Silence.
Knox stands very still. Through the bond, he feels Dimitri’s emotions churn. Fury and disgust, and underneath them something sharp and possessive that flares hot and bright before Dimitri smothers it. But not fast enough. Knox catches the shape of it before it disappears, and it isn’t just refusal. It’s territorial. It’smine,animal and absolute, and Dimitri buries it so violently that the bond shudders between them.
“I’ll snap your neck,” Dimitri hisses between his teeth, “and your daughters can have the remains. Before I give them anything.”
He means it. Knox can feel it, the absolute bedrock certainty behind the words vibrating through the bond. It’s not posturing. It’s not negotiation. Dimitri would kill every succubus in this room before he’d hand Knox over. The possessiveness Knox felt a moment ago wasn’t a flash. It was the surface of something deeper, something that has been building since the warehouse, and Dimitri would rather burn down a room full of his own kind than let any of them touch what is apparently, in some dark and complicated corner of his mind,his.
Knox doesn’t examine why that makes his chest feel tight. He doesn’t examine the heat that climbs his neck or the way his pulse kicks against the bruise Dimitri’s hand left on his throat. He is a Templar. He is a professional. He is not going to stand in the middle of a supernatural speakeasy and have feelings about a demon’s possessiveness.
He crosses the space between them and puts his hand on Dimitri’s arm.
The demon’s muscles are rigid beneath his fingers, corded and trembling with restrained violence, the burned skin hot to the touch. Dimitri’s head snaps toward him, those red eyes blazing, and for a moment Knox sees the ancient thing behind them, the vast and terrible power looking out at him through a borrowed face. It should terrify him. It does terrify him, in the way that standing at the edge of a great height terrifies, the fear tangled up with something else that he is not going to name.
“We need to find our witch,” Knox says quietly. “She can’t help us. Let her go.”
Dimitri stares at him. The red eyes search his face, the split lip, the steady gaze, the hand on his arm, and Dimitri’s jaw works as though he’s chewing on something he doesn’t want to swallow.
“Fine,” Dimitri says.
He drops Ruby. She crumples to the floor, gasping, one hand at her throat, and Dimitri steps over her without looking down.
“I’ll find you again,” he says to the air above her head. “When I don’t have a Templar clinging to me. And we’ll finish this conversation.”
He turns and walks out. Knox follows.
They climb the stairs in silence. The music fades. The cold air hits them. Knox walks ahead of Dimitri toward the mouth of the alley, and he can feel Dimitri’s eyes on his back the entire way, heavy and intent and unwavering.
He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t need to. He can feel exactly what Dimitri is feeling through the bond, a tangled seething mess of fury and confusion and something underneath both that burns in the dark, and Knox recognizes it because he’s feeling it too.
He just doesn’t know what to call it yet.
Chapter 8
The hour is late when they leave the Sable, and the city has gone dark and cold around them.
Dimitri stands on the sidewalk and breathes in the night air and tries to quiet the storm inside his chest. It doesn’t work. The bond is a live wire, humming with everything he’s feeling and everything Knox is feeling, and the two of them are so tangled together right now that Dimitri can’t tell where his anger ends and Knox’s exhaustion begins.
“I need to rest,” Knox says.
Dimitri doesn’t answer. He’s staring at the neon sign above the Sable’s staircase, watching it flicker, thinking about Ruby’s throat in his hand and the way she’d saiddrain him dryand the thing that had erupted in his chest when she did. The thing he’s still not going to think about. The thing he shoved down and buried and that Knox definitely felt, because this fucking link between them doesn't give him one iota of space to breathe–
A hand touches his arm.
It’s gentle. It’s always gentle. Knox touches him the way you’d touch a wounded animal, carefully, without expectation, giving Dimitri every chance to pull away. His fingers are light on Dimitri’s forearm, just above the worst of the burns, and the contact sends a low warm current through the bond that Dimitri absolutely does not lean into.
“I don’t care,” Dimitri snaps, pulling his arm free. “I’m stuck with you until we figure this out. Do whatever you want.”
Knox’s jaw tightens. Dimitri can feel the retort building behind those green eyes, something sharp, something earned, but Knox swallows it. He always swallows it. Years of discipline and self-control, and Knox uses every minute of it to be patient with a demon who doesn’t deserve it.
It’s infuriating. It’s something else too, something Dimitri doesn’t have a word for, but infuriating will do for now.
Knox leads them north. Dimitri follows.
***
The apartment is the same as they left it. Small, sparse, monastic. Knox’s wards sting as Dimitri crosses the threshold, a low buzzing burn that crawls across his skin and settles into a persistent itch. Knox turns on a few of the lights, but it seems like more of a formality than anything. He moves through the apartment by memory, silent and sure-footed, and Dimitri watches him from the living room doorway because watching Knox is apparently something he does now.
Knox takes his coat off carefully, wincing as he does so, and throws it away. There's not much left to salvage. He sets the mace on the table by the door and pulls the rings from his fingers, one by one, setting them in a row beside the mace. Thesilver is tarnished, the wards dim. Dimitri wonders if he has extras of everything.
