Chapter 14 Knox
The stairwell on the fourth floor of Vanderbilt University Medical Center has a window that looks out over the parked cars, and the fluorescent tube on the landing has been flickering since the second week. And it is getting on my nerves.
I check my watch.
Thirty-four minutes.
The routine I’m now in is to wait ten minutes after the last visible visitor exits. Just enough time for the room to go quiet, for the nurses' shift handover to move focus to the east wing, for the corridor outside her door to clear to the one-person traffic of a normal Tuesday night.
I've run it exactly this way for over three weeks and I've had the timing right every time except the nights when River Silver stays until the small hours, which are common enough that I've built in a contingent route.
My phone has two messages from Marco I haven't answered and one from Dante that can wait until morning. Dante has handled whatever is happening with my shipment of speciality liquor.
I check my watch again.
Thirty-five minutes.
I push the fourth-floor door open without a sound.
The nurses' station is to the left; two staff, both oriented away.
The corridor to the right runs toward the window at the far end, with her room at the third door.
I stay close to the wall and move at an unhurried, purposeful pace, and I reach her door and put my hand flat against the frame.
The past two nights, she stirred.
Not so alert that it would have required me to speak, to explain, to suddenly become a person who exists in her story rather than at its edge.
Just a softening of her breathing and a shift of her head on the pillow, and once, two nights ago, her fingers tightening around mine in a reflex so involuntary that I'm certain she'll remember nothing of it.
I left my scent both times. Not only because I sat long enough for it to settle into the room and into her skin and into whatever part of her nervous system is working, but because I rubbed my cheek against hers and against the blanket I left her.
She’s awake and she kept it.
I registered that on the second night when the blanket was pulled to her chin, her hands in the fabric, and an iron bar tightened around my lungs.
I push the door open.
And stand there.
A man occupies the bed.
I stare at him for a full four seconds.
Then I walk to the nurses' station. No longer hiding. I need to know where my omega is.
The nurse behind the counter looks up. She’s in her mid-forties, short hair, looks like she made her peace with this shift two hours ago.
"I'm looking for Remi Silver," I say. "She was in room fourteen."
"Room fourteen was reassigned this afternoon."
"And where is Miss Silver?"
She doesn't look at the computer. "I'm not able to share patient information."
"Where did she go?"
"Sir—"
"I'm her alpha."
The words land in the corridor and stay there.
"Where is she? I need the address."
The nurse looks at me and squares her shoulders.
"That would be hard to arrange, sir," she says, very calmly.
I wait.
"Her alphas took her home earlier today." She arches an eyebrow.
Bloody beta.
The building hums with the sound of the aircon. The flicker of the fluorescent light. Somewhere down the corridor, a cart wheels over an uneven tile.
Alphas.
Something comes out of my mouth that may be thank you and may be nothing, and then the corridor is behind me and the elevator is in front of me and I don’t wait for the elevator because I can't stand still. And I am sure I’m about to throw up.
The stairwell door opens and I'm down three flights before I've made a decision about any of it.
Her alphas.
The plural is a weight. Not alpha. Alphas. Is it on her file? Somewhere in a database, Remi Silver belongs to a pack.
It's not true.
She doesn't have alphas.
She doesn't have a pack.
My car is on level two of the parking structure.
I'm sitting in it before my thoughts have caught up. I hit Marco's name on the car’s hand-free system.
“Yes boss.” he answers.
"I need you to find out where Remi Silver is staying.” I pause a beat. "The figure skater. She was in Vanderbilt Medical. She's been discharged. Find wherever she's been taken and call me."
A pause. Marco is smart enough not to ask questions. "How soon?"
"Now."
I start the car, on autopilot, and then I'm on the street, driving without thinking about where I'm going. I want to go to her, but until I know. Home it is.
The drive takes eighteen minutes.
I park. Walk up the driveway.
The house is lit downstairs.
Isabella.
She arrived back from Italy yesterday. She visited our parents at the house they bought when father retired from US operations, though retired is a generous word for what that transition was.
Isabella mentioned over dinner last night that she's thinking more seriously about the move herself.
I know she wants a life where I'm not three hallways away keeping count of her visitors.
I acknowledged it. I don't remember what I said.
She's on the couch when I walk in, her legs tucked under her, a glass of prosecco on the table, something on her laptop that she closes when she hears the door.
Her hair is down. She looks like our mother in good light, which is a fact I've never said aloud to her because it would break something I don't have the tools to fix.
"You're late," she says. Not accusatory. Observational. Isabella is too observational sometimes.
I sit in the armchair. Don't take my jacket off. And put my elbows on my knees and look at nothing for a moment.
I'm aware that Isabella is watching me with an expression I haven't seen from her in several years. Unguarded. Alert. She's dropped the performance she runs for my benefit and is just watching me.
"Knox."
"She's been moved," I say. "Remi. She was discharged from Vanderbilt today."
"Okay." Isabella's voice is careful. Level. But that’s the omega-calm of someone who has assessed the room. "Where did she go?"
“She’s my omega, Isabella. She can’t have alphas.”
“What?”
I sigh. “They said she left the hospital with her alphas. But she’s mine.”
The one I tracked across two countries, whose scent lived under my skin for a month before I found its source, whose name I didn't know until she was already falling on the Olympic ice and I was at the boards with my hands white on the railing and nothing, absolutely nothing I could do from that side of the glass.
And now she's in someone else's apartment, in someone else's pack, and her file at Vanderbilt Medical says it's legitimate.
I press the heel of my hand into my sternum. Breathe. The concrete feeling behind it doesn't shift.
"Okay," Isabella says, with a finality that means she knows what to do. She's already reaching for her phone. "Let me handle this."
"Isabella—"
"I have her number." Matter-of-fact. "We trained alongside each other for four months.
I'll call her." She glances at me over the phone, and there's something in her eyes I recognize from every chess game I taught her when she was a teenager.
She has the look of someone who saw the move six turns ago and has been waiting for the board to catch up. "Just listen."
She dials.
Four rings.
Five.
Then Remi's voice, which is so small and real through the speaker that something in my chest hurts just hearing it.
Isabella's face changes as she speaks. I’ve seen the many faces she has. The cold to the professional warmth she deploys for the rinkside cameras, but this version has something genuine underneath it I like.
"Remi! It's Bella." A pause. "No, no, I'm so sorry, I know. I've been thinking about you. How are you feeling?"
She listens, nods once, her eyes cutting to me and back.
“I've got this,” she mouths.
"I'm back in Nashville," she says. "I stayed with my parents in Italy for a couple of nights after the Games.
It was..." A soft exhale. "It was good to see them.
But I'm back now." She shifts, drawing one knee up on the couch, her posture relaxing into the call.
"I was wondering if you'd fancy meeting up?
Just coffee. Nothing complicated. I know you're probably—" She stops, listening.
Her smile widens. "You do? Wonderful. There's a place downtown I love—"
She pauses.
"No, not at all. That's perfect." A shorter pause. "Ten o'clock?" She looks at me and nods once.
Confirmed.
She hangs up and places the phone on the cushion beside her. Reaches for her prosecco as if none of that required any effort.
"Remi can't travel far," Isabella says, studying the glass. "Her knee is still bad. So I'm meeting her at the coffee shop near where she's staying." She glances at me. "The Stave. On Twelfth. Which is the street Steele lives on."
Steele.
I've known this for ten seconds, and it's already rearranging something in my chest.
Isabella watches me absorb it and says nothing, because she is, occasionally, capable of extraordinary restraint.
The fire in the grate ticks.
The room smells of prosecco and her perfume and the familiar warmth of a home I've never once managed to take for granted.
I stand.
I cross to the couch and press my mouth to the top of her head. It’s brief, but real, the way I used to when she was young and she'd done something right and I had no other language for it.
"You're a good Olivetti," I tell her.
She's smiling.
"I know," she says. "Go to bed, Knox. She's not going anywhere, but…” She shows me her gold medal. “You owe me an apartment."