Good in a way that has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the fact that it’s Knox. Because they’re bound, and Dimitri feels everything Knox feels, and what Knox is feeling right now is a concentrated quiet concern that flows through the point of contact and pools in the wound and eases something that the pain alone couldn’t reach. It doesn’t fix the damage. It doesn’t stop the acid. But it softens the edges of the agony, rounds them off, and for a moment Dimitri can breathe.
Knox is so painfully gentle. His fingers move across the destroyed flesh of Dimitri’s arm with a tenderness that Dimitri has never experienced from anything or anyone, and it’s almost worse than cruelty, because Dimitri knows what to do with cruelty. Cruelty is familiar. Cruelty makes sense. This doesn’t make sense. This man who fights demons for a living is touching Dimitri’s wounds as though Dimitri is something worth being careful with, and Dimitri’s throat is tight and his eyes are burning and he is not going to fall apart in a sewer because a Templar touched him gently.
“We need to get off the streets,” Knox says quietly. His fingers withdraw from the wound, and the absence of his touch is a small cold shock. “Before we find more of them.”
“I’m not afraid of a bunch of drooling mongrels.”
“I know you’re not. But you’re bleeding, and I’d rather stitch you up before you pass out and I have to carry you home.”
The corner of Dimitri’s mouth twitches. “You couldn’t carry me.”
“Try me.”
Dimitri looks at him. Small, pale, stubborn, exhausted, kind. Standing in a sewer with gore on his coat and a mace at his hip and concern in his green eyes, offering to carry a demon home, and meaning it.
Dimitri follows him out of the canals.
He doesn’t have a word for what he’s feeling. He’s not sure one exists. It sits in his chest beside the bond, beside the anger, beside the reluctant unwelcome tenderness that Knox keeps pulling out of him, and Dimitri carries it in silence through the dark streets and doesn’t know what to do with any of it.
He has never once been undone by kindness, and the fact that it’s happening now, in a city he doesn’t care about, with a man he shouldn’t want, is either the cruelest joke the universe has ever played on him or the beginning of something he is not equipped to survive.
Chapter 13
Getting Dimitri to sit down is harder than fighting the rifthounds.
“I don’t need—”
“Sit down.”
“I’ve survived worse than a dog bite, Templar. I once had my arm torn off at the shoulder and reattached it myself with—”
“Dimitri. Sit. Down.”
Something in Knox’s voice does the trick. Or maybe something in the bond, the quiet immovable stubbornness that Knox knows Dimitri can feel radiating off him. Dimitri drops onto the couch with a huff and a scowl, his mangled arm cradled against his chest, his red eyes tracking Knox as he crosses the apartment toward the bathroom.
Knox retrieves the medical kit from the cabinet. The same supplies he used on himself and offered to Dimitri after the apothecary, the same salve Dimitri used alone in the dark when he thought Knox wouldn’t know. Knox doesn’t reach for the holysupplies on the top shelf. He didn’t last time either, and the ease of that decision no longer surprises him the way it should.
He returns to the living room and sits next to Dimitri on the couch. Close. Closer than he needs to be, probably, but the wound is on Dimitri’s left arm and Knox needs the angle, and if their knees brush when he settles into position that's not really a choice.
“Give me your arm,” Knox says.
Dimitri extends it. The wound is ugly. The rifthound’s teeth left deep ragged furrows in the bicep, and the acid has eaten into the tissue around them, leaving the edges raw and inflamed. Dark blood still seeps from the deepest punctures. The muscle beneath is visible in places, and Knox can see the faint slow pulse of demonic regeneration trying and failing to close what the acid keeps reopening.
Knox begins to work.
He cleans the wound first, methodically, with antiseptic that makes Dimitri’s jaw tighten but draws no other reaction. He rinses the acid residue with a neutralizing tincture, the liquid fizzing and steaming where it meets contaminated tissue, sharp and chemical. Then he opens the salve.
It’s a healing compound. Non-holy. Knox made it himself years ago from a recipe in one of Fiora’s texts, a blend of regenerative herbs and low-grade enchantment designed to knit flesh back together from the inside out. He scoops a measure onto his fingers and begins to spread it across the wound.
The effect is immediate. The salve sinks into the torn muscle and begins to work, and Knox can see the flesh responding, fibers reaching for each other across the gaps, tissue building over exposed bone in slow deliberate layers. It must be agonizing. The sensation of muscle reknitting, of skin stretching to cover what was moments ago open and raw, is not a gentle process.
Dimitri doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t make a sound.
He’s watching Knox.
Knox can feel the weight of that gaze. Heavy, intent, unwavering. Dimitri’s red eyes are fixed on Knox’s face, not on the wound, not on his hands, but on his face, and Knox keeps his own eyes on the injury because if he looks up right now he doesn’t know what will happen. His neck is hot. The flush starts at his collar and creeps upward, and he knows Dimitri can see it and he knows Dimitri can feel it through the bond, because the bond doesn’t allow secrets, and Knox is rapidly running out of places to hide.
He focuses on the wound. On the steady application of salve, on the slow closure of torn flesh, on the mechanical precision of his hands. He does not think about how close they are on this couch, or how warm Dimitri’s skin is under his fingers, or how the demon’s thigh is pressed against his own.
