Chapter 11 Knox
Three Weeks later - Nashville
The hallway empties by ten.
Beck and his omega, Emmie, leave first. His hand on her back, protective. River comes out next. He stands for a long moment at the door with his hand on the frame, looking back at the bed through the glass partition with an expression he'll probably never show at a hockey rink.
Nikki is the last to leave. She pauses at the nurses' station to say something I don't hear, and then she's gone, and the corridor settles into the sound of a hospital. Monitors. A distant cart. The muffled conversation of a station two floors up traveling through the ventilation.
I wait for another ten minutes.
Then I go in, just as I have since the day she was airlifted back to the USA.
The room smells of antiseptic, a space that has been scrubbed of everything real. But underneath it, faint as a signal through interference, she's still there. Bourbon, chocolate, and orange.
The suppressants are gone and the scent repellent with them, and her biology is doing what biology does when it's no longer being managed. It breathes quietly, yet unevenly, but it lives.
The chair beside the bed is still warm. I don't use it.
I sit on the edge of the bed instead, on the side opposite her injured knee, where there's space between her hip and the railing.
She's so small. I clocked this weeks ago in the dark of The Obsidian Club, when her back was first pressed to my chest, but it registers differently in a hospital bed under fluorescent light with monitors tracking the slow rhythm of her vitals.
The monitors tick on.
I put my hand over hers on the coverlet.
My thumb moves once across her knuckles, and I leave it there, and I don't examine what I'm doing with any precision because examination is not what this moment requires.
After a while, I lower the railing on my side and lie down.
It's narrow. I'm not a narrow person. But she's close to the far side, and there's just enough room if I angle my shoulder behind hers, and when I do her back contacts my chest. Her hair is against my jaw and her scent fills the six inches of air between us, and I, an alpha who has been running on low-frequency static since the club, purr.
Not silent, but quiet. Enough for her to hear and feel me, enough to help her get better. To understand that there is an alpha who… An alpha who needs her.
I breathe her in.
Her perfume is the same combination as mine, nobody else's. I've been reconstructing it from memory since the night she walked into The Obsidian Club, before she entered the Labyrinth, and memory is an unreliable instrument. It flattens. It loses ground.
I told myself the reconstruction was the thing, that I'd built something from nothing, that a man in his thirties who has run an omega-alpha club for fourteen years and never once found his own match doesn't find it in a masked omega who disappears out of an eight-foot window on an injured knee.
I told myself that for weeks.
Then Isabella called me at my hotel in Milan before I went to watch her skate, telling me, "Watch the American. The one with dark hair. Red practice jacket. Her name is Remi."
I wasn't going to watch her. I was going to rest before Isabella skated, but I did go.
And I knew before Remi skated past the VIP rail at full speed.
The suppressants didn't matter anymore, and the repellent didn't matter anymore, and fourteen years of clinical detachment didn't matter, because her scent hit me at close range and my alpha didn't negotiate with it.
My alpha went so still that I thought I'd re-designated as a beta.
The same way it went still when she walked past me in The Obsidian Club.
The same way it went still when Isabella came home from training with a scent on her jacket that made me stand in the kitchen doorway and forget what I was doing.
I'd asked Isabella about the scent three days after the club, when it had faded from the jacket and I was still finding it in rooms she'd been in.
On chairs, in the fabric of the house. She'd been making coffee, moving through the kitchen with the unconscious grace of someone who has trained their body to a high level for so long that even domestic tasks look like choreography.
The scent, I said, from the doorway. "Where did it come from? I need a name."
She turned around, and the expression on her face was not what I expected.
She laughed with a warmth that sat somewhere between finally and I've been waiting for you to ask that.
She's gone, Isabella said. Now you know how it feels, Knox.
I didn't speak.
Now you know how it feels to be kept from something.
She set down her cup. I knew you smelled her on me.
I've known for weeks. I gave her the card because she was yours, because I knew you could smell it, even if you couldn't admit it yet.
I was so angry at you for everything you've kept from me that I wanted you to know exactly what it's like to have someone else decide what you can and cannot have.
The kitchen was very quiet.
And now she's gone, Isabella said. Softer. I'm sorry, Knox. I don't regret it entirely. But I'm sorry for the way.
I stood in the doorway and understood that I had done to Isabella what I feared most. I had managed her risks and access and posted guardrails at the edges of her life. I had told myself this was protection, and it was, but it was also a cage, and she had been living in it for six years.
And this was how she picked the lock.
She's always been smarter than I thought.
I reach out now and push a strand of dark hair from Remi's face. The monitor tracks her pulse. It's slow, but climbing.
"I never believed in this," I tell her. "For the record. Scent matches and mates and the whole idea of destined biology. Yet, I've run a club built on the principle for over a decade, and I've always been the person in the room who understands the mechanism and doesn't take part in the experience."
Her hand is warm beneath mine.
"Yet, here I am," I say, "I turned into an alpha who drove to the hospital from the airport, and I've waited in the corridor every night for everyone to leave. It's not what I wanted."
The monitor ticks on.
"You landed your double axel," I tell her. "I watched it. The landing was clean. The step sequence was—" I stop.
Watching her on that ice with everything she was carrying was one of the more extraordinary things I've put my eyes on, and I don't have the right delivery system for that sentence and she can't hear me anyway, so I close my mouth and stay there.
My phone vibrates.
Isabella Olivetti. Nine hours ahead, which makes it seven in the morning in Milan, which means she's either just woken up or hasn't slept.
"Tell me," I say.
She's crying. Not quietly. Isabella has done nothing in silence since she was two. But this isn’t falling apart crying.
"Who hurt you?" I ask. "Right now. Name them."
"You did," she says. "But I hurt you too." A ragged breath. "I'm sorry, Knox. I never meant to hurt you."
"Yes, you did."
"Okay," Isabella says. "I did. But it wasn't supposed to—" She stops, starts over, and I can hear the shift in her voice that means she's decided to say the real thing. "I have to tell you something."
"Go on."
"It's Remi Silver. The girl. The scent." A pause. "The skater who was hurt at the Olympics. The one I asked you to go and watch. That's who you smell. That's who I gave the card to. That's who came to the club."
The light outside the room flickers.
"I know," I say.
"You—" She pauses. "You know?"
"Thank you," I say, "for being honest."
"Knox." Her voice has changed. "Did you follow her from Italy?"
I look at Remi's profile. Dark hair loose against the pillow. The red glow of monitors reflected in the glass partition.
"Sorry, but yes," I say.
"I won gold yesterday," she states. "In case you wanted to know."
The sting behind my eyes sharpens. "I know," I say. "I watched the highlights on my phone in the corridor for four hours. You were—" I stop. Search for the word. "You were brilliant, Isabella. I’m sorry I wasn’t there."
A pause.
"You still watched me," she murmurs.
"I'm always watching you."
A deep breath comes through the speaker. "Thank you. Love you.”
“Love you too.” I disconnect.
For a moment I sit with the phone in my hand while the monitor beeps, then I lean over Remi and press my lips to her forehead, just above the hairline. I hold them there for one breath, and I straighten.
"I'll be back tomorrow," I tell her.
When I leave, the corridor is muted. This time I leave by the elevator, which takes me down to the ground floor and my car waiting at the curb.
I sit in the seat and stare ahead, wondering what possesses me to do this every night.
But I'm not being a stalker. I'm keeping vigil, and I intend to continue.