“Come for me,” Dimitri says against his mouth. “Show me. Let me feel you.”
Knox comes with a cry that Dimitri swallows, his body clenching around Dimitri’s cock, spilling between them untouched, and the orgasm rips through the bond and drags Dimitri after him. Dimitri buries himself deep and comes inside Knox, and they shudder through it together, the bond carrying every wave back and forth until the sensation is one continuous shared thing.
Dimitri collapses against him. Knox’s arms wrap around his shoulders, and Dimitri’s face presses into the crook of Knox’s neck, and for a long time neither of them moves.
Knox’s fingers card through Dimitri’s dark hair, careful around the base of his horns, and Dimitri makes a low sound against his throat that is closer to a purr than anything else, and Knox files this information away as something precious and private that belongs only to him.
“You called me angel,” Knox says eventually, his voice barely there.
“I always do.”
Knox is quiet for a moment. His fingers trace the ridge of one horn, featherlight, and Dimitri’s breath catches against his neck.
“It didn’t hurt this time,” Knox says.
Dimitri lifts his head. His red eyes are unguarded in a way Knox has never seen, and the expression on his face is not the sharp grin or the fury or the performance. It’s just him. Just Dimitri, with the armor off, looking down at Knox in the morning light.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. The bond is open between them, and what Knox can feel from Dimitri’s side is answer enough. Knox reaches up and traces the line of Dimitri’s jaw, the same gesture Dimitri made with a claw in a hallway that feels like a lifetime ago, and Dimitri’s eyes close and he turns his face into Knox’s palm and stays there.
They don’t say anything else. They don’t need to.
Chapter 20
Willow’s is, by the standards of the Old City’s supernatural establishments, almost respectable.
This is not a compliment. Respectability in the Old City means the bartender waters down the drinks and nobody has been murdered on the premises in at least a calendar month. It means the lights work. It means the floor is sticky for mundane reasons rather than arcane ones. It means that when you walk in, nobody reaches for a weapon, which in Dimitri’s experience is either a sign of civilized company or a very effective ambush.
Willow’s occupies the ground floor of a double story brick building on the kind of street where the lampposts work in shifts. The sign above the door is flickering neon that seems to sense when it needs to behave and when it can dim to something less obtrusive,and the windows are frosted glass that lets light out but not looks in, which is the primary selling point for a clientele that prefers not to be looked at. It is a bar for people who exist in the margins. Not criminals, necessarily. Notexclusively. Just the ones who live in the spaces between what Haven acknowledges and what it pretends not to see.
Dimitri has been here before, though not recently. Not since before the summoning, before the warehouse, before the freckled catastrophe of a witch reached through the veil and dragged him into a chalk circle and then, through a series of events so profoundly stupid that Dimitri still can’t think about them without wanting to set something on fire, bound him to a nephilim Templar who is currently walking beside him smelling of soap and coffee and something bright and clean that makes Dimitri’s teeth ache.
Knox showered before they left the apartment. He stood in the bathroom for twenty minutes with the water running and Dimitri sat on the couch and pretended not to feel the warmth of it through the bond, the quiet contentment of hot water on sore muscles, the way Knox’s thoughts went soft and unfocused the way they do when he lets his guard down. Which he does. Around Dimitri. Which is either a profound display of trust or an act of suicidal idiocy, and Dimitri has not yet determined which.
Then Knox came out in clean clothes with his hair damp and his skin flushed pink from the heat, and Dimitri pulled him into his lap on the couch and kissed the water off his throat, and Knox laughed. Actuallylaughed,quiet and surprised, as though he still can’t believe Dimitri would want to touch him. The sound hit Dimitri somewhere behind the ribs that he is becoming increasingly convinced Knox has colonized.
They had coffee. Knox made it. Dimitri watched him move through the small kitchen with his hair still damp and his sleeves pushed up and his feet bare on the tile, and he thought,you are going to be the death of me,and he meant it in every possible sense, and the worst part is that he no longer minds.
Now they are here, and Knox is in his coat with his mace at his hip and his hair pulled back into its ponytail and his expressionset into the kind of mild, pleasant calm that Dimitri has come to understand is Knox’s version of armor. He wears politeness the way Dimitri wears cruelty, as a shield, as a weapon, as a way to keep people at arm’s length while they underestimate him. The difference is that Knox’s is genuine. He is actually kind. He is actually patient. He actually means it when he saysnice to meet youto people who are actively trying to eat him, and Dimitri finds this so simultaneously infuriating and devastating that he has stopped trying to reconcile the two.
Mine,the bond says, which is the bond’s only song these days, a single note played on repeat at a frequency designed to turn Dimitri’s carefully curated detachment into rubble.
He holds the door to Willow’s open. Knox raises an eyebrow at him.
“What?” Dimitri says.
“Nothing.” Knox’s mouth twitches. “Very chivalrous.”
“Keep walking before I change my mind.”
Knox walks through the door, and Dimitri follows him and does not look at the way the overhead light catches the gold of his hair, because he has some self-respect left, and it is hanging by a thread, and he is not going to lose it in the doorway of a bar that smells of elderflower and old beer.
***
Inside, Willow’s is warm and dim and populated by the usual assortment of beings who prefer their drinking establishments quiet and their fellow patrons disinclined toward small talk. A group of fae occupy a corner booth, their features sharp and luminous in the low light, speaking in a language that sounds as though wind has learned to whisper through a keyhole. A man with bark-brown skin and moss growing at his temples sits atthe end of the bar nursing something amber. Two women who might be human and might not sit at a table near the window, their heads close together, one of them trailing a finger through a small puddle of spilled wine that is rearranging itself into patterns that are definitely not random.
The bartender is behind the bar.
Dimitri notices him immediately, because the bartender is conspicuously, almost aggressivelymundane.In a room full of beings who shimmer and pulse and exist at frequencies that make the air taste of ozone, the bartender is a man with short blond hair and a plain face and the quiet, unhurried competence of someone who has been pouring drinks for a long time and stopped being impressed by his clientele roughly two weeks into the job. He is drying a glass. He looks up when they enter, takes in Dimitri’s horns, Knox’s coat, and the general aura ofcomplicated situationthat follows them everywhere, and nods once.
