Newt moves with the quick nervous gait of someone who has spent his whole life trying to take up as little space as possible. Shoulders hunched. Hands in his pockets. Eyes on the ground. He flinches when a door opens on the street ahead of them. He flinches when a voice calls out from a window above. He makes himself small the way animals make themselves small in thepresence of something bigger than them, not just Dimitri but the street itself, the neighborhood, the weight of the coven name carved into the buildings around them. This is a boy who lives in a flinch. Who grew up in the shadow of a dynasty that views him as an asset to be controlled or a threat to be eliminated, and who was desperate enough to summon a demon because the people who should have helped him wouldn’t.
Dimitri does not want to feel sympathy for the person who ruined his life. He does not want to look at this shaking freckled kid and see anything other than the architect of his current predicament. He does not want to notice the way Newt’s shoulders relax fractionally the farther they get from the bookstore, or the way he keeps glancing at Knox with the wary hope of someone who has found an adult who seems trustworthy and is afraid to believe it.
He does not want to care. He is very tired of not wanting to care and caring anyway. Knox has ruined him for indifference. Before Knox, Dimitri could walk past a thousand desperate mortals and feel nothing, and now he is watching an amateur witch hunch his shoulders against his own last name and something in his chest is doing something inconvenient, and this is Knox’s fault. All of it. The caring, the sympathy, the creeping suspicion that people are more than the sum of their worst decisions. Knox and his steady green eyes and his patient voice and his terrible, contagious goodness have infected Dimitri with the disease of giving a shit, and there is no cure, and Dimitri is going to add it to the long and growing list of things Knox owes him.
Newt’s house is a narrow, eclectic townhouse tucked at the end of a dead-end street. Ivy crawls up the facade. The windows are crowded with plants and crystals and what appears to be a small herb garden growing on the windowsill in defiance of the season. The front door is painted a color that was probably blue once andis now something more philosophical. It is messy and overgrown and nothing at all like the precision of the Hargrove compound visible at the end of Thornfield Row, and Dimitri suspects that is the point.
Newt lets them in. The interior is exactly what the exterior promises, cluttered and warm, every surface covered in books and botanical specimens and half-finished projects that suggest a mind running in twelve directions at once. It smells of dried herbs and candle wax and the faint ozone tinge of ambient magic. Knox enters with the calm curiosity he brings to everything. Dimitri enters with the guarded wariness of a creature walking into an unknown witch’s home, because the last time he entered a witch’s workspace he was set on fire, and once is enough to establish a pattern.
Chapter 23
Newt seems to grow more comfortable once they’re inside his space.
The flinching stops. His shoulders come down from where they’ve been hovering near his ears. He moves through the house with the efficiency of someone on familiar ground, pulling supplies from shelves and drawers with muscle memory, chalk and jars of dried components and the same leather-bound book Knox remembers from the warehouse. He’s still wary of Dimitri, giving him a wide berth, never turning his back, but he stands a little straighter. Speaks a little more clearly. The stuttering terrified witch from the street is being replaced by something more solid.
Knox watches him and wonders how the coven treats him. Xela’s words echo in his mind, the boy caught between being valuable and being a threat, and he sees it in the way Newt moves. The habitual smallness. The instinct to be unobtrusive, to apologize before anyone’s asked him to. Knox recognizes it.He’s seen it in recruits who came to the Order from hard places. He’s seen it in the mirror, in the early years, before he learned that being small didn’t mean being less.
Newt clears a space in the living room, pushing furniture aside, rolling up a rug to expose the hardwood floor, and begins sketching chalk lines with the same trembling precision Knox remembers from the warehouse. He works from the leather-bound book, open on the floor beside him, cross-referencing symbols with a second smaller notebook filled with his own handwriting.
Dimitri lounges in an armchair.
He is draped across it in the way that only Dimitri can drape across things, legs spread like he has to take up as much space as possible, his head tilted back, his red eyes half-lidded with the deceptive laziness of a predator at rest. He is simmering. Knox can feel it through the bond, impatience cycling beneath the surface, hot and restless. Dimitri wants this done. Dimitri wants this over. And underneath the impatience is something else, something Dimitri is working very hard to keep buried, and Knox has learned enough about the architecture of Dimitri’s feelings to know that the things he buries hardest are the things that matter most.
Knox crosses the room.
He steps between Dimitri’s legs, positioning himself in the space between Dimitri’s sprawled knees, and looks down at him. Dimitri’s eyes open fully. They trail up Knox with slow unabashed appreciation, from his boots to his hips to his waist to his face, and one hand lifts from the arm of the chair and finds Knox’s thigh. His fingers trace along the outside of it, a lazy possessive drag through denim that makes Knox’s skin prickle.
“What’s wrong?” Knox asks.
“Nothing’s wrong.” Dimitri’s fingers continue their path along Knox’s thigh. “I’m just sitting here wondering how spectacularly bad this is going to go.”
Knox looks at him. Dimitri looks back, expression casual, the mask firmly in place.
“You’re lying,” Knox says.
“I’m not—”
“I can feel it. The bond doesn’t let you hide fear any better than it lets me hide pain.”
Dimitri’s eyes flash. His fingers stop moving on Knox’s thigh, and the mask cracks, something sharp and irritated surfacing beneath it. “Being in my head doesn’t mean you get ownership of my thoughts, angel.”
The words have teeth, but Knox doesn’t flinch. He is learning to read the difference between Dimitri’s anger and Dimitri’s fear, and right now the anger is a shell over something softer. He leans forward. His hands settle on Dimitri’s shoulders, gently, the way he always touches Dimitri, the way that makes the demon go still, and he brings his face close enough that the conversation belongs to no one but them.
“It feels like fear,” Knox says quietly. “And I don’t know who it’s coming from.”
The fury flares through the bond, hot and defensive, and Knox’s concern spikes, a flash of worry that he’s pushed too far. But then the fury turns inward. Dimitri isn’t angry at Knox. He is angry at himself, angry at the feeling, angry at the vulnerability, angry at the fact that he’s sitting in a witch’s armchair with a nephilim’s hands on his shoulders and he’s afraid and he can’t hide it.
Knox’s hands tighten on his shoulders. Not pulling. Not pushing. Just holding.
“What if it’s the bond,” Dimitri says.
The words come out low and rough and reluctant, dragged from somewhere he didn’t give them permission to leave. His jaw works. His red eyes are fixed on a point somewhere past Knox’s shoulder.
“What do you mean?” Knox asks.
“What if all of this—” Dimitri gestures between them, a sharp motion that encompasses the hand on Knox’s thigh and the bond humming in his chest and the last week of his life and every feeling he can’t name. “What if it’s the bond. What if we break the tether and it goes away. What if I’m free and I don’t—”
He stops. He can’t finish the sentence. Knox can feel the shape of the ending through the bond, the fear that what Dimitri feels is the magic and not the man, that the wanting and the caring and theminewill evaporate the moment the tether does, and the terror of that possibility is so naked and so vast that Knox’s throat aches with it.
