Chapter 23 Knox
The barista sets the second coffee on the table.
She does this because I ordered two coffees forty minutes ago and drank one and left the other untouched, and because this is the third time I've been in The Stave this week, and done the same thing.
"Is she coming?" the barista says.
"Yes," I say.
She isn't coming.
No text. No call. No door chime. And the chair across from me sits empty, the coffee mocks me, along with the chocolate I placed on the saucer that sits untouched.
I'm a man who built an empire on reading rooms and I cannot read this one.
I check my phone. The last log is one outgoing message.
I could call her again.
Knox Olivetti does not beg.
Except I pick up my phone and consider it. She told me she loves them.
She sat across from me and said she’d always been in love with them and I held her hand and told her I don't share and then I walked out.
I could have stayed and pulled her hand to my mouth, pressed my lips to the inside of her wrist where the scent gland pulses.
But inhaling her scent has been destroying me since the night in my club.
So I walked out, and she went home to my brother's apartment.
The second coffee goes cold.
I leave forty dollars on the table and step onto the sidewalk. The Nashville air hits me and I stand there for seven seconds with my hands in my coat pockets, and then I make a decision.
I walk to the building with the dark brick facade and the doorman who works mornings and an elevator that requires a key fob after nine at night. I know the layout. I know the sightlines. I know the apartment is three blocks from the café.
I know everything except how to stop.
Apart from helping financially, I haven't been a resident of my brother's life since he changed his name and built a career under a surname that isn't ours, and the distance between Oliver and Olivetti is not five letters, it's everything.
Yes, I helped him from the sidelines. I bought his car, I paid his way through college, I gave him a lifestyle he has never thanked me for.
The doorman looks at me.
He holds the door without asking for identification, which is either excellent service or poor security. Right now, I don't care which.
Later I will. Later, when I know Remi is in the apartment and I know the doorman lets people into the building without checking their credentials.
I’ll say something on the way out.
The elevator takes forty-three seconds. I count them because counting is what my brain does when the rest of me threatens to do something uncontrolled.
Like going back to the doorman and using my fist.
The elevator doors open. The smell hits me. Someone's cooking and fake lemon from the dehumidifier, underneath both, the unmistakable scent of bourbon and chocolate and orange. Her scent is threaded through the building's air system.
Has she slept with them?
The thought comes as fact, not feeling. But her scent seems different. The one I smelled at the café yesterday has changed. She now has a deepened note. A richness that coats the strongest scent when an omega is happy or for days after a knotting.
I grind my teeth as I knock.
The door opens and my brother stands before me for the first time in years.
He looks the same. The jaw. The eyes, our mother's gray, paler than mine. The height, the build, the way he holds his shoulders that says I can carry my omega.
His hair is shorter than when I last saw him. There's a bruise on his cheekbone, yellowing at the edges.
He doesn't speak.
I don't speak.
The hallway stays quiet.
Two men who share blood and a tattoo and a surname one of them abandoned, and who haven't figured out whether the next sentence is going to be a greeting or a declaration of war. Most of the time it’s the latter.
"Steele," I say.
His jaw works. The same motion I watched through the café window. The same motion our father makes when he's processing information that threatens what he has. Or when my mother told him she could no longer live without her mate.
"Knox. Why are you here?"
"You already know the answer."
A beat.
"You're not welcome here."
He doesn't step aside. He stands in the doorway with one hand on the frame and his body blocking the apartment behind him, and I understand he's keeping the wall between me and the interior, between me and whatever version of his life exists on the other side of that door, between me and her.
"That's her decision, not yours."
"She's not here," he says.
"I didn't ask."
"You were going to."
He's right. He's always been right about the things I'm going to do, which is the fundamental problem between us. People think it’s because we’re too similar, not that we disagree, but that he sees me clearly and disapproves of what he sees.
"She’s mine" I say.
“She’s ours.”
Does he mean me too?
“Does she know about us? Have you told her?” I ask.
Something moves behind Steele’s eyes as he nods. "She’s linked it all from a Google search. Your name, me, our parents, Isabella. All of it."
"You should have told her, Steele." I try to keep the annoyance from my voice. “You should have told her about me the moment you knew what her scent was. How long have you known her? Since college?”
His hand tightens on the doorframe. "You don't get to tell me what I should have done.”
“Six years. You knew she was mine for six years and kept it to yourself?”
“No, she was on scent suppressants. I liked her for her, Knox, not because she is scent compatible, not because she is beautiful, but because she is Remi.”
“I never got that chance. But now–”
“You lost any right to her when you started following her."
"Watching."
"Following." His voice drops. "Stalking."
I move my head from side to side, feeling the creak in my neck. "I was doing it for her."
"No. You were doing it for yourself."
The hallway hums. A door opens somewhere on another floor and closes again.
"You found the nesting materials," I say. Not a question because alphas know.
His jaw tightens. "The t-shirt. The blanket. You had a nerve putting your scent in my apartment."
"She needed them." I hold his gaze. "She needs to nest, Steele. She needs somewhere to anchor. She needs my alpha scent." I pause. "And knowing you, when you found them, you made it about territory instead of asking why she reached for them in the first place."
"Don't tell me how to—"
"She's an omega who has gone through an omega drop. I don’t want that to happen to her again. And neither should you. If the first thing she reaches for carries my scent, that should tell you something about what the omega needs, and not what I took from you."
The air fills with nothing but alpha pheromones. Steele stares at me.
"She loves you," I say. "Both of you. She told me."
He leans against the doorframe.
The anger is still there, but underneath it something shifts.
"And I'm telling you because you need to hear it from someone who has no reason to make it easy for you." I hold his gaze. "She loves you, and she chose you, and she didn't come to the café today because she chose you. And I need you to understand that choosing you doesn't change what I am to her."
Steele's expression hardens. "You're nothing to her."
"I carry all three notes, Steele."
The words land the way I intend them to.
With precision, not cruelty, though the line between the two has never been thinner.
He flinches. He knows what I mean. We grew up in the same house with the same biology textbooks and the same mother who smelled like gardenias and the same father who didn't.
"You carry bourbon and orange," I say. "Crew carries chocolate and orange.
Two out of three each. Together you cover her three scents, and she responds to that.
I suspect she really does love you both, and I'm not here to take it from her.
" I pause. "But I carry all three notes.
Bourbon, chocolate, orange. The full match in one scent. You know what that means."
"It means nothing—She’s choosing us."
"It means her body recognizes me as a complete match.
Not two partial ones. Not an approximation built from two separate alphas.
One." I keep my voice level because the moment I raise it, this becomes a fight, and what I need it to be is a warning.
"You and Crew can surround her with every note she needs, and her omega will still reach for the source that carries them all.
If you keep me from her, that need doesn't go away. It compounds. You know this."
"Stop."
"Ask Dad."
The words land like a bomb and Steele's hand drops from the doorframe. His face changes. The anger is gone, and the controlled hostility of a man guarding a threshold with it.
"Don't," he says.
"Mom was fated to another alpha. Not Dad.
You know how hard it was for them. She fought it for years with suppressants, distance, and sheer willpower.
We know she loved Dad. That was real. She chose him, but her biology wanted someone else and the longer she denied it, the worse it got.
The tremors. The fevers. The nights she couldn't sleep in his bed because his scent wasn't enough. "
"I know the story, Knox."
"Then you know how it ends." I meet his eyes.
"Dad didn't fight it. He didn't make her choose.
He took her to Italy because he loved her more than he loved being right, and to keep the omega he loved, he lost us in the process.
He chose her over his sons and his daughter because the alternative was watching her destroy herself trying to stay. "
The hallway is silent.
"I'm not telling you this to hurt you," I say.
"I'm telling you because you're standing in a doorway doing exactly what Dad should have done and didn't. You're protecting someone you love from a biological reality that doesn't care about your feelings.
And I'm telling you that if you succeed and keep me away from her that you won't save her.
You'll watch her reach for something in the night that isn't there.
You'll watch her scent thin out around the edges.
You'll watch the fever return. And in a year, maybe two, her body will choose me anyway, and by then she'll resent you for the time you cost her. "
He swallows.
"Or," I say, "you let me in. And she keeps both of you."
Steele stares at me. "You always said you would never share."
There's a long silence because he is right.
"I meant it then," I say. "I meant that I would never let anyone take what was mine. But she's not yours to keep, Steele. She's not mine to keep either. She's hers. And if you love her, you'll let her choose. And if you don't, then you're no better than Dad. The man whose name you refuse to use."
He grabs the front of my coat. Pulls me close enough that the gray in his eyes looks silver. His voice drops to something barely above a whisper. "Stay away from her."
I look at my brother. My younger brother, who changed his name and built a life clean of everything our family carried, and who stands in the doorway of an apartment that smells of the woman whose scent coated my hands in the maze of my club the first night I found her.
"No," I say.