Chapter 9 Remi
Italy - Two weeks later
The warm-up rink smells of sweat and Zamboni exhaust fumes.
My knee does not care about this.
My knee has a very firm and non-negotiable opinion about the past few months, and that opinion is: enough.
I groan. A dull pressure behind the kneecap that flares when I take weight on an outside edge, but managed with the ruthless physical self-deception that makes elite athletes and makes them miserable in equal measure, is getting worse.
I bend over the boards and breathe.
But it's not nausea from the knee. It's the other kind.
River called two days ago. His voice had the quality it gets when he's delivering bad news, when he's trying to be gentle, and he is not built for gentleness. I expected what he said. "Sorry Remi, I can't make it to Italy."
That was the first thing that hurt, the way a blade would go into your stomach. Clean entry, brutal stop. But nothing prepared me for being told that Crew and Steele have an omega. She's been living with them for two weeks, he thinks. Apparently, Crew and Steele couldn't remember.
Too busy fucking her to remember the date she moved in.
I've been sick since.
They have someone. An omega. She's staying with them. I thought… I thought they wanted me.
I'm not sad. I want to be very clear to myself about that. I'm not heartbroken, because to be heartbroken you have to have had a heart involved, and what happened in that maze was three things mixed together. Adrenaline, stupid omega biology, and desperation.
It was not anything.
It was not the beginning of something.
Except my body keeps replaying it anyway, the way it replays a failed jump. Not for comfort but for analysis, hunting the point of error, the moment where the decision went wrong.
His arm around my waist, solid as a wall.
The way I stopped running, not because he caught me, but because part of me had been running toward him.
The question he asked, "Can you take both of us, omega?
" And the sound I made, which I will not think about.
Nor his fingers. The heat of it. Then his voice when he said, "Don't move. I'll be back in two minutes."
His hand on my chin, tilting my face up, eyes on mine through the mask, as if the instruction was a kindness and not a dismissal.
The door closes after him. The cold air settles back into the space where he'd been standing, and me, still there, still waiting, like some version of myself I don't recognize.
But the second man wasn't Steele.
She called out, Knox.
Maybe he came back and saw me with Knox, went home, and he and Crew put a blonde omega in their apartment.
I'm an idiot.
I've turned this over enough times to have identified the worst part.
I'm not angry with Steele and Crew for leaving.
I'm angry with myself for staying. But with my back pressed against the wall, my body was so flooded with whatever those two men had done to my nervous system that it didn't occur to me to leave.
It didn't occur to me that once they realized it was me, they would choose my brother.
The nausea surges. I breathe through my nose until it passes.
Uncle Beck arrives the day after tomorrow; he'll know what I need.
He'll sit somewhere in this arena with his hands clasped in his lap, with the posture of a man who has been watching me compete since I was nine years old and has never fully made peace with the anxiety of it.
He'll tell me to eat something. Nikki will tell me to eat something.
I had half a banana two hours ago and my body has made exactly clear what it thought of that.
Fine. I don't need food. I only need to get through four minutes and thirty-two seconds of Swan Lake without my knee buckling or my brain doing what it's currently doing, which is cycling through the memory of a hedge maze, a dead end, and an arm around my waist, before he was called away by a female.
I push off the boards and skate a slow lap.
The warm-up ice is half-empty this hour. Two skaters do run-throughs at the far end, another doing footwork patterns near the boards, her coach calling corrections in rapid Italian. My blade finds its edge automatically, the muscle memory the most disciplined of anything else in my body.
On the ice, I'm not the version of myself who looked for the men who left. Nor the woman who jumped out of the window when the alpha with the same tattoo was called away by a woman, no less.
His scent, though…
"Stop it. You need to focus." I push off and skate.
On the ice, I have to be Remi Silver, and Remi Silver lands triple axels.
I'm on my third lap when I hear the boards knock.
Isabella is leaning against them in her training jacket, ponytail over one shoulder, watching me with a strange look on her face. It normally means she already knows something and is waiting to see if you'll tell her yourself.
I skate over.
"It's been a while."
I nod. "I had to see a specialist for my knee in New York before we flew to Italy. Had an injection which was the worst fucking pain I've endured in my life."
"You went," she says.
"Where? New York?"
"No. The Obsidian Club."
"Yeah. I went."
She hums, tilting her head. "And?"
I look at the ice for a moment. The Italian coach's voice carries across the rink. Somewhere above us the building creaks in the cold.
"It was everything you said it would be," I say. "And it was a complete disaster."
Isabella says nothing. She waits.
This is the thing about Isabella Olivetti. She has more patience than anyone I've ever met. She waits like a surgeon waits. She will stand there until you hand her exactly what she came for.
"All I've ever wanted," I say, and I hate how it sounds coming out, "is Steele Oliver and Crew Banks. Since I was probably old enough to know what wanting meant. They play for the Scorpions. They're my brother's best friends." I look at her. "If you have a brother, you must know how that is."
Something moves across Isabella's face. "I have two," she says. "One of them is here to watch me compete. I'll introduce you once I have a gold medal around my neck." She bites her lip.
I try to smile. It doesn't quite land.
"He was there," I say. "At the club. Steele and Crew both of them.
And Steele. Well, he came back. After the maze.
He found me in the house and he…" I stop.
"I was an idiot, though. It wasn't Steele who came back.
" The words sit flat in the cold air. And I could tell her about the second man being called away.
About his scent, but tears sting my eyes.
"And now it's like I don't exist to Steele and Crew, and they've found an omega. River told me. She's living with them."
Isabella is very still.
"So that's the disaster that was The Obsidian Club.
" I swallow. "I went to get fucked. The two alphas I wanted were there, and I thought they'd choose me over River.
I thought I would get exactly what my body has apparently been screaming for years, and it turns out they were just passing time until something better came along. "
The Italian coach shouts a correction. Blades carve the far end of the ice.
"Steele Oliver," Isabella says.
"Yes."
"He was at the club."
"Isabella—"
"Steele Oliver was at The Obsidian Club." She says it the way you repeat a calculation that has come back wrong. Quiet. Precise. Her eyes have gone somewhere I can't follow.
"Yes," I say. "Why—"
"And the other man? Did he want you?"
I shake my head. "A woman called him away."
"Fuck!" She's already pushing off the boards, already turning away, her training jacket disappearing through the gate at the far end of the rink, and she doesn't look back, and she doesn't answer, and the door swings shut behind her.
I stand on the ice.
My knee throbs as my music starts.
Four minutes and thirty-two seconds of Swan Lake.
Nothing changed that Steele and Crew have an omega.
I'm not heartbroken.