Knox curls against him. It’s not deliberate, not calculated. Knox just turns toward him, the way a body turns toward warmth, and tucks himself against Dimitri’s side with his headon Dimitri’s chest and his leg draped over Dimitri’s thigh and his loose blond hair spilling across Dimitri’s skin. His hand rests over Dimitri’s heart, and his breathing slows, and the bond between them settles into something quiet and whole.
Dimitri wraps an arm around him. His hand finds the curve of Knox’s hip and rests there, possessive and careful, and Knox’s weight against his chest is warm and slight and exactly right.
They fall asleep.
Chapter 19
Knox wakes sore in a way that has to do with the demon whose arm is draped possessively across his hip.
The soreness is deep and good and grounding, settled into his muscles and the base of his spine and the tender places Dimitri’s mouth and hands spent hours mapping in the dark. Knox lies still and takes inventory. The thin mattress beneath him. The morning light, pale and cool. The weight of Dimitri’s arm heavy and warm against his bare skin, the demon’s chest pressed against Knox’s back, the slow rhythm of his breathing stirring the hair at Knox’s nape. They are tangled together in a way that suggests neither of them moved after they fell asleep, as though their bodies decided independently of their conscious minds that this position was the correct one and refused to adjust.
Knox’s hand rests on the mattress in front of him, and Dimitri’s hand rests on top of it, clawed fingers loosely threaded through Knox’s smaller ones.
He stares at their interlocked hands and feels something vast and fragile move through his chest. He is in bed with a demon. He has had sex with a demon. Twice. The demon is holding his hand in his sleep, and through the bond Knox can feel Dimitri’s resting state, not the void and not the fury but something warm and unguarded and at ease, and Knox is terrified because this feels too much like the thing he has spent eighty years not allowing himself to have.
He takes stock of himself. Checks the bond the way a soldier checks a wound, methodically, without sentiment. The tether is still there, dark and pulsing beneath his sternum. The angelic rejection is still there too, the grinding cellular friction that has been tearing him apart since the binding. And the bond has not sealed.
Knox closes his eyes. Opens them.
It should have sealed. Sex between bonded partners is a consummation, a completion, the final click of a lock falling into place. It should have closed the loop and made the bond permanent and irrevocable. That’s what Knox warned Dimitri about in the bedroom, the night Dimitri cupped his face and pulled away. If you accept the bond, it becomes permanent. We won’t be able to reverse it.
But his angelic blood is still rejecting it. His body is still fighting the bond on a cellular level, still treating it as an infection, still burning through its reserves to prevent the seal from taking hold. The consummation should have been the final anchor. Instead, his blood looked at the anchor and set it on fire.
Knox doesn’t know if he’s relieved or devastated. He suspects both.
Dimitri stirs behind him. His fingers dig into Knox's hip bone and Knox's breath stutters. His eyes close. His body responds to the touch with a Pavlovian immediacy that would be embarrassing if he had the energy to be embarrassed.
Dimitri doesn't say anything.
Knox holds his breath. The bond is quiet. Not empty, not gone, but quiet. Dimitri's mind, usually a roiling storm of fury and hunger and sharp-edged thought, is still. Calm. Unreadable. And the silence is more frightening than any of Dimitri's rages, because Knox doesn't know what it means, and the possibilities are unbearable.
He remembers Dimitri recoiling from him two nights ago. The disgust on his face. The revulsion at the idea of being bound to Knox permanently, as though Knox were a disease, a trap, a cage with a pretty face. He remembers that, and it sits in his chest like broken glass.
But he also remembers last night. Dimitri's mouth against his ear, murmuringangel— not as a weapon, not as a barb, but like a prayer, like a word that had been stripped of all its edges and made into something sacred. Dimitri's hands on his body, so careful, so devoted, taking him apart not to destroy him but to understand him, to learn the architecture of him, to map every nerve and commit it to memory. Dimitri holding him afterward, arm around his waist, face pressed into his hair, breathing him in.
Those two memories cannot coexist. And yet they do.
Knox stares at the wall. The silence stretches. He can feel Dimitri awake behind him — fully awake, fully aware, choosing not to speak.
"The bond didn't seal," Knox says.
Behind him, Dimitri’s breathing changes. The slow rhythm stutters, catches, and then goes deliberately even, the breathing of someone who is controlling their reaction with precision. His arm is still on Knox’s hip. His fingers are still threaded through Knox’s.
Knox braces himself. He braces for relief, for the flood of gratitude he expects to feel from Dimitri’s side of the bond,because last night was extraordinary and devastating and the best thing that has ever happened to Knox in eighty years of living, but it was also the thing Dimitri recoiled from in this very bed days ago. The permanent bond. The cage. The loss of freedom. Knox braces for Dimitri to feel relieved that his freedom is intact, because that is what makes sense, that is what is logical, that is what Knox would feel if he were a creature whose entire identity was built on answering to no one.
He feels nothing.
Not relief. Not gratitude. Not anything. Dimitri’s side of the bond is flat and empty, a deliberate void, and Knox knows this void. He knows it intimately. He spent an entire day walking beside it, eating breakfast across from it, fighting rifthounds alongside it. It is the wall Dimitri builds when what he’s actually feeling is too dangerous to let through.
Knox’s chest seizes.
The hurt is immediate and overwhelming and humiliatingly familiar. It floods his chest and his throat and the backs of his eyes, and he knows he’s not hiding it, knows it’s pouring through the bond the way it poured through last time, but he can’t stop it because his body has betrayed him twice now, once by not sealing the bond and once by reacting to the void as though it’s a rejection, which it is, which it has always been. Dimitri wanted him for a night. Dimitri took what Knox offered and now the void is back because wanting is not caring and the wanting is satisfied and there is nothing else.
He was wrong again. He was wrong when he thought the fury was a shell and the fear underneath it meant something. He was wrong when Dimitri kissed him and the bond sang and he thoughtthis is real.It was sex. It was a demon taking what was offered, because that is what demons do, and Knox let himself believe otherwise because he is, as Dimitri correctly identified, disgustingly naive.
Dimitri’s hand tightens on his hip.
The grip is sudden and firm, clawed fingers pressing into the bone, holding Knox in place with a possessiveness that sends a shock through the bond. Knox freezes. Through the void, through the flat empty nothing Dimitri is projecting, Knox feels the grip and the intention behind it, and the two things do not match. The void says nothing. The hand saysstay.
