Chapter 17 Knox
The restaurant is three blocks from The Big Apple Stadium and completely unremarkable.
Unremarkable in this part of Midtown means good light and bad acoustics and tables close enough together that the general noise of twenty simultaneous conversations provides better cover than any private booth.
I've been in the corner seat for forty minutes.
My coffee is half-finished. I haven't looked at my phone.
River Silver chose well. The table he picked has its back to the wall and a sightline to the door, the protective older brother instinct is something I like about him.
He's in a navy jacket, his arm in the soft brace I last saw on him from security footage three weeks ago, the same arm, not healed yet, which explains why he's here having lunch instead of in the locker room two hours before a game.
He's talking.
She's laughing.
Her head tips back slightly, her hand coming down flat on the table beside her coffee cup. It's unguarded, and it's aimed at her brother, and it does something to me that I don't examine.
The crutches are propped against the wall beside her chair. She's wearing a navy sweater and her hair loose. Every image I have of her except the halo of dark hair against the pillow in the hospital, her hair is tied up in a ponytail.
I look at everything that matters.
The crutch positioning is on the right side, slightly angled, which means she favors the right regardless of which knee is injured.
I know that’s a compensation pattern, probably unconscious.
The way she holds her coffee cup with both hands.
The way she dresses casually. Which is surprising because in January she was running in my club, wearing a red mask, her shoes in her hand and looked anything but the person she looks now.
She has two versions.
Both are real.
River says something, and she shakes her head, and whatever the disagreement is, River solves it in under ten seconds and Remi points at him with one finger and then concedes the point with a small shrug that's mostly neck.
She does that, the neck shrug. I've seen her do it eleven times in the past forty minutes.
It's not quite a shrug, it's more of a tipping.
Like she's considering refusal and then letting it fall.
A waiter brings their order.
I watch her eat, the way the fork goes into her mouth and she savors the food. I could feed her.
I could do anything. I’m learning everyday what my omega needs because soon the day will come.
I already know how she takes her coffee and which side she sleeps on. I also know the sound she makes when she's crying quietly and doesn't want to be heard. Those times, I’ll hold her.
She tips her head back and laughs again, and the waiter passing my table straightens himself as if he's been distracted.
I look back at my coffee.
Three more weeks of this. That's the operational timeline. Remi Silver in my brother's apartment, in my city, three kilometers from my house. My brother with his point-per-game average and his absolute conviction that the charming option is always the correct option.
I take a sip of the coffee.
I want her now, but I can’t ruin Steele’s glory. If I take her now, the Scorpions will fail.
But she will be mine.
Later that evening, I’m at The Big Apple Stadium. It holds twenty thousand people, which is nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight more than I want in this building tonight.
The noise hits at the concourse level. It feels more like a physical pressure, but crowd-warmth and the bass rumble of twenty thousand bodies all doing the same thing, which is believing that their team is going to win this game and that believing is all that matters.
I know that.
The arena smells of ice-cold air and beer and hot salted pretzels and the scent of competitive adrenaline that large gatherings of alpha-adjacent sports crowds produce, which is not subtle.
I've been to one hockey game before tonight.
I went because Steele was playing and because it seemed like the kind of thing a brother does, and I spent most of it researching the zoning implications of the east wing expansion and watching Steele score two goals with the effortlessness that makes me understand, in an abstract way, why twenty thousand people are in this building instead of somewhere quieter.
Tonight I'm watching someone else.
She's four rows down from the glass, second from the aisle, her right leg extended at the careful angle the brace requires.
River is beside her, also in civilian clothes, his arm in its brace, both of them an injury report made visible.
The seat to her left is empty and the gap means she can turn that direction without touching a stranger's knees.
I'm two rows directly behind her.
The period hasn't started.
The warm-up ice is occupied, Scorpions and Bears moving in their orbits, the screech and spray of hard stops, the crack-crack-crack of sticks on pucks in the practice-shot rotation.
Steele skates by. I watch him skate because I’ve been doing this since he was four years old.
He's my brother, he's good at this, I'm proud of him the way I'm proud of most things I had a hand in building.
But he's also the brother who went home to an apartment where she's sleeping, and this morning he woke up and probably made her coffee.
The horn sounds.
The players clear the ice and the game starts with a wall of sound that starts in the upper deck and crashes down like a bad weather event. Twenty thousand people saying this is ours on a single collective exhale.
The Bears come out fast.
Jetson James wins the opening face-off clean and swings it back to his brother, Jenson, on the left side, and the first shift is all New York, all pressure, skating hard into the Scorpions zone and testing Keane's angles.
Keane is the backup goalie, since Milton has been out with a shoulder injury since last week.
He reads the first two shots and the crowd swells against its own energy, building.
She's watching.
Remi…
I can't fully see her face from this angle, but her attention is readable. She's leaning forward slightly, her weight on her left hip, her hands in her lap. She watches the ice the way she would watch a competitor's warm-up.
The Bears, Lucas Hilton, right wing, secures a deflection that Vonn never had a clean angle on. The puck changes direction twice before it's back to Hilton and in the net and the Bear fans in the building go up like kindling.
Bears score first.
Hilton does one stride of celebration before something hits his left leg and he goes down.
The crowd goes wild.
The building shifts from jubilation into uncertainty, and then the medical staff are on the ice and Hilton is helped off, and for the next four minutes the Bears play like they're skating for him.
Three to one, Bears, at the end of the first.
She doesn't move during the intermission. River gets up for concessions and comes back with something warm in a cup that she takes with both hands, and for a moment she's alone in the row and her head turns. Slightly. Just slightly left, scanning the rows above her on the angle.
I'm already looking at the ice.
When River returns, the second period starts and the Scorpions' adjustment is immediate.
Julius Keane pulls them tight, the defensive pairs are closer, and then Steele finds the lane off a Malcolm Evans face-off win.
He takes the puck wide, cutting back inside the right defenseman with two strides and putting it high on the blocker side where their goalie had no answer.
Three to two.
The building splits. Half the crowd is up, half seated, but she's not up.
Kane Moretti ties it.
Steven sets it up, threading the puck through traffic with a pass that looks irresponsible until it works.
Moretti puts it home on the move without breaking stride and the Scorpions bench empties onto the ice in celebration.
Crew is the last one in as always, getting there after the fact with a gloved hand to the back of Moretti's helmet.
Three all.
The Bears answer. Elijah Jackson, on the power play after Korbin Brooks takes a high-sticking call, puts one five-hole, and that's four-three to the Bears.
The third period starts with twelve thousand New York fans convinced they've got this and eight thousand Scorpions fans in traveling shirts convinced the same thing from the other direction.
The noise presses into the body from all directions and makes the brain work harder just to process single thoughts.
My eyes are on her, except for the moments when Steele has the puck and muscle memory wins.
Three minutes left.
Crew Banks, carrying from the left circle, releases what should be a defensive clear, and it goes in. Long shot. Fluky geometry, the puck catching the post and banking in off Vaughn's back pad. Vaughn doesn't even turn for a beat. He doesn't know it's in until the red light flashes.
Four all.
The building breathes with twenty thousand people at once, the cross-current of roars and groans. She's still not standing, but she is gripping the armrest of her seat with one hand and leaning forward with her whole upper body.
Overtime.
I push my hand through my hair and wait.
Three-on-three hockey is another sport. The ice opens, the numbers change, and what was tactical becomes instinctual.
Steele gets the first chance, a breakaway off a giveaway, going in alone on Vaughn, and the building holds its breath for the duration of two strides, and then Vaughn's pad finds it and deflects it wide and twenty thousand people breathe out wrong.
Then Crew.
Two-on-one, Julius Keane on his right, and Crew makes the play he should never make. He dumps it to Keane in the slot instead of shooting, and Keane puts it in the top corner so cleanly that the net barely moves.
Five to four. Scorpions.
The arena comes alive.
Twenty thousand are on their feet. The Scorpions bench empties.
Steele buried under it, Crew arriving last. The Bear fans are shocked into silence.
The Scorpions fans are loud. Every person in my row stands, pressing toward the glass in the collective forward gravity of people who've just witnessed something that cost them two and a half hours of belief to see happen.
River stands.
Remi stays seated with both hands in her lap and her face turned toward the ice, and the standing crowd is a wall around her.
She turns her head, looking for something. Her head moves away from the ice, searching the rows above. The careful movement of a person whose body knows there's something in the room before her brain has caught up.
Her eyes find me.
In a building full of twenty thousand people, in the noise and the celebration and the standing crowd, in the two seconds between Keane's goal and the moment River realizes she's not beside him.
Her eyes find me.
And she knows.
Not my name. Not what I am to Steele, to Isabella, to the structure of her current life. Just a man who is looking at her.
The recognition doesn't arrive from memory but from below it, from the part of her that registered my scent since the Club.
I don't look away.
She doesn't look away.
Nineteen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight people are still making noise, and her brother is still looking at the ice, and everything in between us is exactly as it was when she said, “please take me.”
I hold her gaze.
I let her see her alpha.