Without the coat, the burns on his arms are visible. Angry red skin, blistered in places, raw and weeping in others, stretching from his elbows to his hands. Knox looks down at them as though assessing damage to a piece of equipment. Clinical. Detached. The way he probably looks at every wound he’s ever taken.
Dimitri drops onto the couch and stares at the ceiling and does not think about the burns on Knox’s arms or the fact that Knox got them pulling Dimitri out of a fire.
Knox disappears into the bathroom. Dimitri hears a cabinet open, the clink of bottles, the sound of running water. When Knox reappears he’s carrying an armful of supplies, both mundane and magical, and he sits on the edge of the coffee table in front of the couch and begins tending his wounds with the quiet efficiency of a man who has done this many times before.
Dimitri watches from the corner of his eye because he is incapable of not watching.
Knox rolls up what’s left of his sleeves and cleans the burns with something from a brown bottle that smells sharp and medicinal. He doesn’t flinch. His jaw is set and his breathing is even and his green eyes are focused on the task with the same calm precision he brings to everything, and Dimitri can feel through the bond that the pain is significant. It is not small. Knox is simply choosing not to react to it, the way he has apparently chosen not to react to pain for decades, and something about that, the discipline, the stubbornness, the sheer refusal to give an inch even when no one is asking him to be strong, makes something hot and tight coil in Dimitri’s chest.
Knox applies a salve from a small jar. It’s magical, Dimitri can smell it, something herbal and warm with a faint luminescence that sinks into the blistered skin and begins to work. Knox wrapshis forearms in clean white bandages, winding them carefully, tucking the ends with practiced hands. The whole process takes maybe ten minutes, quiet and methodical, and when he’s done he flexes his fingers and tests his grip and nods once to himself, satisfied.
Then he looks at Dimitri.
Dimitri looks at the ceiling.
“Your burns are worse than mine,” Knox says.
“No shit.”
Knox is quiet for a moment. Dimitri can feel him choosing his words through the bond, the careful deliberation of a man who has learned that what he says matters less than how he says it.
“Let me help you,” Knox says.
Something hot and ugly twists in Dimitri’s chest. He turns his head and looks at Knox for the first time since they sat down, and Knox is holding the jar of salve and the roll of bandages and his green eyes are steady and sincere, and the bond is humming with his concern. Concern. For him. For a demon who punched Knox in the mouth less than two hours ago, who had his hand around Knox’s throat against a brick wall, who has done nothing since they met except make his life actively worse. And Knox is sitting beside him offering to tend his wounds with the same careful hands that just tended his own, and Dimitri wants to put his fist through the wall.
“I don’t need your fucking pity, angel.”
Knox’s jaw tightens at the word, the way it always does, and Dimitri feels the flinch through the bond, the nerve he keeps hitting on purpose because he doesn’t know how else to keep Knox at a distance. But Knox doesn’t retreat. He never retreats. He sits there with his bandaged arms and his split lip and his infuriating, patient, boundless kindness, and he reaches for Dimitri’s arm.
His fingers brush the inside of Dimitri’s wrist, just below the burned skin, gentle and careful and so fuckingtenderthat Dimitri’s vision goes white.
He grabs Knox’s wrist.
Not gently. His burned fingers close around Knox’s bandaged forearm and he surges off the couch, hauling Knox with him. Knox makes a startled sound, his green eyes going wide, but Dimitri is already moving, already driving them both across the living room. Knox’s back hits the wall between the bookshelf and the hallway door, hard enough to knock the breath out of him, and Dimitri is on him, burned hands braced on the plaster on either side of Knox’s head, his body a cage.
Knox stares up at him. His lips are parted, his breath quick, the split lip still swollen, his pupils blown wide in the dim light of the apartment. The flinch from the initial grab is gone, replaced by something more complicated. Wariness, yes. But underneath it, threaded through it, something that makes his pulse jump at the base of his throat.
Dimitri can see it. That pulse. That pale, narrow throat. He’s close enough to count the freckle below Knox’s left ear that he’s never noticed before.
“What the fuck are you playing at,” Dimitri says.
Knox blinks. “What?”
“The fire. The circle. You punched through a holy fire barrier and pulled me out.” Dimitri leans closer. Knox presses flatter against the wall but doesn’t look away. He never looks away. “And now you’re bandaging yourself up and coming at me with salve and that look on your face, like I’m something broken you can fix. You pull me out of a fire and get burned for it and then you sit down next to me and try totendme. I want to know what game this is.”
“It’s not a game.”
“It’s always a game. Everyone wants something. What do you want?”
Knox’s jaw tightens. Through the bond Dimitri can feel the hurt that lands, the accusation embedded in the question, and Knox doesn’t hide it. He lets Dimitri feel it, lets the bond carry it across, and his green eyes are very bright and very close.
“Nothing,” Knox says. His voice is steady. His pulse isn’t. “You’re hurt and I have supplies and that’s it. It’s not pity. It’s not a game. It’s just what you do when someone is injured.”
“Someone,” Dimitri repeats. “I’m notsomeone.I’m a demon. I’m the thing you hunt.”
Knox holds his gaze. “I know what you are.”
“You could have been rid of me.” Dimitri’s voice drops low, barely above a whisper. The living room feels very small. “The witch would have burned me to ash, and you would have walked out free. No more bond. No more leash. No more demon in your apartment and your head and your—” He stops himself. The sentence has too many endings and none of them are safe. “You could have let me die and gone back to your life.”
