Knox's hand stays on his arm. It doesn't tighten. It doesn't pull. It just stays.
Dimitri climbs to his feet. Knox follows, keeping pace, and for a moment they stand side by side in the ruined back room of the apothecary, the demon scorched and smoking, the Templar bloodied and burned, and look at the witch who tried to kill one of them and save the other.
She stares back with an expression of utter scandalization, as though Knox is the one who has committed an unforgivable act. As though saving a demon's life is the crime here, and not, say, luring a living creature into a death trap and setting it on fire. Dimitri would laugh if he weren't so close to tearing her head off.
He holds her gaze for one long, poisonous moment. Then he turns and walks out of the shop, fury in his bones and conflict in his chest and something new and unnamed lodged beneath his sternum right next to the bond, and the bell above the door chimes cheerfully behind him as he goes.
The street is bright and cold and smells of rain.
Dimitri stands on the sidewalk and breathes and thinks about Ruby.
Ruby, who recommended this witch. Ruby, who knew exactly what Madame Vex was. Ruby, who sat at her velvet card table and sent Dimitri into a trap with a smile and a shrug and ayour funeral.Ruby, who he has known for years. Ruby, who just tried to have him killed.
"I'm going to tear her apart," Dimitri says.
Knox emerges from the shop behind him, pulling the door shut with his burned hand and wincing when the metal meets raw skin. "What?"
"Ruby. She knew. She sent us here knowing exactly what that woman would do." The shadows are back, curling around Dimitri's boots, bleeding from his clenched fists. "I'm going back to The Sable and I'm going to make her regret every second of her miserable immortal life."
"That's stupid."
Dimitri rounds on him. "Excuse me?"
"You're going to walk back into that club, burned, half-dead, held together by spite, and fight Ruby and every creature in there?" Knox's green eyes are steady, unflinching, even with blood still drying on his chin and his arms cradled against his chest. "That's stupid."
Something snaps.
Dimitri moves. His hand closes around Knox's throat, not squeezing, not yet, but firm and possessive, his burned fingers bracketing the pale column of Knox's neck, and he drives him backward into the brick wall of the apothecary. Knox's shoulders hit brick and Dimitri leans in, using every inch of height he has, crowding the smaller man into the wall until there's nowhere left to go.
"You have no idea who you've been bound to," Dimitri says. His voice is low and quiet, the kind of quiet that comes right before something detonates. "You have no idea what I am capable of."
Knox doesn't flinch. His green eyes stare up into Dimitri's from six inches away, and his pulse beats steady and calm against Dimitri's palm. "I've fought plenty of demons who thought they were special."
Dimitri leans closer. His lips peel back from his teeth, too sharp, sharper than they were a moment ago, and the shadows at his back thicken and writhe. "I've eaten demons stronger than anything you've fought," he says softly. "Consumed them. Taken their power and worn it. You're eighty years old, little Templar.I have centuries on you. You are a child playing at being a holy man, and if you think your mace and your rings and your angel blood make you safe from me, you are tragically fucking mistaken."
Knox says nothing. His pulse doesn't change. His eyes don't waver. And Dimitri's hand is around his throat, burned and cracked and aching, and he can feel Knox's heartbeat against his palm, steady and calm and infuriatingly unafraid, and his hand is not tightening. Dimitri has had years of hands on throats and he knows the mechanics of violence better than he knows anything else in this world, and his hand is not tightening on Knox's neck. And some quiet, terrible part of him knows it never was going to.
He lets go. Steps back. Shakes out his hand as though the contact burned him, which, in a way it did, because Knox's skin is still warm against his palm and his heartbeat is still echoing in Dimitri's fingers and the memory of it is not going anywhere.
He turns and stalks down the street toward The Sable, his burned skin cracking with every step, his shadow stretching long and dark behind him.
Knox follows.
Chapter 7
Knox follows Dimitri through the streets of the Old City and tries to hold himself together.
It’s harder than it should be. He’s been a Templar for half of his life. He’s weathered worse than a split lip and a demon’s hand on his throat. He’s been stabbed, burned, broken, thrown through walls. He’s spent nights in infirmaries putting himself back together with nothing but discipline and prayer. He knows pain. He knows how to compartmentalize it, how to fold it up and tuck it away and keep moving.
But this is different. This isn’t just his pain.
Dimitri’s rage burns through the bond, constant and consuming, radiating outward from that dark place beneath Dimitri’s sternum and pouring into Knox’s chest. Knox can feel it layered on top of his own emotions, tangled up in them, and the combination is dizzying. His own confusion. Dimitri’s fury. His own aching, complicated relief that Dimitri is alive. And something else on Dimitri’s side of the connection, somethingthe demon keeps pulling back every time Knox gets close to understanding it, a shape in the dark that retreats when he turns toward it.
His face hurts. The split lip throbs with every heartbeat and he can taste copper on his tongue. His arms ache where the holy fire caught him, a deep pulsing heat beneath the blistered skin that is getting harder to ignore. His heart aches in a way that has to do with the fact that he pulled a demon out of a fire and got punched in the mouth for his trouble and still doesn’t regret it.
He tries not to think about the wall outside the witch's shop. He fails.
Dimitri pressing him against the bricks. Dimitri’s hand around his throat, the span of those burned fingers, the heat of his palm against Knox’s pulse point. The way Dimitri had loomed over him, teeth bared, shadows writhing at his back, every inch the monster Knox was trained to destroy. He’d blazed fury and threats and promised violence, and yet hadn't hurt him beyond the split lip. Which, if Knox thinks about long enough, he thinks Dimitri might feel bad about in spite of himself.
