“I know.”
“Thenwhy?”
Knox holds his gaze. Those green eyes are steady in the dim apartment, and Dimitri can feel Knox’s heartbeat through the bond, fast and rapid, a staccato rhythm that doesn’t match the calm on his face.
“No one deserves to die like that,” Knox says quietly. “Not even a demon.”
Dimitri makes a sound in his throat. Disgust, maybe, or the precursor to it. “That’s not a reason. That’s a platitude. That’s something you tell yourself to sleep at night. I want the real reason.”
Knox is quiet for a long moment. His pulse is still fast. His breath is still quick. Dimitri is close enough to feel the heatradiating off his body, to see the individual strands of blond hair that have come loose from his ponytail and fallen against his jaw.
“You could have been rid of me too,” Knox says.
Dimitri goes still.
“Ruby offered you a way out,” Knox continues. “Hand me over. Let her daughters have me. Walk away free.” His green eyes don’t waver. “You didn’t.”
The silence in the room is absolute. Dimitri can hear his own breathing. He can hear Knox’s. They’re close enough that the sounds almost overlap.
Dimitri holds the silence for a long, weighted moment. He holds it because he doesn’t have an answer, or rather he has one and it terrifies him, and Knox is standing there against the wall of his own apartment with his bandaged arms and his steady green eyes, and he just turned Dimitri’s question back on him with the precision of someone who fights with a mace and the gentleness of someone who bandages his enemies, and Dimitri doesn’t know what to do with any of it. He has consumed the power of demons and brought cities to their knees and stood in the courts of kings and never once in all that time has a five-foot-eight Templar with a ponytail and a wounded mouth made him feel as though the ground beneath him has shifted.
Then Dimitri smiles.
It’s slow. It’s sharp. It’s the kind of smile that shows teeth and means danger, and he leans forward until his mouth is inches from Knox’s ear.
He lifts one hand from the wall and traces a single clawed finger down the side of Knox’s face. Slowly. From his temple to his jaw. The claw is light, barely touching, not breaking skin, and Knox’s breath hitches, and Dimitri feels the hitch echo through the bond.
“Where would be the fun in that,” Dimitri murmurs, “angel?”
Knox knocks his hand away.
The motion is sharp, decisive, the trained reflex of a Templar reasserting control. Knox ducks under Dimitri’s arm and steps around him, putting distance between them, and when he turns back his expression is set in a frown that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Don’t call me that,” Knox says.
He turns and walks down the hallway to his bedroom. The door closes behind him. Not a slam. Knox doesn’t slam things. Knox is constitutionally incapable of slamming things. It’s a firm, deliberate click that saysthis conversation is over.
Dimitri stands in the living room.
He looks at the jar of salve on the coffee table. At the roll of bandages Knox left beside it. At the careful, precise way Knox had laid out the supplies, everything within reach, everything organized, the habits of a man who expects to take care of people and expects nothing in return.
He presses his hand flat against the wall where Knox’s shoulders were a moment ago. The plaster is warm.
He picks up the salve. He opens the jar. The smell is herbal and warm, and it’s the same stuff Knox used on his own arms, and Dimitri sits on the couch in the dark and applies it to his burns with clumsy, careful fingers, and he tells himself this means nothing. This changes nothing. He is a demon and Knox is a Templar and the salve is just salve and the warmth in his chest is just the bond and the ache beneath it is just the burns.
He tells himself he’s grateful Knox didn’t stay.
The salve sinks into his skin. It helps. It helps more than it should, because Knox’s hands were meant to apply it and Dimitri’s were not, and even the ghost of Knox’s intent, the care baked into the making of the stuff, eases something in Dimitri that the medicine alone can’t account for.
He doesn’t sleep. He sits in the dark and feels Knox on the other side of the wall, awake and hurting and stubbornly alive, and he holds the jar of salve in his burned hands and doesn’t think about anything at all.
Chapter 9
“We need to go to the Cathedral.”
Knox says it over coffee. One mug, his only mug, the one with the faded logo, filled and handed to Dimitri because Knox was raised with manners even if his guest is a demon who slept on his couch and filled his apartment with an ambient darkness that made the lights flicker. Knox drinks water and stands at the kitchen counter and watches Dimitri hold the mug in his burned hands and says it again.
“Fiora. The archivist. She’s our best chance at understanding how to reverse this.”
