He stands at the window and watches the street and feels Knox’s heartbeat through the bond, faint and steady, and the fury is gone. All of it. Every scrap and shred and remnant, burned away by the ten seconds it took Knox to collapse and Dimitri to catch him, and what’s left in its place is something Dimitri has never felt before and cannot outrun and cannot wall off and cannot lie about anymore.
He does not sleep. He stands in the dark and guards the door and tells himself nothing and waits for Knox to wake up.
Chapter 17
Knox wakes in his own bed and doesn’t know how he got there.
The ceiling is familiar. White, blank, unremarkable. His ceiling. His bedroom. The thin mattress beneath him, the military corners of the sheets now tangled around his legs, the pale morning light filtering through the window. His boots are off, set side by side on the floor with a precision that is not his own. His mace is on the nightstand. His coat is still on, unbuckled but not removed, as though whoever put him here got as far as the boots and the weapon and then didn’t know what else to do.
He sits up slowly. The room tilts, steadies. His body feels hollowed out, not the sharp immediate pain of the bond’s punishments but something deeper, a bone-level depletion, as though his reserves have been drained to the dregs and are only now, sluggishly, beginning to refill. The war inside him, angelicblood versus demonic bond, has quieted to a dull grinding friction. Tolerable. For now.
He doesn’t remember falling. He remembers the alley. The demons. Dimitri standing over their remains with blood on his claws and shadows pooling at his feet, barely winded. He remembers the look on Dimitri’s face when he turned, feral and blazing, and the feeling that had surged through the bond so hot and so bright that Knox’s chest had cracked open with it. He remembers saying Dimitri’s name. He remembers the way Dimitri’s expression had changed when he heard it, something breaking behind those red eyes, and then pain, white and total, and the ground rushing up.
And arms. Arms catching him before he hit the pavement. A hand behind his head. His weight settling against a broad chest that radiated heat, and the last thing he felt before the dark took him was the bond screaming between them and Dimitri’s heartbeat against his cheek, fast and terrified.
Terrified.
Knox pushes himself out of bed. His legs hold. He takes a breath, tests his balance, and walks out of the bedroom.
Dimitri is standing by the living room window.
He’s silhouetted against the morning light, shoulders rigid, arms crossed, staring out at the street below with the fixed intensity of someone who has been standing in exactly that position for a very long time. He hasn’t slept. Knox can feel it through the bond, the brittle wired energy of a body running on fury instead of rest.
And the fury. God, the fury.
It rolls off Dimitri in waves, thick and dark and suffocating, saturating the bond until Knox can barely breathe around it. This is not the hot explosive anger Knox has come to know, not the flash-fire rage of the apothecary or the club. This is something colder. Something that has been building for hours,compressing, hardening into something dense and sharp and dangerous. The deliberate void from yesterday is gone. In its place is a wall of fury so total that Knox can’t feel anything underneath it, and he doesn’t know if that’s because there’s nothing there or because Dimitri is using the rage to hide what is.
Knox crosses the room. He touches Dimitri’s arm.
Dimitri spins.
His hand comes up and knocks Knox’s arm away, not a brush, not a redirect, but a violent strike that sends Knox’s hand flying and leaves a sting across his forearm. The motion is fast and brutal, and Dimitri’s red eyes are blazing, and his face is a mask of something that looks as though it could burn the apartment down.
Knox feels the flash of hurt before he can stop it. Brief, bright, a flare behind his sternum. He stamps it down. He’s had practice.
“What’s wrong?” Knox asks.
Dimitri stares at him. His jaw is tight, his nostrils flared, his chest rising and falling with the controlled breathing of someone holding themselves together through sheer force of will.
“What’s wrong,” Dimitri repeats. His voice is quiet. The dangerous quiet.
“You’re angry. I can feel it. I don’t understand—”
“You don’t understand.” Dimitri laughs. It’s an ugly brittle sound. “You don’t understand. That’s perfect. That’s absolutely perfect.”
He steps forward. Knox holds his ground.
“You’re weak,” Dimitri says. The word comes out as a condemnation. “You’re fragile. Your own blood is trying to kill you, and you just collapsed. In an alley. In the dark. Surrounded by things that want to eat you alive.” He takes another step.Knox doesn’t move. “I could break you. Do you understand that? I could snap you in half with one hand. I could crush you.”
He’s close now. Close enough that Knox has to tilt his chin up to hold his gaze, and Dimitri is looking down at him with those blazing red eyes and something shifts in his expression, something predatory sharpening beneath the fury, and his voice drops lower.
“And youwantme.”
Knox’s breath stutters.
It’s involuntary, a small hitch in his chest that he can’t suppress, and Dimitri latches onto it in an instant. His red eyes narrow. His head tilts. The fury is still there, burning hot and dark, but something else joins it now, something sharp and cruel and zeroed in on the fracture Knox just showed him.
“There it is,” Dimitri says softly, and his voice is a knife wrapped in velvet. “I felt it. Just now. That little catch in your breath, that flutter in the bond.” He steps closer, and Knox’s back is almost against the wall. “You want me. A Templar, a nephilim, a soldier of the holy Order, and you want to give yourself over to something born from the underworld.”
