Knox is pressed against Dimitri’s side, one hand gripping Dimitri’s arm, his green eyes bright with worry and something deeper, gratitude, maybe, or awe, or the complicated aching feeling of watching someone sacrifice for you and being unable to stop it. Dimitri stands beside him, his hand on Knox’s hip, his red eyes fixed on the boy who ruined his life and is now saving it.
Newt smiles at them. It is small and shaky and brave, and it transforms his freckled face into something that almost looks like peace.
He reaches out and signs the paper.
The pen leaves a trail of light across the document, Newt’s name scrawled in the handwriting of a twenty-year-old who never learned calligraphy, and the moment the last letter is complete the document erupts into flames. The fire is violet and gold, and it consumes the smoke-paper in seconds, and the ashes drift upward and dissolve, and the contract is sealed.
The bond in Dimitri’s chest shifts.
He feels it. The open contract, the chain threaded through the door of his bond with Knox, loosening. Releasing. The debt transfers, sliding off Dimitri’s ledger and onto the incubus’s, and the soulbind between Dimitri and Knox shudders and settles and begins, finally, to close.
The sensation is extraordinary. The grinding friction that has been tearing Knox apart, the angelic rejection fighting the demonic tether, eases. Not all at once, not dramatically, but the way a fever breaks, the way a held breath releases. Through the bond, Dimitri feels Knox’s body responding, the cellular war quieting, the reserves beginning to rebuild, and the relief that pours through from Knox’s side is so vast and so sudden that Dimitri’s knees nearly buckle with the weight of it.
The bond seals. Dimitri feels it close, feels the final click of the lock, and the tether between them is no longer a tether. It is a bridge. Permanent, stable, woven into the architecture of their shared existence, and it hums with a warmth that Dimitri has never felt before, a warmth that is not his and not Knox’s buttheirs,a third thing born from the joining that belongs to neither and both.
The incubus rolls his shoulders. His purple eyes sweep the room and his gaze lands on Knox.
It lingers. There is something wistful in his expression, the particular regret of a being built for desire looking at something desirable and knowing it belongs to someone else. His purple eyes trace Knox’s face, Knox’s blond hair, the faint glow ofdivinity beneath Knox’s skin, and his mouth curves in a small private smile of genuine appreciation.
Then he looks at Dimitri.
And winks.
The fury is instantaneous. It detonates in Dimitri’s chest, hot and possessive and completely disproportionate to the offense, and his hand tightens on Knox’s hip and a snarl builds in his throat.
The incubus grins. It is dazzling and infuriating and entirely deliberate, and he turns back to Newt with the satisfied air of a being who has accomplished exactly what he set out to accomplish, and Dimitri is left standing in the library with his teeth bared and his blood boiling and the absolute certainty that this incubus is going to be a problem.
Knox puts a hand over Dimitri’s on his hip and squeezes gently, and through the bond comes a wave of warm exasperated affection that saysbreathe.
Dimitri does not breathe. But he stops snarling.
It’s a start.
Epilogue
They part with Newt on the steps of the Hargrove mansion, which is as good a place as any for a goodbye that Dimitri doesn't want to be having. Goodbyes imply attachment and attachment implies caring and caring implies that somewhere in the last miserable, world-altering, catastrophically inconvenient four hours of his existence, Dimitri has started giving a shit about an incredibly inept witch who can barely read Old Tongue and once accidentally soulbound a demon to an angel because he thought he was summoning a familiar.
He has. He's not going to say it out loud. But he has.
Newt stands on the second step with his spellbook clutched to his chest like a shield. He looks happier than Dimitri has seen him, which isn't saying a lot. It's not like he has a huge frame of reference. But maybe having a couple of people in your life who care if you live or die makes a difference over zero. He looks far younger than his twenty years, with those freckles and that disarray of red hair and the wide, earnest expression of someonewho has stumbled face-first into a situation far beyond his depth and is determined to see it through anyway. Behind him, leaning against the wrought-iron railing with the practiced disinterest of someone who has been alive long enough to find everything tedious, the incubus picks at his fingernails.
Dimitri stares at the incubus. The incubus does not look up. He is offensively beautiful in the way all incubi are–built to draw the eye, to hold it, to make you forget why you were looking in the first place. He is radiating a studied, deliberate boredom that Dimitri does not believe for a single second. The incubus had looked at Knox during the summoning with an appreciation that went beyond professional curiosity, and Dimitri had nearly torn the circle apart with his bare hands, and the fact that the incubus is now pretending to be fascinated by his own cuticles does not mean Dimitri has forgotten. Dimitri does not forget. It is one of his least convenient qualities.
He glares at the incubus. The incubus continues not looking up.
Good. Smart. Self-preserving. The creature has instincts, at least.
Knox is saying something to Newt. His voice is low and warm and Dimitri feels it through the bond like a hand pressed flat against his sternum. Knox's concern is a physical thing, warm and heavy, and it pours through their connection with a steadiness that should be annoying and is instead, infuriatingly, one of the things Dimitri likes most about him. Knox cares. Constantly, relentlessly, about everything, about everyone, about amateur witches who almost got them both killed. It is exhausting and admirable and Dimitri wants to shake him and kiss him in equal measure.
"You have my number," Knox says. His hand is on Newt's shoulder, and the boy is looking up at him with an expression that makes Dimitri think of stray animals finding shelter for thefirst time. "If anything happens. If you need anything at all. You call me."
"I'll be fine," Newt says. He smiles, and it is shaky at the edges but genuine. "I've got a familiar now, right? That's what I wanted in the first place."
"That is not a familiar," Knox says, and his eyes cut to the incubus on the railing, and Dimitri can feel the very specific flavor of Knox's unease—the kind that comes from leaving someone vulnerable in the care of something dangerous and not knowing whether the danger is real or imagined. "That is a demon who has a contractual claim on your future."
"Which is basically a familiar."
"It is not basically a familiar, Newt."
