but something sallower, thinner, with a faintly translucent quality that makes the veins at his temples visible. His green eyes are bloodshot. His blond hair hangs tangled around his jaw, and when he splashes cold water on his face the cold doesn't register the way it should. Everything is muted, slightly distant, as though he's experiencing the world through a pane of glass.
He scrubs his face. Ties his hair back into a ponytail with practiced hands. Pulls on a clean shirt and buckles his coat to his chin and puts the mace at his hip and slides the blessing rings onto his left hand. The routine is decades old and it steadies him the way it always does, each step a rung on a ladder that leads back to himself.
When he leaves the bathroom, Dimitri is sitting on the couch watching him.
The demon looks better than he has any right to. The fracture lines from the summoning have faded to faint silver traces on his skin, and his red eyes are alert and sharp and tracking Knox's movements with an intensity that makes Knox's neck warm. The duster is draped over the arm of the couch, and the shirt is low enough to show the line of his collarbones, while the ridged horns curving back from his temples catching the thin morning light from the kitchen window. Knox catalogs this information under irrelevant and moves on.
Dimitri's gaze drags down his body and back up again, slow and deliberate, and then he grins.
It's not the sharp, defensive grin from the warehouse or the all-teeth provocation from the top of the stairs at The Sable. This one is wicked and knowing and edged with something private,the grin of a man who knows exactly what he sent through the bond last night and exactly what it did. His red eyes hold Knox's and the grin widens, just slightly, just enough, and the message is unmistakable:Have a rough night?
Knox gives him a flat look, turns back to the door and says, "The apothecary should be open. Let's go."
