Chapter 27 Knox
I brought wine because Remi asked me to, and because arriving at my brother's apartment with bourbon would be the equivalent of arriving in uniform. She said wine would mean that Steele would know I was trying.
And because tonight, I'm not Knox Olivetti running an empire. Tonight, I'm a man quietly deciding if he can share his omega with two men who got there first.
I still have standards.
The elevator opens on the fourth floor and I stand in the hallway for eleven seconds before I knock. Footsteps from behind the door. Not Remi's, though. These are much heavier.
I knock again.
Crew opens the door.
He looks at me with a steady gaze, measuring.
He reads situations the way he reads plays on the ice.
I’ve noticed that about him. He always seems two passes ahead, three moves deep.
I've underestimated Crew Banks for years and I'm trying to stop. I know how Steele works, but Crew is a different animal. And I’m here because of Crew.
He wants me in this pack, which is either the most generous thing anyone has ever offered me or the most dangerous.
"Knox." He steps aside. "Come in."
"Banks."
"You can call me Crew."
The apartment smells of garlic and something slow-roasted. Steele is in the kitchen with his back to me, chopping something on a cutting board. He doesn't turn around.
Remi appears from the hallway, wearing jeans and a sweater, her hair down. She looks at me and smiles, which does something to my chest I wasn't prepared for.
"You brought wine," she says.
"You asked me to bring wine."
"I didn't think you'd actually do it." She takes the bottle and reads the label. "Nice. A Barolo."
"2016."
"Of course it is." She stands on her toes and kisses my jaw. Natural, easy, as if she's been doing it for years rather than days. Then she turns and walks to the kitchen.
I follow her. Because following Remi Silver into rooms I'm not sure I belong in is apparently my entire life now.
Dinner is a negotiation.
Not the food. Not at all, the food is good. Steele cooks the way he plays, with every element timed precisely. Roast chicken, root vegetables, something with herbs that I can't identify and won't ask about because asking would require speaking directly to him and we haven't done that yet.
The negotiation is spatial. Where I sit. Where Remi sits. The distance between Steele's chair and mine is four feet, the width of the table, enough room for the wine and the bread and the entire history of two brothers who haven't shared a meal in too many years.
Crew sits beside Steele. Remi sits beside me. The placement is deliberate and everyone knows it and nobody says so.
"This is good," Remi says, meaning the chicken, meaning the dinner, meaning all of us in one room without anyone bleeding.
"Steele's a good cook," Crew says.
"Steele learned to cook because our mother taught him when he was sixteen. She finally had someone in the family who was interested." The words come out before I can stop them.
Steele's fork stops.
The table goes quiet.
"That's accurate," Steele says. He doesn't look at me a he cuts a piece of chicken like a man performing surgery. "Dad burned toast. Regularly."
"He burned everything," I say. "Including pasta, which takes genuine commitment."
Steele's mouth moves. Not a smile, but the precursor to one.
Crew watches us with the steady observation of a man who has been reading rooms since he was old enough to understand that reading rooms was how you survived them.
"Can I ask something?" Crew places his fork on his plate.
"You're going to regardless," Steele replies.
"What is it between you two? Not the biology, not Remi, not the scent match. Before all of that. What happened?"
The silence presses on the walls and fills the room.
Steele sets down his fork. Picks up his wine glass. Takes a sip and stares at me.
"Nothing happened," Steele says. "That's the point. Our parents left, and everyone went on as if nothing happened."
"That’s not true. You left first," I say.
"I went to college and then to play hockey. That's not leaving."
"You changed your name. That's leaving."
Remi's hand finds my knee under the table.
"Why did you?" Remi asks, looking at Steele. "Change it, I mean. Oliver instead of Olivetti."
Steele stares at the wine in his glass. The red catches the kitchen light.
"My father asked me to," he says. "When I was nineteen.
I'd just been drafted. First round." He pauses.
"He sat me down in the study that Knox runs his business from now, and told me that if I played professional hockey as Steele Olivetti, every sports journalist in the country would have our name.
Our family. Our history. And our mother's fated mate, the alpha in Siena who she left to stay with us, would be able to trace her. "
The room holds its breath.
"He asked me to change it. Pick something close. Something that wouldn't draw questions. Oliver. Simple, clean, good on a jersey." Steele drinks. "I was nineteen. My father asked. I said yes."
"But he didn't ask Knox," Remi says.
"Knox runs clubs. Private businesses. No press conferences, no jerseys with your name in block letters.
Nobody traces a nightclub owner to a family in Italy.
" Steele sets the glass down. "He didn't ask Isabella either.
Her junior events were low profile. But he never asked her to change it.
" A pause. "I always wondered if he was ashamed of me. "
"He wasn't ashamed of you," I say.
Steele looks at me.
"He made me erase myself, Knox. He made me compete under a name that isn't mine while you and Isabella kept the one that is. How is that not shameful?"
"Because he came to every game." I hold his gaze.
"Every single game. Home and away. Portland, Chicago, Denver.
He drove sixteen hours to watch you play in a preseason exhibition in Winnipeg that didn't matter.
He didn't go because he was ashamed of you.
He went because you were the only Olivetti doing something that made him stand up and shout. "
Steele's jaw tightens.
"He didn't ask you to hide, Steele. He asked you to fly. Without the name dragging you down. Without the family complicating it. He wanted one of us to be free of being an Olivetti, and he chose you because you were the one who deserved it."
Steele shakes his head. "That's a generous rewrite."
"That's what he told me." I pause. "He said the only thing he ever did right was freeing you of the name. He never let me play hockey."
"You were shit at hockey,” Steele retorts.
Remi chokes on her wine.
"Shit is a bit harsh," I reply. "But I did struggle moving my feet."
Steele's voice is soft. "You were too busy wondering how to make your first million."
"Dad was proud of you." I hold his gaze. "He just didn't know how to say it without burning the toast."
Steele laughs.
It's not a full laugh. It's broken and wet and it catches in his throat and he covers it with his hand, but it's a laugh, and it's the first one I've heard from my brother in six years, and it costs me more than I expected.
Remi presses closer to my side. Her hand hasn't left my knee.
"More wine?" she says.
"More wine," Steele says.
The dishes are done. Crew washes, Steele dries, the choreography of two men who have divided labor so many times it's instinct, and Remi and I are on the couch with the second bottle of Barolo.
"Marilyn wants to meet with me tomorrow. She says she has a proposition."
"What kind of proposition?" Crew asks from the kitchen.
"She didn't say. Just that she wants me to come to her office when I'm ready." Remi shrugs. "Maybe she wants me to be the team mascot and official omega ambassador. I could skate around the ice in a little swimsuit."
"That would give the opposite team palpitations," Crew says.
"Easy win. They'd be too distracted to play." Remi laughs.
"I don't think that's how it works," Crew says.
"I don't know. I'm sure it doesn't take much to distract an alpha," Remi replies. “I could just jiggle my boobs and ass.”
"That's not funny," Steele says.
"It's a little funny." She laughs, and I'm watching her. I've been watching her all evening. The way she moves, the way her scent shifts, the way her skin has flushed in the last twenty minutes.
"Remi," I say.
She looks at me.
"When was your last heat?"
The question lands in the room the way a stone lands in still water. Crew turns off the tap. Steele sets down the dish towel. Remi’s mouth opens, her eyes round with a look of someone who’s been asked a question she's been avoiding.
"I've never had one," she says.
“Never?”
"The suppressants," she continues. "I went on them the moment my designation came in.
My coaches put me on them early because heats would interfere with training.
Competition schedule. Then I got good enough for international competitions.
" She picks at the label on the wine bottle.
"I've been on suppressants for ten years.
My body has never had a natural heat cycle. "
"That's why the omega drop was so severe," Crew says.
"That's why the Olympics happened the way it did," Remi says.
"My body was failing. Suppressants were fighting the heat that needed to happen.
I didn't know it then. I thought I just needed sex.
That's why I went to the club. To do something my body was designed to do, and I was chemically preventing it, and eventually something had to give.
" She pauses. "It wasn't just my knee that gave. "
I look at her. The flush on her neck. Her pupils have dilated slightly in the last ten minutes.
"You're warming," I say.
"I know. I've been feeling it for days now, maybe since last week, on and off."
"You're going into heat."
"Maybe. I don't know. I've never—" She stops. Breathes. "I don't know what it feels like. I have nothing to compare it to."
I take her hand. Hold it. The temperature of her skin is elevated, her cheeks flushed, the early markers of a heat arriving.
"I could be getting sick."
"Or you could be about to have your first heat," Crew says.
She spins to him. "And you're all going to help me through it."
I glance at Steele. He nods.
"How will I know it's a heat?" she asks.
"You'll know," I say. "And we'll be here."
Crew's phone rings.
The sound is loud and jarring after the quiet, and Crew fumbles it out of his pocket with the startled energy of a man who forgot the outside world existed. He looks at the screen.
"My mom," he says.
He answers as he walks to the hallway. His voice is low and soft.
Twenty seconds later he comes back. His face is a color I haven't seen before.
"What?" Steele says.
Crew holds up his phone. The screen shows a tabloid article. The headline reads:
REMI SILVER NEVER GOT GOLD BUT SHE FOUND LOVE
Below it, a photo. Remi and Crew, two days ago, outside the arena. His mouth at her temple. Her eyes closed. The angle is intimate. The caption reads: Figure skating's fallen star spotted with Nashville Scorpions defenseman Crew Banks.
Steele's eyes widen.
Remi's eyes widen.
"My mother," Crew says, "is coming to Nashville for the first semi-final game. She wants to meet Remi."
The room is silent.
"She also said," Crew adds, "that you're very pretty and she hopes you're feeding me properly."
Remi covers her mouth with her hand. "You feed me more than I feed you."
"I'm going to die if she finds out," Crew says.
"You're not going to die," Steele says. "You're going to introduce your mother to your omega and your two packmates and it's going to be fine."
Two packmates. Not two brothers. Not two friends.
Two packmates.
"My mother is going to ask Remi about grandchildren within the first eleven minutes. Please be warned."
"Crew," Remi says, standing and walking to him. She takes his face in her hands. "I can't wait to meet your mom."
Crew closes his eyes. "That makes one of us."
I watch this from the couch.
My brother is drying a dish he's already dried.
My omega is holding the face of the man she chose for different reasons to me. There’s a tabloid headline and photo that will be on every hockey blog by morning. Crew's mother is coming to Nashville.
Remi might be going into heat for the first time in her life.
And I'm sitting on a couch in an apartment that isn't mine, drinking wine I don't usually drink, in a pack I said I didn't want.
And my brother called me his packmate.