He tilts Knox’s face up with his hands, gentle, so gentle, gentler than he has been with anything in a millenium, and he brings his mouth close. Not touching. Not yet. But close enough that they’re breathing the same air, close enough that the heat between their mouths is a tangible thing, and Knox’seyes flutter half-closed and his fingers tighten on Dimitri’s wrists and through the bond there is nothing except want, shared and enormous and undeniable, and Dimitri is going to kiss him. He is going to close this distance and put his mouth on Knox’s and find out if the electricity gets better or worse when they stop pretending, and nothing in his many years of existence has ever felt as inevitable as this.
“We can’t.” Knox’s voice cracks on the second word. He swallows and Dimitri feels the movement against his palms. “We’re bound by blood magic. If you—if we—if you accept the bond, it becomes permanent. We won’t be able to reverse it.”
Dimitri doesn’t pull back. Not yet. He stays there with Knox’s face in his hands and his breath on Knox’s lips and the wanting screaming through every nerve in his body, and he processes the words slowly, because his brain has vacated the premises and is only now beginning to return.
A permanent bond. With a nephilim.
The words penetrate the haze of want the way cold water seeps through cracks in hot stone. Permanent. Irrevocable. Not the temporary chain that can be broken with the right spell and the right witch and enough effort. A real bond. A true bond. Soul to soul. Forever.
He would never be free again.
The full weight of it hits him. A thousand years of answering to no one, belonging to no one, being owned by nothing. His freedom is the only thing he has that has never been taken from him, the one constant across centuries of summoning and binding and trading. And Knox is telling him, with his face in Dimitri’s hands and his breath on Dimitri’s mouth, that if Dimitri closes this last impossible inch, he will lose the only thing he has ever truly possessed.
Dimitri recoils.
He pulls back as though Knox has struck him, a sharp violent retreat, his hands releasing Knox’s face, his knee coming off the mattress, his whole body recoiling from the bed as if the sheets are made of holy fire. The wanting doesn’t stop. It claws at him, howling, as he puts distance between them. But the revulsion is stronger. The revulsion is survival. The revulsion is instinct screaming that a cage is a cage no matter how beautiful the bars.
The hurt on Knox's face feels like a punch to the ribs.
The brief devastating expression of a man who just had someone hold his face with reverent hands and lean in close enough to taste and then recoil from him in disgust, and who can’t quite keep the wound from showing. His hands are still raised, still hovering where Dimitri’s wrists were a moment ago, holding nothing.
It lasts less than a second. Knox’s composure closes over it, smooth and seamless, and by the time Dimitri blinks the Templar’s expression is neutral and his green eyes are steady and his hands have dropped to his lap and there is no trace of the hurt except in the bond, where it echoes, small and sharp and aching, and Dimitri can feel exactly how much it cost Knox and he wants to claw his own chest open to get the feeling out.
Dimitri tries not to feel it. He tries so hard not to feel it that the effort is almost worse than the feeling itself.
He turns. He walks out of the bedroom. He pulls the door shut behind him with a click that sounds, in the silence of the apartment, final.
He does not look back.
He drops onto the couch and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes and breathes, and the ghost of Knox’s skin lingers on his palms, the shape of those cheekbones still imprinted in his hands, and the ache in his chest is not the bond. It is not the wanting. It is the memory of Knox’s empty hands hovering in the air after Dimitri pulled away, holding thespace where his wrists used to be, and Dimitri presses his palms harder against his eyes and makes a sound that he will never admit to making.
Chapter 15
Knox tries to feel nothing.
He lies in the dark after the door clicks shut and he tries to feel nothing, and he fails so completely and so immediately that the failure itself becomes another thing to feel. The rejection sits in his chest, not the clean sharp rejection of a blow or a wound but the slow, spreading kind, the kind that seeps into soft tissue and stains everything it touches. Dimitri had held his face in his hands. Dimitri had leaned in until they were breathing the same air and Knox could feel the ghost of his mouth and the wanting pouring through the bond had been so vast and so shared that Knox had thought, for one brief and stupid and devastating moment, that this was it. That the distance between them had finally become too small to maintain. That someone was going to cross it.
And then Dimitri had looked at him, truly looked, and the wanting had turned to disgust, and he had pulled away as though Knox were something contagious.
Knox stares at the ceiling and feels the shape of Dimitri’s palms on his face. They are still there, the phantom pressure of large hands and careful fingers, and his skin remembers the warmth of them even though the warmth is gone. His own hands are in his lap, holding nothing. He’d held on to Dimitri’s wrists and Dimitri had pulled away and Knox’s hands had stayed up, hovering in empty air, reaching for something that was already gone.
He didn’t sleep. He is not going to sleep. The bond hums between them, thin and taut, and from Dimitri’s side there is nothing. Not anger, not frustration, not the usual roiling darkness that Dimitri wears the way Knox wears his coat. Just nothing. An empty, deliberate void, as though Dimitri has walled off his side of the connection and left only silence. Knox has felt Dimitri’s rage and his hunger and his reluctant amusement and his sharp-edged grief, and this is worse than all of them. This is the sound of someone choosing to feel nothing rather than feel what they actually feel, and Knox recognizes the technique because he’s been using it his entire life.
He lies in the dark and does not sleep and tries to reconcile the man who cupped his face with the man who recoiled from him.
He fails at that too.
***
Morning is a landscape of silence.
Knox makes coffee. He pours it into the single mug and sets it on the counter for Dimitri, same as every morning, and the routine is the only thing holding him together. His hands move through the familiar motions, kettle, grounds, pour, and the normalcy of it is a rope he grips with both hands. He fills a glass of water for himself and stands at the sink and does not drink it.
He is not hungry. His stomach is a closed fist. The angelic rejection is grinding through his blood with a ferocity that is worse this morning, as though the almost-kiss activated something, as though his body registered the nearness of the bond sealing and responded by fighting harder to prevent it. His skin feels paper-thin. His pulse is visible at his wrists, and when he grips the edge of the counter his fingers shake.
Dimitri takes the mug without acknowledgment and sits on the couch and doesn’t look at him.
This is new. Before last night, Dimitri always looked at him. It was the one constant Knox could rely on, those red eyes tracking him across every room, studying him, wanting him, the gaze that made Knox’s neck warm and his pulse kick and his discipline strain. Now there is nothing. Dimitri stares at the wall with the rigid focus of someone determinedly not staring at something else, and the absence of his attention is louder than anything he has ever said.
