Chapter 6 Crew
She smells like a distillery that moonlights as a dessert.
That's the thought my brain hands me in the half-second between stepping into the darkened room and processing the reality of her. Bourbon and chocolate with a citrus thread underneath that cuts through the ambient pheromone fog of the previous occupants like a blade.
And it's not perfume or a product.
We came to let off steam, not to chase an omega through the maze. But her scent is doing something primal, and it lands in my alpha like the drop of a starting horn.
Steele reaches her first.
He comes in from behind, one hand circling her waist, his chest solid against her back. Her breath punches out, but she doesn't fight it. Her hands hit the wall, bracing, and her head drops forward, and Steele lowers his mouth to the curve of her shoulder and inhales.
The sound he makes is not one I've heard from him on a hockey rink.
My hands go to the hedge, flanking them both. The manicured maze is cold enough to register even through my palm, and I press into it and stay there, measuring if we should do this or if that choice is gone and it's too late. I'm trying to figure out which side of it I'm standing on.
The omega doesn't move. She holds herself absolutely still, the way people do when the thing they were bracing for actually arrives and they don't know if their knees will hold.
"Easy." Steele's voice is low against her shoulder.
Her exhale comes out trembling.
He pulls back just enough to look at her, but it's hard to see enough because of the red mask. The shape of her face is familiar. Her eyes are too dark to see in the moonlight. She has loose dark strands of hair at her neck.
She smells so good. Not a match, which would be heaven, but there is compatibility.
Steele looks at me, and there's nothing casual in his expression whatsoever.
Up close, the scent deepens. The orange is warmer than I clocked inside the club; now it is layered into the chocolate and bourbon. It's only her I smell; inside was a collection of scents. My alpha doesn't negotiate with it. My alpha just runs completely still, the way it does before it commits.
I press my mouth to the angle where her neck meets her shoulder and breathe her in through my nose, slow and thorough, my lips not quite making contact.
The sound she makes travels directly from my ears to somewhere lower, skipping the part of my brain that makes sensible decisions.
"Show us your face," Steele says, surprising me.
She shakes her head.
He pulls back to look at her. "No?"
"No." Her voice is steady. Steadier than I expected, given that she's pressed between two masked alphas in a stone room under a castle, and her breathing is not steady at all.
Steele glances at me. I straighten slightly.
"You signed up for everything?" I ask.
A pause. The single syllable she's about to give us hangs in the air a beat too long, and I think she's going to quit, and then her chin moves. Down, up. One small, deliberate nod.
"Good," Steele says. "Then we're going to fuck you."
The word lands in the room like a stone dropped into water, and her breath breaks, and she says. "Please."
Steele moves, carrying her to a stone wall at the far end of the maze. A place where the cameras don't turn to, unless someone deliberately chooses.
He turns her in one smooth motion, hand at her waist, spinning her so her back hits the stone wall and he's in her space with his forearm braced above her shoulder and his face inches from hers. The red mask stares back at him, and for a second they just breathe.
She bites her lip, and I'm sure she is trying to suppress a smile.
"God," he says, low and almost private, his nose grazing her jawline. "The way you smell." His lips touch the edge of the mask, then drop lower, running along her jaw to her throat. "It's been driving us insane since we walked in. Do you know that?"
She doesn't answer.
"Do I smell good to you?" he asks against her skin.
Her head tips back against the wall, and her hands, which have been flat at her sides, flex once, searching and uncertain, and then she says, "I take scent repellents." A pause. Her chin drops as if the admission costs something. "And heat suppressants."
Steele's exhale is a controlled thing.
"That explains it," he says, not moving. "But it doesn't change it."
He spins her away from the wall, finds her wrists, both of them, and lifts them, pressing them above her head. His right hand holds them there against the cold stone, the phoenix tattoo across his thumb and index finger lit orange from the sconce above.
He leaves them there as he whispers in her ear.
Her eyes raise to his hand. To the ink across the thumb and index finger. She stares at it for one second. Two.
Then Steele ducks his head to her neck, and her eyes close, and whatever she was computing gets overridden by sensation.
My hands circle her waist, and I catch the tremor that runs through her when she registers the new contact.
Her skin is warm at her collarbone when I brush the strap of her dress aside.
And there is a jump in her pulse when my mouth finds the junction of her neck and shoulder.
The spot just above the tendon where the scent gland sits.
She might wear repellents, but it's there.
My teeth graze her skin, not hard. Just a warning. She makes a noise that compresses my chest.
Steele murmurs against her throat, low and proprietary, and she arches slightly off the wall.
"You've never done this before," I say against her collarbone.
"Don't ask me questions," she breathes.
"That wasn't a question."
Steele lifts his head. His gray eyes finding mine over her shoulder. I know what he's asking.
I meet her eyes behind the mask. In the dim light, they look dark, almost black. "Can you take both of us, Omega?"
Her lips part. The question sits in the air between us, frank and heavy, and her chin tips down and her breathing goes ragged, and then she groans and the sound of it hits me like a body check I didn't see coming.
My thumb hooks under her jaw, tilts her face up, and I'm two seconds from kissing her when Steele's phone vibrates.
Loud. Hard. The urgent buzz of a notification.
"Fuck!" Steele's hand leaves the wall. The sound of him pulling the phone from his jacket is deafening in the cold air. A pause, two seconds, and then his exhale comes out slow and flat, which is Steele's version of controlled alarm.
He turns the screen toward me.
Anonymous: Paps outside the gates. Two cars. Someone tipped them off. Get out.
A second message loads as I read the first.
Anonymous: Marilyn's going to find out if you don't move now.
Marilyn Mansfield takes a detailed and personal interest in where her players are on Saturday nights. If a paparazzo tip gets back to her before we're out of this building, the conversation that follows will be the kind that ends careers and begins contractual addendums.
The omega is breathing fast against the wall, her wrists loose where Steele released them. Her hands have come down to grip the sides of her dress.
"Sorry," Steele says.
"No way. Please."
Steele turns her face toward him, tips her chin up, and presses his mouth to hers. It's hard, brief, and her exhale is a sound I will not examine later tonight because examining it will undo me completely.
He steps back.
I pull away from the wall. My hands leave the stone.
The cold imprint of it stays in my palms like a measure of what I didn't do, and I turn her face with two fingers under her jaw and kiss her once, harder than I meant to, darker than I should have, my thumb at her pulse point, and she makes a sound against my mouth that will stay forever in my brain.
I pull back.
"Go home." The alpha bleeds through my voice, and I let it, because the alternative is saying something worse. "Get a car. Now."
She stares at me from behind the red mask.
I step back. Steele is already heading out of the maze.
Within five minutes, we're through the corridor and up the service stairs, through the side entrance, out into the cold Cumberland-damp of a Nashville night. The river sound drops away behind us as we move fast through the treeline toward the car.
Neither of us speaks until the estate gates are behind us.
"That was close," Steele says.
"Yeah."
"Paps still out front?"
"Probably."
The dark road unreels ahead, limestone hedges closing in on both sides, and the peacefulness between us has a different quality than the usual kind. It's the silence of two men who just stopped something that didn't really want it to be stopped.
"Her scent," Steele says.
"Don't."
"It was Remi, Crew. That's why it became more. That's why it turned into more than a drink." He turns to me. "She was staring at my tattoo."
I take a breath. "She knew it was us. For the first time, she smelled like ours. And she was begging us to take her. It was the only way River wouldn't find out."
The orange and chocolate and bourbon is still in my jacket and on my hands and my mouth, and my thumb still has the memory of her pulse, and somewhere in the Labyrinth, a girl in a red mask is standing at the wall with her wrists at her sides, wondering if the two alphas who disappeared were her brother's best friends.
"We give her until after the Olympics, Crew, and then she's ours."
The road straightens.
I don't say anything because there is nothing to say that River Silver will want to hear.