He turns back to Dimitri.
Vale moves fast for a human. His hand shoots out and fists in what’s left of Dimitri’s shirt, yanking him forward until they’re nose to nose. Vale’s dark eyes bore into his, and this close Dimitri can see that the murderous expression isn’t performance. It’s a promise.
“If you lay a finger on him,” Vale says quietly, “I will personally remove them. One by one. With pliers.”
Dimitri grins at him. Wide, wicked, all teeth. “I like you. You’re fun.”
Knox, standing behind Vale with his arms crossed and his green eyes fixed on the ceiling, looks very much like a man who has been asked to carry a very heavy burden up a very steep hill and is only now realizing how far he has left to climb.
“Are you two done?” Knox asks.
Vale releases Dimitri. He straightens his coat, gives Knox one last look, worried and fierce and protective, and turns on his heel and walks down the corridor without looking back.
Dimitri watches him go. Then he looks at Knox.
Knox opens his eyes and gives Dimitri a look that contains years of accumulated patience straining at its absolute limit. Then he turns and walks down the hallway, and Dimitri follows, grinning at his back.
The grin stays because it’s easy, because it’s a mask he’s worn for years and it fits the way old armor fits, comfortable and concealing. Beneath it, in the place where the bond lives and the unfamiliar feelings are beginning to accumulate faster than he can bury them, Dimitri is thinking about the wall. About Knox’s wrists in his hands and the sound Knox made when Dimitri’s wanting poured through the bond, that caught breath, that tiny fracture in his composure. About Vale stepping in before Dimitri could find out what came next.
About the fact that Knox hadn’t fought.
Knox hadn’t struggled. Hadn’t reached for his mace. Hadn’t summoned a blessing or thrown Dimitri off him the way he had in the warehouse when they first met. Knox had stood there with his face against the stone and his pulse hammering and his body very still and he hadlet Dimitri hold him.
Dimitri follows Knox down the corridor and smiles and says nothing and files this information in the growing collection alongside the electricity and the salve and the way Knox sayshis name, and the collection is becoming something he can no longer pretend is casual, and the ground beneath his feet has shifted again, and he doesn’t know where he’s standing anymore.
Chapter 11
The cathedral steps are bright with midday sun, and Knox squints against it as they descend. His head is pounding. The bond throbs in his chest, and the constant low-grade war between his angelic blood and the demonic tether is grinding him down in ways he can feel but can’t fix. He’s tired. He’s been tired since the warehouse, but it’s getting worse, settling deeper, spreading further, becoming less like exhaustion and more like erosion.
He doesn’t mention it.
“So,” Dimitri says as they reach the sidewalk. His tone is light, careless, the verbal equivalent of someone flipping a knife between their fingers. “How long have you been letting your Templar friend fuck you?”
Knox stops walking.
He turns and stares at Dimitri. The demon is leaning against the railing at the bottom of the cathedral steps, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, wearing an expression of idle curiosity thatdoesn’t match the dark, churning thing Knox can feel pressing against the bond from his side.
“Vale,” Knox says slowly, “is mypartner.We’ve worked together for forty years. He’s the closest thing I have to a brother.” He holds Dimitri’s gaze. “I have never once thought of him that way.”
Something shifts in the bond.
The dark, churning thing that has been pressing against Knox’s chest since Vale’s fist connected with Dimitri’s ribs, the thing that flared wildfire-hot in the cathedral corridor and flooded the bond with black heat, eases. Not entirely. Not all at once. But it loosens, the way a fist unclenches, the way a held breath releases, and Knox feels the difference immediately. The pressure in his sternum drops. The barbed, ugly weight he’s been carrying from Dimitri’s side of the connection since the hallway softens into something less jagged.
Oh,Knox thinks.That’s strange.
Dimitri’s expression hasn’t changed. The idle curiosity is still fixed in place, the eyebrow still raised, but his posture has shifted, a fractional release of tension through his shoulders, and he pushes off the railing and falls into step beside Knox with a half-step less distance between them than before.
***
The days blur.
Knox and Dimitri hunt the rifthounds through Haven, and the city is vast and the creatures are cunning and the work is slow, grinding, and relentless. They follow leads: reports of acid damage in the warehouse district, livestock killed in the outer boroughs, a sewer worker hospitalized with burns no one can explain. They track sulfur trails through alleys and drainage tunnels and abandoned lots. They find claw marks on steel and concrete and bone.
They find nothing alive.
The rifthounds are smart. Smarter than Knox expected. They move at night, they don’t stay in one place, and they’ve scattered across the city in every direction. For every lead that pans out, three go cold. For every trail Knox picks up, the creatures are already gone.
It is obvious that Knox is suffering.
