4. Knox
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Knox
“Push her past the fourth marker and that engine comes apart in your lap, son. Wiser men than you have tried.”
“Lucky for us both, I’ve never been accused of wisdom.” I take the gloves out of his hand and pull them on slowly, working each finger down, my eyes never leaving Vane’s.
His brow lifts, an expression between amusement and irritation crosses his weathered face, the look of a man deciding whether to laugh at me or throw me off his property. “They warned me you’d be like this.”
“They undersold it.” I flash him a grin, drop into the car, and the door shuts on whatever he says next.
The thing about a warning is that it tells you more about the man giving it than the thing he’s warning you off. Vane delivered that one a half-second too smoothly, a line he’s used before, on other buyers, in this exact pit lane.
I tip the rearview mirror down with two fingers and find the car idling beside mine, Vane’s man at the wheel, the driver who’s supposed to make a fool of me in front of a contract. He leans out his window.
“You sure about this, Beaufort?” Half a grin, all challenge. “Last chance to walk away with your pride.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” I settle my hands on the wheel. “I came here to win a company. I don’t intend to leave without it.”
He laughs and pulls his head back in. Somewhere ahead a flag drops, and the world narrows to engine and asphalt and the long bright line of track in front of me.
The engine turns over, alive and furious, and I take the first lap clean to feel her out, listening past the noise to what she’s actually saying. By the second lap I know. There’s a difference between a machine at its limit and a machine a man wants you to think is at its limit.
So on the third lap, coming into the long curve where the needle starts climbing toward the number Vane swore would kill me, I don’t lift.
The front end goes light as I push her past the fourth marker.
Past the ceiling he quoted and out the window. As I take the corner, I catch sight of him at the wall with both hands coming off his crossed arms, and I can’t help it.
“This the part where she comes apart, Vane?” I call it out the window, grinning into the wind, and then I open her all the way up.
She doesn’t come apart, she thrives. I take the last corner wider than I need to, because there’s no sense humiliating the man by making it look effortless on top of being right, and I bring her across the line, back into the pit smooth and slow as I kill the engine.
Quiet rushes back in. I sit a second in it, then climb out, unhurried.
Vane is at the wall with his arms uncrossed now, wearing the face of a man watching his own bluff stroll back to him on two legs.
“That,” he says, “was a damn fool thing to do. I told you what that engine would take.”
“You told me what you wanted me to think it would take.” I pull the gloves off finger by finger and hand them to the kid hovering at his elbow. “Contrary to what people enjoy assuming about me, Mr. Vane, I don’t get into anything without knowing exactly what I’m walking into.”
His jaw works. He definitely came here this morning fully intending to watch a rich man’s son wrap his pride around a tire wall, and instead he’s got me, dry, whole, and right.
“You couldn’t have known for certain,” he says. “You gambled.”
“No.” I let the smile come, because this is the part I enjoy. “But I wasn’t wrong, was I?”
He doesn’t answer, which is its own answer.
“I was willing to be wrong, though.” I lean against the warm flank of the car. “You don’t walk into a business you don’t know yet without the stomach to be wrong in it, and I know exactly how new I am to this one.”
My eyes move over him while he chews on it. The race was the easy part but you don’t win a man like this by being right at him. You play the man, not just the race.
“Which is why I don’t want to buy you out and file your name in a drawer.” I push off the flank of the car and straighten, and I meet his eyes plainly, nothing performed in it. “I want you in the room. I only ever partner with people who are better than me at the one thing I need.”
For a long moment he just looks at me, surprised out of himself, and whatever he came here expecting, it wasn’t this.
“Hell of a thing,” he says, putting out a hand. “You’ve got a mouth on you, but you have guts, kid. That counts for more than money in my book.”
“It’s good to be doing business with you, Mr. Vane. Truly.” I take the hand and shake it, warm and easy. This time, I give him a polite smile. “You won’t regret it.”
He’s still chuckling as we go sign the paperwork. By the time the ink dries, Vane Motorsport belongs to me.
***
The car is mine too, it turns out. Vane signs it over with the company, says a man should drive what he was fool enough to bet his life on, and I take the keys, already turning them over in my hand.
I’m still tossing them up and catching them, walking the floor toward my office and whistling tunes when the nagging starts at the back of my skull. The specific itch of a thing forgotten. I run through the day and come up empty, so I let it go.
It’s probably nothing.
“Idris.” I rap my knuckles on the edge of his desk as I pass. “Clear the afternoon. I just bought Vane Motorsport. The contract’s signed but there’s a mountain of processing behind it. I need you to do all the parts I find boring.”
Idris stops typing. He closes his eyes for the length of a slow breath.
“A racing company.” He opens his eyes with a tight smile. “This morning. So that’s where the urgent off-site was. You said it was due diligence.”
“It was. I diligenced. Then I bought it.”
“I don’t get paid enough to deal with you, sir.” He’s already pulling up three windows at once, the sigh of a man who knows exactly how his weekend is going to go now.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get a raise soon.” I reply with a laugh, shrugging my jacket off one shoulder, already turning toward the lobby and the rest of a very good day. “Send me the worst of the paperwork and I’ll pretend to read it.”
Halfway toward my office, someone clears their throat.
The forgotten thing in the back of my mind finally surfaces, whole and damning, a half-second too late.
Shit.
Lunch. I forgot lunch.
Slowly, I turn, and she’s there in the lobby, coat immaculate, expression arranged into the particular stillness she uses when she’s deciding exactly how disappointed to be.
“You stood me up for lunch,” my mother says, by way of hello. “Again.”
I grin at her, the old reflex, the one that used to get me out of everything before I was tall enough to reach the counter, and I open my arms and go in for the hug.
But her bag catches me in the ribs. Hard.
“Ow! God.” I straighten, pressing a hand to my side. “What is that thing made of, rebar? Where does a woman even buy a bag engineered as a weapon?”
“Milan. And it was a gift, so don’t ask the price.” She lifts her other hand, and only now do I notice the paper bag hanging from it. “Since you couldn’t be bothered to show up for a meal with me, I brought the table to you. Sit down and eat before it’s cold.”
There’s no winning against my mother so I take the bag, drop into the nearest lobby chair, and she lowers herself across from me.
“When are you going to grow up, Knox?” She asks as I’m unwrapping the thing inside, and I’m already halfway into it before she’s finished the sentence, because it turns out, I was starving. “I am asking sincerely. I am old enough now to want an actual answer.”
“I’m not being irresponsible, mom. I know what I’m doing.” I swallow before I say it, to make a show of the manners she raised me with. “There was a sabotaged venture bleeding me out, and I salvaged it by closing on a brand-new one before lunch.”
“That isn’t what I’m talking about. We know we can trust you with the business.” She sighs, exhausted. “But I fear we’ve spoiled you too thoroughly. Your grandfather warned us we would. He said we’d raise a boy who could buy anything and keep nothing.”
“Oh, don’t listen to Gramps.” I wave the food at her. “The man’s a grump. There’s a reason the two words rhyme. He warned you the telephone would rot my brain, too.”
I reach for another bite, and she slaps my hand away from it and fixes me with a glare.
“You are not getting any younger, Knox Nathaniel Beaufort.” The full name lands, telling me she really is serious. “And neither, in case it’s escaped your notice, are your father and I.”
She lets a pause open, and in it sits a thing I don’t want to look at directly.
“Business is not the only thing in life worth being serious about.”
“Mother…”
“How is she? The young woman you’re seeing.” She watches me as she asks it, testing and observing. “Blythe.”
The bite stops halfway to my mouth.
I set it down. The hunger’s gone, just like that, soured out of me while I take my time with the napkin so my face has somewhere to be that isn’t honest.
“She’s fine. We’re serious.” I say it lightly, as though it costs nothing. “Which is the whole point, isn’t it? You wanted me settled. I’m settling. Consider the deadline met.”
“I didn’t set a deadline so you could check a box and hand me a name.
” She says it laced with suspicion. “A year, Knox. That was the deal. Commit to one person, properly, inside the year, or none of it passes to you. Not the estate, not the companies, not the Beaufort name and everything it’s meant for generations. ”
She reaches across and takes both my hands in hers, and the gesture lands harder than any lectures. Her hands are cool and certain around mine, and for once I don’t have a quip loaded behind my teeth.
“You carry our legacy. We don’t hand the whole of what this family is to a man who’s never once proven he can hold on to anything at all.”
Mother lets go of my hands, and I sit with the warmth of where they were a moment longer than I’d ever admit.