“You’ll die,” Dimitri snaps. The words come out hotter than he intends, louder, the fury cracking through the composure he’s been maintaining. “You get that, right? Your blood is already rejecting the bond. It’s eating you alive. You collapse in alleys. You can barely hold your mace. You’lldie,Knox.”
“Newt didn’t know what he was doing.” Knox looks at Newt, and his expression is gentle, and Dimitri wants to shake him until his teeth rattle. “He made a mistake. He was scared and in over his head. I will not trade his life for mine.”
The parlor is silent. Annabeth’s thin mouth has parted. The young woman in black by the door is staring. Newt looks as though someone has just told his life matters for the first time, and he doesn’t know what to do with the information.
Dimitri is furious.
He is incandescent, nuclear, planet-scorching furious, and the shadows in the corners of the parlor are thickening and the temperature is dropping and the portraits on the walls are rattling in their frames. The one person he has ever cared about, the one person in his entire immortal existence who has made him feel something other than hunger or rage, is standing in front of him and calmly, gently, with those goddamn green eyes, choosing to die. For a witch. For a useless, fumbling, freckle-faced novice who cast the wrong spell from a book he couldn’t read.
Dimitri can't handle this. He can't. He's going to destroy everything. He's going to destroyhimself. He's going to–
A hand touches his arm.
Dimitri flinches. His head snaps down.
Newt is standing beside him. The boy’s hand is on Dimitri’s forearm, touching him for the first time ever, and his bright green eyes are looking up at Dimitri with an expression that has no business being on the face of someone who is terrified of him. Understanding. The kid understands. Dimitri doesn’t know how, doesn’t know what the boy sees or feels or senses, but the look on his freckled face is the look of someone who has put the pieces together.
Newt looks past Dimitri to Knox.
“Knox,” Newt says. His voice is steadier than it’s been all day. “I caused this. I summoned Dimitri. I cast the spell. I bound you two together. Everything that’s happening to you, the pain, the rejection, all of it, that’s on me.”
“Newt—”
“This is my choice.” Newt’s chin comes up. The stubborn set from the warehouse, the refusal to buckle. “I’m making it. You need to let me.”
“It isn’t a choice,” Knox says. “It’s a death sentence.”
“It’s a debt.” Newt’s voice cracks, but he pushes through. “And I’m paying it. Because I won’t let you die for me.” He swallows. “Not when it would destroy the demon I forced onto you.”
The parlor goes silent.
Knox’s eyes snap to Dimitri.
Dimitri cannot guard his expression. He tries. A thousand years of practice, every wall he’s ever built, every mask he’s ever worn. He can’t do it. The walls are down. The mask is gone. What is on his face is naked and raw and devastating, and Knox can see it. Anguish. Despair. The terrible consuming fear of a being who has just discovered he has something to lose and is staring at the prospect of losing it.
Knox’s expression crumbles. The composure breaks. The steady green eyes go bright and wet, and his mouth trembles, and all of his discipline cracks open, and what is underneath isa man who is looking at a demon and seeing, for the first time, fully, without reservation, what he means to him.
Dimitri does the only thing he can.
He opens the bond.
Not a crack. Not a trickle. He tears it wide open, demolishes every wall and every barrier and every carefully constructed dam he has built since the warehouse, and he lets everything pour through. All of it. Every ounce of devotion he’s been hiding. Every moment of tenderness he pretended didn’t happen. Every time he watched Knox sleep and felt something vast and quiet settle in his chest. Every time Knox touched his arm and Dimitri’s entire world narrowed to the point of contact. The hallway. The bedroom. The morning, the mug, the way Knox hands him the coffee without drinking any because Knox has always, always put Dimitri first, even when Dimitri didn’t deserve it, even when Dimitri was cruel, even when Dimitri was everything Knox was supposed to destroy.
It hurts. Tearing himself open is an act of violence against every instinct he possesses, and the vulnerability of it is excruciating, and he does it anyway because Knox is standing in front of him with wet eyes and a trembling mouth and the willingness to die rather than let someone else suffer, and Dimitri has to make him understand.
Knox gasps. The bond floods him, and Dimitri watches it happen. Watches the color come back to Knox’s face. Watches his green eyes go wide. Watches his lips part on a soundless breath as the full scope of Dimitri’s feelings hits him.
Knox closes the distance between them in two steps, quick and graceless, and his hands find Dimitri’s face and he pulls him down and kisses him.
It is soft. It is sure. It is the kiss of someone who has made a decision, a real one, not born of proximity or the bond or the heat of a moment, and is putting everything behind it. Dimitri’shands find Knox’s waist and pull him in, close, until there is no space left between them, and he kisses him back with a gentleness he didn’t know he possessed.
The parlor is quiet. Annabeth watches with an unreadable expression. The coven witches are very still.
Newt stands off to the side, arms crossed, with tears running silently down his freckled cheeks and a look on his face that is equal parts terror and relief and the desperate aching hope of someone who has just witnessed proof that the world contains more kindness than he was led to believe.
Chapter 25
The library is vast and old and smells of mildew.
