No Pucking Way

Chapter 33 Steele

Isabella's apartment smells wrong.

That's the first thing I register when I step through the door that's already open, the lock intact, no forced entry.

The place smells of her. Rose and something sweet, but underneath it there's a chemical note.

Antiseptic. Clinical. The kind of scent that belongs in a hospital, not a twenty-three-year-old woman's living room.

Knox is standing in the middle of the hallway. He hasn't moved since I arrived. He's staring at her kitchen table where a single chair is pulled out, a half-empty glass of water beside a plate with fruit on it. Food she didn't finish.

"Knox."

He doesn't answer.

"Knox. Look at me."

My brother turns. His face is something I haven't seen before.

Knox Olivetti has a face for every occasion.

I've seen the business face, the club face, the face he uses when he's calculating seventeen outcomes simultaneously.

This face has nothing on it. It's blank in the way a screen is blank when the system behind it has crashed.

"She was interrupted while eating."

"I know."

"The door wasn't forced. She opened it."

"She opened it for someone she knew," I say.

Knox's jaw tightens. He walks to the window. Opens it, then closes it. His hands need something to do and there is nothing to do and the violence of that building in his shoulders.

I pull out my phone.

There are fourteen people I could call. Knox's security team, his club contacts, the network of people who operate in the dark spaces of Nashville that my brother has spent a decade building. Any of them would start looking. But none of them know the skating world.

“I’ll call River.”

He answers on the third ring. "Steele?"

"Where are you?"

"On my way to the airport. Why, what happened?" His voice shifts instantly. River reads tone the way I read defensive formations. "Is Remi okay?"

"Remi is fine. She's with Crew." I walk into Isabella's bedroom. The bed is made. Her skating bag is in the corner. Her phone is on the nightstand.

Her phone is on the nightstand.

She left without her phone.

"River. Isabella is missing. Her apartment is empty. The door was open. Someone left a threatening note on her door earlier tonight and now she's gone."

"A note saying what."

"'You're mine. Don't forget it.'"

River's breathing changes. Something shifts in it that I can't place. Something that sounds like more than professional concern for his teammate's sister.

"I'll make some calls," he says. "I'll find her."

He hangs up.

I stand in Isabella's bedroom and look at her phone and her skating bag and the bed she made this morning because my sister makes her bed every day, the way she does everything, with the discipline of a woman who controls the small things because the big things have been controlled for her.

My sister.

I haven't called her that out loud in years.

The word has been sitting behind my teeth, behind the resentment I know isn't fair.

She became a world champion, and the Olivetti name appeared on scoreboards and broadcasts and magazine covers, and the fated alpha in Siena traced the family and found our mother, and our parents left.

None of that matters right now.

I walk back to the kitchen. Knox is on his phone, giving orders to Dante.

He wants security footage, front desk logs, and he wants to cross-reference every visitor in the last forty-eight hours.

The business Knox is operating, and operating well, because crisis is the environment my brother was built for.

But his hands are shaking.

I sit at Isabella's kitchen table and text Crew.

Me: How is she?

Three dots.

Crew: Doctor gave her the booster. Heat is starting. She's in the nest. I've got her.

Me: Don't leave her.

Crew: Wasn't planning on it.

I put the phone down. Knox finishes his call. He stands by the counter with his hands flat on the marble, the same way he stands at his desk when he's thinking, except now the thinking has nowhere productive to go.

"River is making calls," I say.

Knox nods. He doesn't ask how River fits into this. He's past that.

We wait.

Waiting is the worst thing either of us has ever done. It’s been over two hours now.

Knox paces from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen. I sit and watch him and think about defensive formations and gap control and how I wish Crew were here, because Crew would know what to say to Knox that would settle the pacing without dismissing the fear.

But Crew is with Remi. Where he should be.

My phone rings. Not River.

Crew.

"How is she?" I ask.

"Heat's building. She's okay." A pause. "She wants me to tell you something."

"Go ahead."

"She said Isabella always goes to the ice when something's wrong. Every time she was upset at training, she'd be at the rink before anyone else arrived. Skating alone. No music. Just her and the ice."

I look at Knox.

He's already shaking his head. "We have an address. A concrete lead. I'm not chasing a feeling."

"Remi trained alongside her for four months," I say. "She knows her."

"And Dante pulled the security footage. There's a car that visited the building twice in the last week that doesn't match any registered guest. The plates trace to an address in Ashland City. A certain, Dr. Peters."

"Knox."

"We go to the house." His voice has the flat finality of a man who has made his decision. "If she's not there, we'll go to the rink."

I put the phone back to my ear. "Tell Remi we heard her."

Crew's voice drops. "Be careful."

I hang up. My phone buzzes immediately.

River: I’m heading back to Nashville, I'll catch a flight tomorrow.

I show Knox. He reads it. Something crosses his face that isn't quite relief and isn't quite gratitude and lands somewhere between them. "We need to leave.”

"I'm driving," I tell him.

"You're not—"

"Knox." I look at his hands. Still trembling against the car keys. "I'm driving."

He hands them to me without a word.

We drive. Knox calls the police from the passenger seat. Files a missing person report. His voice is calm and detailed and gives them every piece of information in the correct order. When he hangs up, he puts his phone in his lap and stares at the windshield and doesn't speak for twelve minutes.

I count them. It's what I do when I can't do anything else.

"She makes her bed every morning," Knox says. Quiet. "I taught her that. When she was seven. Mom was already pulling away and Dad was working, and I told Isabella that making your bed is the first thing you control in a day."

I don't say anything.

"I should have told her to stay in the house," he finishes.

"She would have hated you for it."

"She'd be safe."

"She'd be in a cage. There's a difference."

Knox turns his head. For the first time in years, his eyes don't have a calculation behind them. They're just gray and scared and looking at me as if I might have an answer.

"We're going to find her," I say.

He nods and turns back to the windshield.

I drive faster.

Ashland City is dark and small and forty minutes from Nashville on roads that aren't built for the speed I'm driving.

The house is at the end of a peaceful street. White siding. Blue door. Lights on downstairs. We park, and Knox is out of the car before I've cut the engine.

He knocks. Hard. Three times.

Footsteps. A light in the hallway. The door opens.

A woman stands in the doorway. Mid-forties, tired eyes, a robe pulled around her shoulders like she was already heading to bed. She looks between us with the wariness of someone who has opened her door to two large men at night and is already regretting it.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Dr. Peters," Knox says.

"He's my husband." Her expression tightens. "What is this about?"

A man appears behind her shoulder. Medium build. Thinning hair. Glasses. He looks like a man who teaches biology at a community college. He takes one look at Knox and goes the color of old chalk.

"Mr. Olivetti." His voice is controlled. Too controlled.

"Where is my sister?" Knox says.

"I don't know. I haven't seen Isabella since her last appointment.

" Peters steps forward slightly, putting himself between Knox and his wife.

Either a protective instinct or the positioning of a man who is very aware of what he's done and how much trouble it could bring to his front door.

"I think there's been a misunderstanding. "

“Your car was seen at her apartment building.”

“My clinic is two blocks away.”

I watch him. Not his words. His body. The way his eyes move to Knox, then to me, then back to Knox. The calculation in it. He's frightened, but it's the fear of professional consequence, not the fear of a man with something catastrophic to hide tonight.

Knox reads him too. I can see the shift in his jaw, the realization happening behind his eyes. Peters is guilty of something. The way he won't hold Knox's gaze says that clearly enough. But whatever it is, Isabella isn't in this house.

"You'll be hearing from my lawyers," Knox says. "And from the medical board.”

Peters says nothing. His wife looks between them with the expression of a woman who has just understood that her husband is not entirely innocent.

Knox turns. Walks back to the car.

I follow.

We're pulling away from the curb when his phone rings.

River.

Knox puts it on speaker. "Tell me."

“Crew called me. Told me to come to the rink. And she's here." River's voice is low. Steady. Something careful in it. "She’s upset, but she's okay. She's not hurt."

Knox's eyes close. One breath.

"We're on our way."

The Pinnacle is mostly dark when we arrive, the parking lot empty except for River's car and a light burning somewhere deep in the building. I give Knox the access code and we move through the corridor, past the locker rooms, through the tunnel.

The rink opens up in front of us.

Isabella is in the stands. Third row up from the glass, her knees pulled to her chest, her skating bag on the seat beside her. River is next to her. Close but not touching.

She looks up when she hears us.

Her face does something I'm not prepared for. Not relief, not the rush of emotion I expected. But a careful, exhausted blankness of someone who has already cried and stopped and is now just waiting to see what comes next.

Knox freezes at the tunnel entrance.

I don't move either.

"Bella."

She looks at him for a long moment. Then she says, quietly, to the rink more than to us. "I just needed somewhere that was mine."

Knox takes the steps toward her. Slowly. As if he's approaching something breakable that he's already broken once.

"I didn't know where to go," Isabella says.

"I got the note and I was scared and I thought, I'll call Knox, and then I thought.

What have I done–" She stops. Breathes. "He'll put me back in the house.

He'll take away the apartment. He'll decide I'm not safe to be on my own, and I'll lose the last thing that's actually mine. "

"Isabella—"

"I know you love me." She says it plainly.

Without accusation. Which is somehow worse.

"I know that's why you do it. But Knox, you, Crew and Steele have Remi now, you have each other, and Mom and Dad are in Italy, and I just—" Her voice cracks, just once, before she pulls it back. "I keep thinking that the only people who ever come looking for me are the ones who want to own me. The gifts, the note, and even you.” She looks directly in Knox’s eyes.

“It's always about keeping me, not knowing me. "

The rink is very quiet.

"I don't want to be kept," she says. "I want someone to actually see me. I want what Remi has found. Is that so bad?"

Knox sits down heavily beside her, as if something in him has given up holding the weight. He puts his elbows on his knees and his hands over his face and stays like that for a long moment.

When he lifts his head, his eyes are wet.

Knox Olivetti, who has never once in my memory let anyone see him come apart, is sitting in a half-dark hockey arena with tears running down his face.

"I thought keeping you safe was the same as loving you," he says.

Isabella looks at him.

"I know," she says. Quiet. No anger in it. "I know you did."

Which is the thing that breaks him properly, because it means she's known all along and loved him anyway and waited and waited for him to catch up.

He reaches for her hand.

She lets him take it.

"I will never—" He stops. Starts again. "I will spend the rest of my life making sure you know the difference.

" His voice is rough, scraped clean of every layer of control he's spent twenty years constructing.

"I failed you. I failed Steele. I failed all of you while I was so busy trying to keep everyone together that I forgot to actually be with you.

" He looks up at me then, across the rows of empty seats. "Both of you."

I don't say anything. There isn't anything to say. I just hold his gaze and nod, once, and let that be enough.

River stands. He doesn't make a production of it. He just moves to the row above, quiet and unhurried, giving them the space without being asked, which tells me something about River Silver that I have always known. He’s a good friend.

Knox pulls Isabella into him and she rests her head against his shoulder. He puts his arm around her and holds on.

After a while she says, muffled against his jacket: "You're going to have to actually talk to me. Not just watch me on camera."

"I know."

"And stop having Dante drive past my building."

A pause. "I'll reduce the frequency."

She pulls back and looks at him. "Knox."

"Once a day," he says. "That's my final offer. I do it because I love you, Isabella, not because I don't trust you."

The sound she makes is almost a laugh.

The drive home is quiet.

River sits in the back with Isabella, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. He left his car at the arena, but he doesn’t care.

She falls asleep somewhere on the highway, or goes somewhere close to it, her breathing slow and even.

In the rearview mirror, Knox watches her sleep as I drive us home.