Chapter 7 Knox
The phone sits facedown on the desk, and I leave it there.
The message has been sent. The number is clean.
I have a burner routed through three network hops that would take a competent investigator six hours to trace and an incompetent one never.
The press will be at the gates in under ten minutes.
And the hockey players will have about eight minutes before their anonymous Saturday night becomes a career problem.
Efficient.
I pour two fingers of Pappy Van Winkle and stand at the window that looks out over the estate's east wing, where the Labyrinth's service exits feed into the treeline. The Cumberland moves somewhere beyond the dark, and pulsing through the estate as it always has.
I had to do it. I know who wore those masks, and if they thought they could take my omega, they were sadly mistaken.
The omega was mine the moment she walked through that door.
I tracked her for fifty minutes from the shadows near the bar, cataloguing every detail.
From the way she adjusted the red mask six times and never got comfortable with it, to the precise tilt of her chin when she decided against the champagne, and the fact that she stood in front of the hunt screen with her weight slightly forward, like her body had already made up its mind about what she wanted and was waiting for the rest of her to catch up.
Bourbon and chocolate, and something citrus underneath. Orange.
Mine.
I clocked her scent from the moment she stepped into the room.
I know that scent. It's the one that's been living in my chest for the better part of two weeks, carried in on Isabella's training jacket, distilled into something obsessive by distance and imagination and the complete inability to find its source.
And now she is here. Mine.
And then Steele and Crew walked over to her as if they had some claim. For forty-five seconds I considered something far less clean than a press tip. But the press tip is cleaner. Less paperwork. And it has the considerable advantage of removing them without my name attached to anything.
My phone lights the desk surface from below.
I turn it over.
The security footage app loads to the grid of feeds.
I have twelve cameras across the estate and Labyrinth level, all night-vision, all time-stamped.
I pull up camera four, the service corridor, and watch two men in wolf masks move through the frame at speed, single-file, heads down.
One sandy-haired, one dark. They hit the side exit and they're gone; the door closing behind them with the finality of men who know they shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Good.
I switch to camera seven, the main Labyrinth floor, and scan for the girl.
Not there.
I pull camera two, then nine I work through the grid methodically, the way I do every problem, and I'm on camera eleven, the upper stairs corridor connecting the Labyrinth level to the main house, when I find her. She walked too far on the ground to reach the house entrance.
She's standing at the top of the stairwell, heels in one hand, clutch in the other, looking at two doors. The right door leads to the street-side exit. The left door leads into the old house.
My thumb stops scrolling.
She tries the right door. Both doors are locked via a timed system, which I set to restrict access like this.
She tries the handle again.
Then she looks at the left door and I smile when she opens it and walks into my home.
I set down the bourbon.
The portraits in the main house corridor watch me pass with their familiar dead-eyed detachment as I move through the entrance hall and down toward the east wing.
I don't rush. There's no need to rush. She's in my house, in the dark, with no idea of the layout, wearing no shoes and a scent-repellent that is doing approximately nothing to suppress what her body wants.
She can try every door in this wing, and she won't find an exit for another fifteen minutes.
I have time.
Her scent threads through the cold air of the corridor, faint because of the repellent, but not absent. The citrus note cuts through despite it, like a signal tuned specifically to mine. I follow it without hurrying, hands in my pockets, taking the east corridor.
The house amplifies everything. Every footstep. Every held breath.
And then I reach her.
Her breath catches a split second before she comes into view — a soft intake of air somewhere ahead, in the foyer where the chandelier hangs, she's standing under it, her back to me, her head moving as she scans the space for something that makes sense.
I retreat into the shadow of the archway.
She turns slowly, and even from here, even at this angle, her face lands somewhere behind my sternum.
She shouldn't be here. Girls with that quality of stillness, that precision in every movement, and that absolute physical discipline packed into a frame that small don't come to places like this.
They don't come to The Obsidian Club with cards that say where masks are worn and desires run free.
Except she did.
Her spine straightens, and she turns toward the corridor on the far side of the foyer, heading further into the house instead of back toward the exit. I let her go because the alternative is announcing myself now, and I have no interest in announcing myself.
I want her to be scared first.
Not because I need her fear. I don't. But because she came, because she wants it.
And I want to know what she does with it.
I've watched enough omegas in this house to know that fear and want are not the same thing, and most of them don't know that.
The interesting ones do. The interesting ones run toward the footsteps even when every sensible instinct is screaming the opposite.
I give her thirty seconds, then I follow.
My footsteps are deliberate now. Heavy. Unhurried. I know exactly where she is. I'm not chasing her yet because I don't need to.
She hears them.
There’s an intake of air from around the corner, and then the slap of bare feet on stone picks up. She's running. The sound of it moves fast.
Fast for someone who came into the club with a slight limp, and is now fleeing on an injured knee in the dark.
She rounds the far corner and I follow at a lengthened stride rather than a sprint, because there's only one door she can go through at the end of this corridor, and it leads to the study, and the study has one window and no other exit, and I've known this house since before I was old enough to have opinions about it.
Light filters under the study door. The window lets in the moonlight.
I give her eight seconds to catch her breath.
Then I open the door.
She's in the center of the room, turned toward me, her chest heaving, her eyes very wide and very green, behind the red mask.
The moonlight from the tall window cuts a pale strip across the floor between us, the chandelier above the desk unlit, and the room has the quality of something about to break.
She's looking for an exit.
I enter and close the door behind me.
She moves under the weight of instinct, or perhaps something smarter. Her hands come up, body angling toward the window.
I close the distance in two strides and find her waist from behind, pulling her back against my chest before she makes it two steps.
"Caught you."
“Oh my…” She swallows the rest, as if she's furious at herself for saying it.
She goes absolutely still.
My hand goes to her mouth. Her back presses into my chest and she's trembling yet warm. She smells of the thing I've been trying to name for two weeks.
Mine.
My mouth finds the curve of her ear. "Do you know what happens to little omegas who run from me?"
Her inhale is ragged behind my hand. She doesn't answer. Her body does, though. A shudder runs from her shoulders down, the way her weight tips back into mine by a fraction, involuntary.
I release her mouth slowly.
"Please," she whispers.
"Please what?"
A pause. A breath. "Please... take me."
I turn her, and she lets me. Her hands finding my jacket as I walk her backward until the desk stops her, her hips hitting the edge and her fingers tightening in my lapels.
Up close, the red mask covers only her upper face, and the lower half is parted lips I want to kiss, and a pulse jumping in her throat that my alpha wants to sink his teeth into.
She's looking at my hand.
At the ink.
The phoenix spanning my thumb and index finger. She's staring at it the way people stare at something that doesn't fit into the space they'd allocated for the evening.
"You want this," I say, against her jaw.
"I hate I want this," she breathes. "He'll kill me if he finds out."
My lips find the angle of her neck, and her exhale is catastrophic. "We can stop right now." She had to hear it, but it was hard to say.
"No. I want it anyway."
My hand slides up her thigh, pushing the hem of the dress higher. Slick coats her inner thighs. I slide my fingers through the wetness. "So fucking wet already."
"Knox!" Isabella's voice cuts through the house as if she's standing directly on the other side of the wall.
Every muscle in my body goes rigid.
"Where are you? I need you now."
The omega is still in my hands. She goes from desperate to alert in the space of a breath. Her head lifts, eyes bright behind the mask. "You should go."
I register the shift crossing her face, and I do not have time to interpret it because Isabella is still calling, and the urgency in her voice holds the register that means something has actually gone wrong.
"Stay here," I say, pulling back.
The omega stares at me.
"Don't move." I grip her chin lightly, tipping her face up. "I mean it. I'll be back in two minutes."
I step into the corridor and pull the door shut behind me. Isabella is in the east foyer, standing under the chandelier in her training jacket, phone in hand, wearing an expression I haven't seen on her since she was sixteen.
"What?" I say.
"I need a shower. And Dante's looking for you. He's dealing with something on the floor," she says. "There's a guest saying she lost something on the upper level, security can't find it, and they're about to call the police. If the police come to this address..."
"Fine." I'm already turning back. "Two minutes."
"Knox!"
"Two. Minutes."
I take the east corridor back at a pace that is not quite a run, push open the study door, and the room is empty. The window is open, curtains pulling in the night air, her scent already thin, already dissipating in the cold Cumberland draft moving through the gap.
She's gone.
The window is eight feet off the ground, yet she jumped. On an injured knee. She looked at the open window and decided the outside was preferable to waiting.
My fist lands on the desk.
The wood cracks.
I stand over the damage for a moment, the river-sound coming through the open window, the curtains moving, the empty room where she was just warm and trembling and mine, and I breathe. In. Out.
I know her scent.
I know the shape of her. The sound she makes. The quality of her stillness when she's frightened and wants it, anyway. I know the way she said I hate that I want this like wanting was something she'd been fighting for longer than tonight.
She'll come back.
They always do when the pull is real, when the biology is already talking.
The Obsidian Club has a way of becoming a necessity rather than a choice. She'll be back, and the next time Isabella won't be in the hallway. The next time there won't be a press tip waiting to be sent, or a club floor waiting to be managed.
Next time, I'll keep her.