Knox is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “What does it mean, to belong to you?”
The fury ebbs. It doesn’t vanish, still banked and smoldering, but something else rises through it, something warm and vast that softens the sharp edges. Knox feels it pour through the bond and into his chest, a deep spreading heat that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the way Dimitri is looking up at him right now.
Fondly. Dimitri is looking at him fondly.
It transforms his face. The sharp angles soften. The predatory gleam in his red eyes becomes something closer to wonder, and for a moment Dimitri looks less like an ancient demon and more like a man who has stumbled onto something precious and can’t quite believe it’s real.
Knox’s breath catches. He opens his mouth.
Someone clears their throat.
They both look over.
Newt is standing at the edge of the living room, chalk in one hand, notebook in the other, staring at them with an expression of acute mortified embarrassment. His freckled face is pink. His eyes dart between Knox’s hands on Dimitri’s shoulders and Dimitri’s hand on Knox’s thigh and the approximately two inches of space between their faces, and he looks as though he is considering whether the window is large enough to escape through.
“I—sorry, I just—” Newt stammers. His flush deepens. He grips the chalk with both hands. “I need to ask you something. Both of you. And it’s—it might be a bit personal.”
Knox straightens. He pulls back from Dimitri, not far, not fast, but enough that there’s daylight between them. “Go ahead.”
Newt’s blush intensifies. He fidgets with the chalk, turning it over in his fingers, and his gaze fixes on a point somewhere between Dimitri’s left horn and the ceiling.
“Have you two—” He swallows. Tries again. “Have you been—I mean, since the binding, have you—” He takes a visible breath and forces the words out in a rush. “Have you been intimate with each other?”
“Repeatedly,” Dimitri says flatly.
Newt’s face goes scarlet. The chalk snaps in half in his grip, one piece rolling off the edge of a side table and hitting the floor, and he stares at the remaining half in his hand as though it has personally betrayed him.
Knox rolls his eyes. “Yes,” he says, with the measured patience of someone who has spent a lifetime fielding situations with grace. “We have. Is that relevant?”
Newt groans. It is a deep, pained sound, the groan of someone who has just received the worst possible answer to a question he didn’t want to ask. His shoulders sag, eyes closing, chalk hand dropping to his side.
Knox’s stomach tightens. “Newt. What’s the problem?”
Newt opens his eyes. He looks at them, at the bond shimmering in the space between their bodies, at whatever it is that witches with magical sight can see when they look at two souls that have been stitched together, and his expression shifts from embarrassment to something much heavier.
“The problem,” Newt says slowly, “is that if you’ve crossed that line, then we’re not working with blood magic anymore.”
The room goes quiet. The wind chimes in the hallway fall silent.
“We’re working with sex magic,” Newt says.
Dimitri’s hand, still on Knox’s thigh, goes still. The wicked grin vanishes. Through the bond, Knox feels the shift, the sudden total silence that descends when Dimitri processes something genuinely bad. Not annoying-bad. Not inconvenient-bad. The kind of bad that changes the shape of the problem.
“Sex magic is a different discipline entirely,” Newt continues. He is talking faster now, his nervous energy channeled into explanation. “Blood magic I can work with. I cast it, I understand the framework, I can reverse-engineer my own circle. But when a soulbind is consummated, the anchors shift from blood to something deeper. The magic rewrites itself around the intimacy. It’s not just in your blood anymore, it’s in your—” He gestures vaguely, miserably. “Everything.”
“Can you undo it?” Knox asks. His voice is calm. His heart is not.
Newt hesitates. That hesitation says more than any words could.
“Not alone,” Newt admits. “I don’t have the knowledge. Sex magic is old and complicated, and my coven has practitioners who specialize in it, but I—” He swallows. “We’re going to need the coven’s help.”
The room goes very still.
Dimitri’s hand clenches on Knox’s thigh. The grip is sudden and hard and possessive, fingers digging into the muscle through denim, and through the bond Knox is hit by a wave of dread so intense it nearly buckles him. Anxiety and resistance and something fierce and territorial, all tangled together, flooding through the tether.
Knox doesn’t know who it’s coming from. He suspects it’s both of them.
He presses his hand over Dimitri’s on his thigh. The demon’s knuckles are white. Through the bond, the dread swells, and Knox can feel his own heart racing in tandem, and neither of them speaks. The silence in the witch’s living room is absolute.
