CHAPTER TWO #2
And underneath the one word, behind the stillness that came down over him before the bad work, the room at the back of him he kept bricked up and mortared over — the room with the thing in it he was not allowed to want — lost a brick.
Full time. Starting tonight. It meant her, every day, close enough to touch, and he was the wall now, and the cruel joke of it was that a piece of him had wanted to be the thing that stood between her and the world since he was twenty-four years old, and Bishop had just made it an order.
"I'll build the rotation around him," Doc said.
Heads turned. The treasurer had his reading glasses shoved up into his gray hair and a legal pad already half-covered in his small square hand, because Doc was always most of the way done with the thing the rest of them were only starting to worry about.
"Knox can't be awake three days straight," he said, reasonable and warm, the same voice that had talked more than one bleeding Saint into holding still for the needle.
"I'll set every shift. Who covers when Knox sleeps, where the cars sit, the lot at her place, the deck at the hospital, the gap when she's in class.
I keep the schedule in my head and nowhere else, so there's nothing to find and nothing to leak.
Y'all put your minds on the Riders. The minute-to-minute is mine.
" He tapped the pad twice with his pen. "She is not uncovered one second of the day.
You've got my word, Bishop, and you know what my word's worth. "
"I know what it's worth," Bishop said, and there was true warmth in it, the warmth of a man who'd handed Doc the club's money and the club's wounds for fifteen years and never once been made sorry. "Best treasurer this club ever had. Get the first week to Knox tonight."
"Already started it during church," Doc said, and a couple of the men chuckled, because of course he had.
The rest of it ran twenty minutes more — runs to cover, the legit jobs at the Forge, a prospect matter for Tiny — and Knox heard almost none of it.
He sat with his thoughts gone flat and quiet and studied the grain of the oak and did the arithmetic Bishop hadn't done, the arithmetic that had nothing to do with Miami.
Every day. Her car, her doorway, the few feet of air between a man and the woman whose body he was answerable for.
He'd spent years keeping the whole width of a shop floor between them on purpose, like a man keeping his hand off a hot stove.
Bishop had just ordered him to close the distance to nothing and call it keeping her safe.
The gavel came down. Chairs scraped. Men stood and stretched and traded low words about nothing, the pressure bleeding out of the room.
Knox felt eyes on him and turned and found Reaper watching from under the hat brim — not unkind, not anything at all, just the flat attention of a man who missed little and said less.
Then the road captain looked off and was up and gone out the door without a sound, and Knox told himself the quiet man watched everybody like that.
It was true. It didn't quite cover it. And Bishop said, low, not looking up from his papers, "Knox. My office. Minute."
The office was small and smelled of the cigarettes nobody was supposed to smoke in here and the cedar of the gun cabinet against the wall.
Bishop shut the door and didn't sit. He stood with his back to the painted-over window and looked at Knox a long moment, and the president went out of his face by degrees, and what was left when it had all drained away was just the man.
"I'm about to put the thing I love most in this world in your hands," he said.
"You understand me. I've watched you work eight years.
There is not a man breathing I'd trust with her safety before you.
Not one." He paused, and his voice went down to the floor of itself.
"So you hear the next part, and you hear it the one time.
Protect her with your life. And stay away from my daughter. "
The cold slow place in Knox did not move. He had built it not to move under exactly this kind of pressure.
"I know how men look at her," Bishop said.
"I've watched it her whole life. Church lots, the shop, grown men with rings on who oughta be ashamed.
I see all of it, and I let most of it go, because looking is free and my girl can handle herself.
But not you. You don't get to be one of the men who looks at her like that.
You're better than them, and you owe me more than they do, and I'm asking you man to man, not president to patch.
" He stepped in close, near enough that Knox could see the gray in his stubble and the fear under the love, naked, a thing Bishop showed almost no one.
"Whatever you are to the rest of the world — and I know what you are, son, I made half of it — to her you are a wall and nothing else.
You keep her breathing. You keep your distance.
That's the whole job. Tell me you hear me. "
Eight years of everything the man had given him stood up in Knox's chest and pressed against the back of his teeth.
The name. The brothers. The cut on his back.
The morning Bishop pulled him out of the worst version of himself and never once, in all that time, asked for a thing in return but loyalty.
Now he was asking. One thing. The only thing.
And it was the single thing in the world Knox had already half-spent without ever laying a finger on it.
"Yes, sir," Knox said.
And he meant it. Standing in the cedar smell with the man who'd saved his life, he meant every word with his whole chest. He meant to be a wall, to keep the bricks set and the mortar dry, to die before he failed the old man or failed her or became, with her, one inch of the thing his own father had been.
And he believed all of it. That was the part he'd turn over later, in the dark, when none of it held — that he hadn't lied to Bishop, not by a word. A man could mean a thing with the whole of his heart and still be dead wrong about what he was made of.
* * *
They didn't even ask her.
That was the splinter Zola couldn't dig out, hours after her father called to tell her how the rest of her life would run for the foreseeable future.
Not Zola, we need to sit down about your safety.
Not Zola, here are your options. Just her father's voice on the phone, gentle as it always was, gentle as a hand on the back of the neck, reading her the new shape of her days like a forecast off the radio.
Someone would be with her. All the time.
Starting tonight. It was settled. It had been settled in the room she'd never been let into, by men who loved her too much to let her sit at the table where they cut up her own life.
"For how long," she'd asked.
"Till it's handled, baby."
Which meant nothing, which meant forever, which was the only unit of time her father had ever counted anything in where she was concerned.
She'd hung up and stood in the middle of her own kitchen in the little carriage-house apartment it had taken her two years of trench warfare to be allowed to rent — the one thing in her life with her name and no man's on the lease — and she'd looked at the alarm panel by the door that Doc had wired in himself last spring, blinking its small green eye at her, and she'd understood all over again that the apartment had never really been hers either. It had only ever been a longer lead.
She thought about her childhood while she waited, pressing it the same as you press a bruise to see if it still hurts.
The friend's father who'd driven her to dance recitals for three years, who she'd found out at nineteen had been club security the whole time, a patched man playing carpool so a little girl would never know she was being guarded.
The prom she'd gone to with an "uncle" parked outside.
The semester at the community college her father had quietly funded a security contract around without ever telling her.
Her whole girlhood, she was learning in pieces even now, had been a set she walked through, every exit watched, every shadow already cleared by men she never saw, and they'd done it out of love, and that was exactly why she'd never been able to be angry at it cleanly. You can't fight a thing that hugs you.
The worst of it wasn't even the guarding.
It was what the guarding had quietly cost her without her noticing the bill.
She had almost no friends, and the few she had, the club had vetted — she'd figured that out too, late, the year her roommate Leticia died and Zola realized her father had run the girl's people before he ever let them share a dorm.
Every person who got close to her had been cleared first by men with her safety in mind, which meant she had never once in her life made a friend her father didn't approve of, never dated a man who hadn't been looked into, never built a single thing that was only hers.
The apartment. The nursing program. The basket on her desk.
That was the whole list. Twenty-seven years old and the list of things that belonged to her and nobody else fit on one hand, and every man who'd shrunk it had done it kissing the top of her head.
She'd tried to study while she waited and gotten nowhere, the same paragraph on cardiac arrest read four times and not once landing.
She'd put music on instead, the low warm neo-soul she kept for nights her head wouldn't quiet, and stood at the counter not cooking the dinner she wasn't hungry for, and let the bass hold her together while the clock crawled toward eight.
It was a small mutiny, the music. Out loud, in her own apartment, the one room of her life nobody got a vote in. She turned it up.