Chapter 20 Remi
The apartment is empty, and the screen is bright, and I've been Googling for fifty-seven minutes.
I started with the obvious: Steele Oliver hockey.
The results are clean and plentiful. Nashville Scented Scorpions, forward, right wing, number seven.
Career stats, game highlights, a headshot where he looks like the kind of man who has been told he's attractive so many times he's stopped believing it means anything.
There's a Wikipedia page and an athletic-focused profile, and several interviews where he says nothing about his family.
None of it mentions a brother.
None of it mentions siblings of any kind. And Isabelle has admitted he is her brother. Strange when according to the internet, Steele Oliver is an only child.
I sit back on the couch with my laptop balanced on my lap and the t-shirt soft against my skin.
His t-shirt.
I put it on an hour ago without fully admitting why, took it from the pile he left at the café and held it against my face and then just... put it on.
I think about Isabella.
Isabella, who trained with me. Isabella, who gave me the card to the club. Isabella, who said she's Steele's sister.
Not Isabella Oliver.
Isabella Olivetti.
I type it in.
The results arrive like a door opening onto a room I didn't know was there. Which is so true, because before today I was only interested in her as competition.
I read.
Isabella Olivetti. Olympic gold medal figure skater. Current World Champion. Italian-American. Born in Nashville, Tennessee. Parents: Giancarlo and Isadora Olivetti, currently residing in Siena, Italy. Siblings: Steele Oliver (professional hockey player) and Knox Olivetti (entrepreneur).
Knox.
Knox Olivetti.
My hands are steady on the keyboard, which is a biological accomplishment given that the rest of me has just rearranged itself around his name.
I click on news articles and business profiles.
Check out a photograph from a Nashville business journal of a man in a dark suit with gray eyes and a jaw I traced with my gaze three hours ago across a coffee shop table.
Knox Olivetti, 32. Founder and owner of The Obsidian Club, Nashville's premier nightlife venue.
I laugh to myself. If only the press knew what happened in the lower levels. The place omegas and alphas come together.
The club Isabella gave me the card for. The club with the maze and the masks and the two men who chased me through a hedgerow in the dark and a third man who probably did it all before I nearly came apart in his hands.
His club.
I continue reading.
Recently expanded operations to include The Scarlett Lounge in Manhattan's Meatpacking District.
Did Isabella send me to her brother’s club on purpose?
I scroll further. A more recent article, dated three weeks ago:
Olivetti Entertainment Group has finalized the purchase of a third venue in Los Angeles, currently undergoing renovation. The property, formerly known as The Hemisphere, will reopen under its new name: The Silver.
The Silver.
I stare at the screen until the words swim.
He bought a nightclub and named it after me.
My knee is throbbing. The walk to The Stave and back was too much today. I know that, I knew it when I was doing it. My head has the dull, pressurized quality of something building behind my eyes that isn't just a headache.
My skin feels too warm. The t-shirt I'm wearing smells of Knox and every time I breathe in, my body responds with so much slick I need another shower.
I close the laptop.
I open the laptop.
I close it again and put it on the cushion and pull my knee–singular, the other one doesn't cooperate–up to my chest. And I sit in the dark apartment in a stranger's t-shirt and I think about the fact that I told Knox Olivetti I was in love with his brother, and he said I don't share, and then he left, and then I wanted him to come back.
I’m going mad.
The front door opens at ten-thirty.
Crew comes in first, I can tell by the footfall. He is heavier and more even than Steele. He puts something down in the kitchen and then appears in the living room doorway with the radar of someone whose alpha instincts have already registered that something in this apartment is off.
He crosses the room and places his hand on my forehead.
His palm is cool against my skin, which is nice.
"You're burning up," he says. "You need something to bring your temperature down."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're—"
"Crew. I'm fine."
Steele comes in behind him.
He pauses in the doorway and his gaze moves across the room before they find me on the couch. They drop to the t-shirt I'm wearing, which is not his, not Crew's, and several sizes too large and smelling like a man who has never been in this apartment.
Alphas know. They know when another alpha is invading their space.
And Steele knows.
His jaw works.
His gaze moves to the coffee table, where my laptop is still open, the screen having woken up when Crew sat down and now showing, in bright clean detail, a photograph of his brother in a business journal article with the headline OLIVETTI ENTERTAINMENT GROUP EXPANDS TO WEST COAST.
The room changes.
"What the fuck is this?" Steele says.
His voice is quiet. That's worse than loud, with Steele. Loud means the anger is arriving. Quiet means it's already here.
"Steele—" Crew starts.
“Whose shirt is that?” Steele roars.
“Mine.”
He looks at the screen and back to me.
"Is that his shirt?" His eyes are doing something I haven't seen before. The gray of them has gone flat, the warmth drained, and what's left is the coldness of a man whose control is fracturing. "Are you wearing my brother's fucking shirt?"
"He gave it to me," I say. My voice is even.
“When?”
"At the café. Today." I say matter-of-factly. If Steele and Crew won’t choose me, then why is it a problem?
"He was at the café."
"Yep. He sat down opposite me and gave me things to nest."
“To nest.”
I nod.
"Why?" One word. Not a question, not exactly. I hear the accusation in that one word.
"Because I've been smelling him for weeks and I didn't know who he was." My voice cracks. "You didn't tell me you had a brother, Steele. You didn't tell me your name is Olivetti. You didn't tell me Isabella is your sister. I found most of this out from Google."
Steele's expression fractures.
"Is that why you've been—" He stops. His hand comes up through his hair in the way that means he's about to say something he hasn't processed yet. "The sniffing. The scent thing yesterday. You were comparing us to him?"
"I was trying to understand why something was missing."
"Nothing is missing."
"Steele—"
"Nothing is missing, Remi." His voice gets louder with each word.
“Then why don’t you want me?”
The room is very quiet.
Crew stands between us with his hands at his sides and the expression of a man who is watching two people he loves run a conversation he can't stop and doesn't know how to redirect.
His jaw is tight. His shoulders have dropped into the stillness that means the alpha in him is fighting the peacemaker and the peacemaker is losing.
But Steele still hasn’t answered.
"I'm going to bed," I say.
I stand. My knee screams but I hobble toward the hallway with as much dignity as the brace allows, which is not much.
"Remi—" Steele's voice behind me.
"Don't follow me."
"Rem—"
I reach my door. I turn. He's three steps behind me in the hallway, his face a ruin of the careful control he usually wears, and I can see in his expression that the anger is already giving way to something worse underneath it. Perhaps it’s the fear of a man who has just realized that his brother is in the building, metaphorically, and the walls aren't thick enough.
"You are not welcome in my room tonight," I say.
I close the door.
I lock it.
I sit on the bed in Knox Olivetti's t-shirt, and I press both hands into the cashmere blanket he left at my hospital bedside. I shuffle my pillow into the pillowcase he gave me, place the extra blanket on my bed.
And I stare at the start of a nest. A nest I’m building with Knox Olivetti’s scent and fabrics he knows I’d like.
I don’t cry because it is not Steele or Crew, I cry because I’m aching inside.
It's one thirty in the morning when my headache becomes too much and the glass on my nightstand has been empty for an hour.
I unlock the door and push into the room. The apartment is dark. The only light is the amber strip from the kitchen that they leave on overnight and I move through the hallway on the edge of my toes as much as I can, because it makes my knee worse.
“Oh God. What the hell?” I whisper-hiss.
They're on the sofa.
Both of them. Steele on one end, Crew on the other, the space between them the width of a person who isn't there. Steele has his head back against the cushion and his eyes closed, but he's not sleeping. I know because he has slept in my bed and his breathing is wrong for sleep.
Crew smiles and I smile back.
I hobble to the kitchen and wait for the water to run cold and fill my glass. I drink half of it standing there and looking at them.
Steele sits forward.
"We do want you Remi, but we promised River," he says.
I set the glass down.
"Before we went to Nashville. Before the transfer.
Before any of this." His elbows are on his knees and he's looking at the floor between his feet.
"River made us promise. Both of us. There was no conversation, it was a condition he gave us.
If we wanted to stay in his life, if we wanted to keep the friendship, we gave him our word that we would not touch his sister. " He looks up.
The kitchen light hums.
"Do you understand what that means?" His voice has the ragged quality of something that's been held too long.
"Do you have any idea how hard it's been?
You are in this apartment, in the next room, we share your bed and hold you close.
Yet we have our hands in our pockets because we gave our word to the two people on earth who trusted us enough to give us access to you. "
“Then why agree to come into my bed?”
Crew is watching me.
"You wanted us there," Steele says. "And because you needed to feel us next to you.
Because the alternative was watching you drop and doing nothing about it.
And it was enough, for us, to be near you.
To hold you. To not—" He stops. His jaw works.
"We wanted you to make the move, Remi. We needed you to decide.
Not because we didn't want you. Because if we made the first move, we broke the promise, and if we broke the promise, everything else falls apart. "
My hands are on the counter.
"I thought you didn't want me," I say. "I thought you both still saw me as—"
"River's sister?" Crew's voice, quiet. "We haven't seen you as River's sister since the night you walked into our apartment in a hospital gown and told us you weren't going to be easy."
“Before then…” Steele adds. “Do you know how hard this is for us?”
They want me.
"But Knox—" Steele starts.
"I told Knox I wanted you both," I say. "That's what I told him. At the café. He asked why I was telling him, and I said I didn't know, but the truth is I did know: I was telling him because neither of you would let me tell you."
Steele stares at me. “You told Knox.”
I nod.
Crew stands.
He crosses the kitchen in three steps and picks me up, hands at my waist and the backs of my knees. I let him because the alternative is standing on a knee that won't hold me for the conversation I need to have.
He sets me on the counter. My legs hang. Steele stands and comes to the kitchen and they're both in front of me now, close, the air between us narrowed to the width of a word.
"You have an opportunity to tell us what you want, Remi," Steele says.
His voice is low. Steady. The anger is gone and what's left is something rawer and more dangerous and completely honest. "In the club you wanted that decision taken out of your hands.
In this apartment, it's different." His eyes hold mine. "We need your words."
I look at Steele. I look at Crew.
Crew's hands are on the counter beside my hips. Steele is close enough that I can feel his breath. The kitchen light is amber and the apartment is dark around us and the entire shape of the last six weeks has been leading to a room that looks exactly like this one.
"I want you both," I say.