They stay there, separated by a door, connected by everything else, for longer than either of them would admit. Knox presses his palm to the wood and feels the warmth of Dimitri on the other side, and the caring he tried to hide is still there in his chest, enormous and terrifying and one-sided, and he holds it the way he holds everything, quietly, carefully, expecting nothing in return.
Chapter 14
It’s after two in the morning and Knox isn’t sleeping.
Dimitri would know this even without the bond. He’d know it the way you know a storm is coming, the pressure in the air, the charged stillness, the sense of something building toward a breaking point. The apartment is thick with it. Tension saturating every surface, seeping through the walls, filling the space between couch and bedroom.
But Dimitri does have the bond, and the bond tells him everything. Knox is awake. Knox is lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and his mind is a churning current of exhaustion and frustration and something else, something hot and restless that Knox keeps pushing down and that keeps floating back to the surface. Dimitri can feel the shape of it without being able to name it, a wanting that is tangled up in something more complicated, something Knox is holding with white-knuckled hands and refusing to release. It presses against the bond with a warmth that makes Dimitri’s skin prickle.
There is a longing in the apartment tonight that Dimitri cannot attribute to either of them with certainty. It lives in the space between them, in the wall that separates them, in the bond that connects them, and it has no single origin. It is his and it is Knox’s and it is theirs together, two currents feeding the same river, and Dimitri has been lying on this couch for an hour trying to determine where his wanting ends and Knox’s begins and he cannot find the seam.
He lasts until 2:17.
He gets up. He walks through the hallway. He doesn’t hesitate at the bedroom door, because hesitation is weakness and Dimitri is ancient and has never been weak. He opens it and walks inside.
Knox sits up in bed.
He’s completely awake, not groggy, not disoriented, just instantly upright, green eyes sharp in the dark. The sheets pool around his waist, and the moonlight pouring through the window paints the room in silver and shadow.
Knox is bare to the waist. His hair is down.
Dimitri stands in the doorway and feels the world reorganize itself around those two facts.
The hair falls around Knox’s shoulders and across his collarbones in waves of pale gold, longer than it looks in the ponytail, and the moonlight catches it and turns it luminous. It frames his face in a way the ponytail never allows, softening the angles of his jaw, falling across one green eye, pooling in the hollow of his throat. Knox pushes a strand behind his ear with one hand and the gesture is so small and so unconscious and so devastating that Dimitri’s breath leaves him.
His chest is lean and defined, the compact precise musculature of a man who has spent years swinging a mace, and his skin is pale and smooth and faintly radiant in a way that has everything to do with what he is. The shadows pool in thehollows of his collarbones, in the dip between his ribs, along the narrow taper of his waist where it disappears beneath the sheets. He is built on a smaller scale than Dimitri in every way, and the delicacy of it is a lie that Dimitri knows better than to believe, because he has seen those narrow shoulders swing a mace through bone, has seen those slender arms haul him out of a fire, but the lie is beautiful. Knox’s body is a study in contradiction: fragile-looking and impossibly strong, holy and warm-blooded and utterly, devastatingly human in the moonlight, and Dimitri wants to put his mouth on every inch of it.
He was wrong in the canals. He was wrong when he said no one wanted Knox. When he saidunwanted,when he dug for the wound and tried to make Knox bleed. He was projecting, and he was lying, and he was wrong, because Dimitri wants Knox with a clarity that cuts through every layer of anger and resistance and self-preservation he has built up over years of existence.
The longing is everywhere now. It fills the room, fills the bond, fills the space between the doorway where Dimitri stands and the bed where Knox sits, and Dimitri still cannot tell whose it is. It feels like his, the deep visceral pull toward this man that has been building since the warehouse. But it also feels like Knox’s, the restless warmth that has been pressing against the bond all night, the thing Knox keeps pushing down, and the two longings are layered on top of each other so completely that they’ve become one thing, one shared ache that belongs to neither and both.
Dimitri crosses the room.
He presses one knee into the mattress, and the bed dips under his weight, and he brings his face level with Knox’s. Close. Inches apart. Knox’s green eyes are wide, his lips parted, and the flush is already blooming, rising from his bare chest, climbing his throat, spreading across his cheeks. Through the bond Dimitri can feel Knox’s heartbeat, rapid and frantic, and his ownheartbeat is doing something similar, and the two rhythms are almost synchronized, almost the same, two pulses reaching for a frequency that would lock them together.
“What are you doing?” Knox breathes.
Dimitri looks at him. At the moonlight on his skin. At the pulse hammering in the hollow of his throat. At the way his blond hair falls across one shoulder and catches the light. At his mouth, which is slightly swollen from the split lip that hasn’t fully healed, and which is parted.
“I can’t stop thinking,” Dimitri says, and his voice is low and rough and stripped of every pretense he usually wears, “about how good you would taste.”
Knox flinches back. It’s small, a fractional retreat, his spine pressing against the headboard, but Dimitri is faster. His hand shoots out and catches Knox’s arm, just above the elbow, and the contact detonates the bond between them.
Heat. Immediate, overwhelming heat, pouring through the point where their skin meets and flooding outward. Knox’s arm is warm under Dimitri’s hand. Warm and soft, softer than he expected, softer than a Templar’s arm has any right to be, and the muscle beneath is taut with tension but the skin is smooth, and Dimitri’s fingers span it easily, and Knox is gorgeous. He is so goddamn gorgeous that it’s an act of violence, sitting here in the moonlight with his hair down and his chest bare and his green eyes blown wide with something that isn’t fear.
Knox is red down to his sternum. The flush covers him, and his breathing is heavy, and through the bond Dimitri can feel exactly what Knox is feeling, the racing pulse, the dry mouth, the heat coiling low in his stomach. Knox is aroused. The knowledge hits Dimitri and the bond amplifies it, mirrors it, feeds it back and forth between them until the wanting is a loop with no beginning and no end, a current that passes through them both and gathers strength with every pass, and Dimitri is drowning in it.
Knox is tense in his grip. Not fighting. Not pulling away. Just held, caught between the headboard at his back and Dimitri’s hand on his arm, and his chest is rising and falling in rapid shallow breaths and his eyes are locked on Dimitri’s and the air between them could ignite.
Dimitri releases his arm. Knox doesn’t move.
Slowly, deliberately, Dimitri lifts both hands and cups Knox’s face.
Knox’s breath stutters. His green eyes go very wide, very bright, and his lips part on a sound that doesn’t quite make it out. Dimitri’s hands are large enough that his fingers slide into the loose gold hair at Knox’s temples and his palms bracket those high cheekbones and his thumbs rest at the corners of Knox’s mouth, and Knox is looking up at him with an expression that is cracked open, vulnerable in a way Dimitri has never seen from him, every wall down, every defense breached, and the longing pouring through the bond is so vast and so mutual that Dimitri cannot find where his ends and Knox’s begins because they are the same longing, they have always been the same longing.
Knox’s hands come up. Not to push him away. They land on Dimitri’s wrists, light and trembling, and his fingers curl around the bones there and hold on, and the electricity arcs between every point of contact, wrists to palms to jaw to hair, and Dimitri’s vision narrows to the green of Knox’s eyes and the parted shape of his mouth and the warmth of his skin beneath Dimitri’s palms.
Dimitri leans in.
