CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

RILEY

The commission was a custom chopper for a musician — I'm not allowed to use his name but if I told you which band, you'd know — and it was the biggest single job Redline & Redemption had ever taken on. Two hundred and forty thousand dollars for a full rebuild, custom frame modification, hand-painted tank with an original design based on the album artwork from his first record. A museum piece that would also run.

I called Knox.

I didn't mean to call Knox. I meant to call Mara, which is who I call first for business news because Mara handles the numbers side and also because she gets it — she's seen what this shop has been and what it's becoming and she understands what a commission like this means. I meant to call her. I dialed Knox.

He picked up on the second ring.

"We got the Harrington commission," I said.

A pause. Then: "The one you quoted in February?"

"The one I quoted in February."

"Riley." His voice did something quiet and warm that I immediately decided not to think too hard about. "That's yours. You built that."

"I know." I was smiling and couldn't stop it. "I just — I needed to tell someone."

"I know," he said.

There was a beat of something comfortable and simple that lasted about three seconds before I remembered who I was talking to and cleared my throat and said I needed to call Mara and hung up.

He showed up at the shop the next morning in a work shirt.

"I said I didn't need—"

"I know." He was already rolling up his sleeves. "Where do you want me?"

Here is the thing about Knox Blackthorn that I have been carefully not examining for three weeks: he knows bikes. Not the way a rich man knows things he's paid people to explain to him, but the way someone knows something they grew up with, something in the hands. He knows the sound a belt drive makes when it's thirty miles from giving out. He knows the difference between a torque spec issue and a gasket issue by feel. He rebuilt bikes in the compound workshop every weekend for ten years because it was the one place his wolf went quiet.

I didn't send him home.

We worked side by side through the morning and I handed him tools before I named them and he took them without asking questions and it was easy in the exact way that things are easy when you've done them before. Old fluency. Like a language you stopped speaking but didn't forget.

Damien arrived at two.

He came in through the front with yellow flowers and a smile that I'd learned by now to read two registers below the surface. Knox was on the creeper under the frame. Damien didn't see him.

"Hey." Damien set the flowers on the clean end of the workbench. "Thought I'd surprise you."

"You're surprising me." I kept my hands in the work. "What's up?"

"Just checking in. Wanted to see how things were going with the — the building situation." He meant Knox. "I've been thinking about the property, actually. There might be some things worth looking at, some protection measures given the current—"

"What kind of protection measures?"

"Just some restructuring. Nothing major. I've been talking to some people about a holding arrangement that would give you more legal buffer if Blackthorn decides to—"

"If Blackthorn decides to what?" Knox said, from under the bike.

Damien went very still.

Knox slid out from under the frame on the creeper, sat up, and looked at Damien with the specific expression that I had been thinking of privately as his *corporate face* — no particular emotion, total focus, the expression of a man doing math.

"I don't know who you've been talking to about restructuring her property," Knox said, voice completely even, "but I'd be very careful about who you're taking advice from."

Damien made several different calculations very quickly. Then he said something about calling me later and left.

Knox picked up a wrench and went back under the bike.

Neither of us said anything about it.

He called his property attorney that evening. I found out three things over the next two days: the lien Damien had filed, the holding company it was filed under, and the fact that the deed to the shop was now in my name outright, no conditions, transfer complete.

My landlord called me.

I went upstairs.

"You keep doing things without asking me first."

Knox was at the kitchen counter. He looked at me steadily. "Everything I've done is yours. The shop is yours. The building is yours. The security is yours." He paused. "I owe you about five years of rent."

I stood in his doorway.

He held my gaze and didn't add anything, didn't soften it, didn't wrap it in an apology or a justification. Just said the true thing and waited for me to do what I wanted with it.

I went back downstairs.

Thought about it for a long time.

Decided I didn't know what to do with it yet, and that was okay, and that there were fifty-something days left in which to figure it out.