Ride With Me

Chapter Sixteen

Knox rose.

He did it slowly, the way men move when the decision is already made and there is nothing left to weigh. His knees came off the asphalt, the same hands that had just run over Piper's arms and shoulders settling loose at his sides, and he looked down at her once. His voice came out flat and quiet, a stranger's voice.

"Don't move. Don't watch."

Then he turned, and the roar of the crowd died in stages around him—the people nearest going quiet first, the silence spreading outward in a wave until the strip was the quietest place in the city. Heat came off the blacktop in sheets. The air tasted of burned rubber and hot metal and the copper of blood, and somewhere behind him Piper lay on the asphalt, and he didn't look back. He couldn't. If he looked back and saw her down there, the quiet thing inside him would go loud, and he needed it cold.

Ryker had stopped fighting Diesel's grip. That was the first sign something was wrong—the man had been thrashing a second before, all bluster and rage, and then Knox stood up, and Ryker went still the way prey goes still, that one frozen second before the bolt drops. His eyes were huge behind the scratched visor of his helmet, his face sweat-slicked and gone the color of ash.

"Knox." Diesel's voice was low and careful, the voice you use on a dog that has slipped its chain. "Brother. Walk it off."

Knox walked.

The strip was forty yards of heat and oil-stained blacktop, and he crossed it like water, his boots making no sound he could hear over the drum of his own blood. A woman called his name, thin and questioning. A man started forward and thought better of it. The crowd parted around him like water around a stone, and he walked through the middle of it and saw none of it. He was looking at Ryker, at the wide eyes and the working mouth, and the distance between them was the only thing keeping the man alive.

"Look—look, man." Ryker's voice cracked on the second word. "She was in my way. I didn't mean—"

Knox's hand closed around the front of the helmet.

Not the chin strap. The whole shell, fingers digging into the vents, and he ripped it off Ryker's head in one motion —the strap snapping, the plastic scoring a red line down the side of his face as it came—and sent it spinning across the asphalt to clatter off a bike stand. Without the helmet, Ryker's fear was naked: the twitching mouth, the eyes that couldn't hold still, the way he kept trying to bring his hands up while Ben held them down.

"Knox—" Felix started, and his voice had nothing left in it, no humor, no edge. "Knox, man. Think."

Knox hit him.

It wasn't a punch the way men throw punches in a fight. There was no windup, no telegraph, no craft—his fist came up from his hip and met Ryker's face like it had been waiting for it all night, and the sound carried through the silence: a thick, wet crack, a bat meeting a side of beef. Ryker's head snapped back, and his nose went with a crunch that Ben and Diesel both heard. Their grips, previously clamped around Ryker, loosened in sheer, stunned disbelief.

They had all seen Knox fight. Every one of them had seen him fight—parking lots, back rooms, the kind of trouble that found men like him the way a magnet finds iron. But this wasn't fighting. Fighting had rules, even when it didn't have rules. This was a man taking something apart with his hands, and none of them had been ready for it. None of them had ever seen the quiet thing inside him loose before.

"Jesus Christ," Diesel's voice was raw, disbelieving.

Knox hit him again. The other side. Ryker's head whipped around, blood arcing from his nose in a dark spray across the blacktop. Ben’s hand, which had been on Knox’s shoulder, recoiled as if burned. Ryker sagged in Diesel's arms like a puppet with cut strings, and then Diesel, caught off guard by the sudden slackness, let him fall. Ryker hit the blacktop with a sickening thud, his body folding unnaturally.

"Knox. Knox, that's enough—" Diesel’s voice was strained, already trying to re-establish control.

But Knox’s fist came down a third time, and a fourth, and the rhythm of it was worse than the violence—the silence between blows, the way he reset his feet between them like a man working a job. There was no anger in his face. That was the thing none of them would be able to explain later, in the quiet of the truck on the way home. There was nothing at all in his face. He was simply breaking the man, methodically, and Ryker's face came apart in stages—the nose, then the mouth splitting open against his knuckles, then the cheekbone giving with a sound like stepping on ice.

Felix, who had been hovering, now surged forward, getting an arm around Knox's chest from behind. Knox barely registered it. He drove forward, dragging Felix with him, and landed another blow before Diesel, who had finally recovered from the shock, could even react. Ryker hit the blacktop again, this time with the finality of a sack of cement, his head bouncing once. Diesel threw himself onto Knox's back, both arms locked around his chest, his whole weight hauling him backward.

"Knox! Stop! You're going to kill him!" Diesel's voice was right at his ear, desperate, cracking on the last word. "You're gonna f*cking kill him!"

Knox didn't hear him. He was looking at Ryker—crumpled on the asphalt, blood pouring from his face, one hand lifted in a weak, useless defense—and the quiet thing inside him wanted more. It wanted to kneel on the man's chest and keep going, past the point where the face was no longer a face, until every thought that had ever passed through Ryker's head about touching Piper was gone from the world.

Ben was there, suddenly, in front of him—hands on Knox's shoulders, shoving, his own face white with a desperate urgency. Felix had his other arm wrenching. It took all three of them—Diesel locked around his chest from behind, Ben driving into his shoulders, Felix fighting his arm—and still Knox fought them, his boots dragging across the blacktop as they hauled him backward, and the crowd watched in a silence so complete that the buzz of the strip lights filled the whole night.

"Enough!" Ben's voice cracked on it. "Enough, Knox. She's watching. Piper is watching you."

The name stopped him. Not the violence. Not the three men straining against him. The name—Piper, in Ben's mouth—and Knox went still so suddenly that Diesel's weight nearly carried them both over. He stood in the middle of the strip with his chest heaving, his breath coming in ragged pulls that fogged the night air, his knuckles split open and wet, blood smeared up his forearms and across the front of his black shirt where there hadn't been any a minute before. His rings were slick with it, the silver glinting pink and dark under the strip lights.

Ten feet away, Ryker lay in a pool of his own blood, and the sound he was making was the worst thing Knox had ever heard—a wet, rattling cough that brought blood up with it, spattering his chin and the blacktop, his whole body curling around the pain of it like a struck animal. His face was a ruin: the nose crooked and pouring, the cheek split to the bone in one place, the mouth a mess of blood and broken teeth. He coughed again, and again, each one worse than the last.

Ben was already moving past Knox, dropping to one knee beside Ryker, one hand pressing the man's shoulder to the asphalt, the other coming up with his phone. Diesel was still holding Knox's arms, breathing hard, his eyes on the ruin on the ground.

"Ben," Diesel said, low. "He's swallowing blood."

"Get off me." Knox's voice was flat, scraped down to nothing. "Get your hands off me."

Diesel held on a second longer, reading him, then let go. Knox stood alone in the middle of the strip, and the crowd was a ring of white faces and raised phones, and somewhere far off a siren had started to rise—thin, then closer, then everywhere, red and blue light beginning to wash over the far end of the strip.

Knox looked at what he'd done. At Ryker. At the blood. At Ben crouched over him in the stroking light. Then he turned.

He walked back to Piper.

The crowd parted for him the way it had the first time, but nobody even breathed now. His boots made the same flat sound on the blacktop, and he crossed the distance faster than he had crossed it before, and when he reached her he dropped to his knees beside her—the same practiced hands that had checked her arms and shoulders a lifetime ago, and they were shaking. Smeared with another man's blood.

Piper's eyes were huge above the visor of her helmet. She was looking at him the way you look at something you thought you understood and suddenly don't—fear and wonder and something else all mixed, her good hand pressed flat to the asphalt like she was trying to hold the ground still.

He reached for her, stopped, looked at his own hand, and used the back of his wrist instead, the clean part, brushing a strand of raven hair off her cheek with a gentleness that was almost obscene after what they all just watched.

"I've got you," he said. His voice was rough, scraped raw. "You're okay. You're okay."

The red and blue light was on them now, sweeping across the strip, and men were shouting somewhere behind him, and Diesel was calling his name, urgent and sharp. Knox didn't look. He looked at Piper, and the cold thing in his face was gone, and what was left underneath it was worse—a man who had just shown her exactly what he was, no warning, no soft edges, and was waiting to see if she had flinched.

"Piper." Her name came out cracked, almost swallowed. "Say something."

She looked at him for a long moment. The fear was still there, in the set of her mouth, but something else was moving in behind it—something that looked like wonder, like a woman recalculating everything she thought she knew. Her good hand lifted off the asphalt, and instead of pushing him away, it found his wrist. The bloody one. Her fingers closed around it, warm and steady.

"I’m here," she said.

The sirens screamed. Men were shouting. Ryker coughed again somewhere behind them, wet and terrible, and Knox didn't turn around. He was looking at her hand on his wrist—small, pale, holding on—and the thing in his chest that had been cold for the last five minutes cracked down the middle.