“I want you somewhere safer for a few days.”
“Define safer.” She sounds perturbed.
“A separate suite. Your own door. Key card access to ours. Same floor. We rotate walking you everywhere. We shift the behind-the-scenes schedule so you’re never alone in a room with a door that isn’t ours.”
“What are you talking about, Knox? I’m not the one who’s under threat here.”
“Not yet.” There’s a weight in my chest that makes it hard to breathe. “But he’s clearly not thinking clearly, and if anything happened to you…” Can’t breathe.
“I’m not running. I’m in this. You can’t sideline me because things get a little weird.”
“I’m not asking you to run. I’m asking you to keep moving with a better plan. You can be next door, if that one’s available. I just need you in a suite where only you and the hotel have access. The four of us have key cards to our suite. So does Quincy. So do some people from the label. That’s too many people with access to you, and people do stupid shit for money, Lou.” I swallow the knot in my throat. “Sagebrush is a part of our family. Seeing her like this…I can’t handle it if something happens to you too.”
She’s quiet, at first. “I’ll get a separate suite and key access. But I’m not hiding.”
Thank god. “Deal.”
I call the hotel and book a second suite on our floor under a quiet name. It’s two down from us. I tell security exactly who comes and goes and exactly who doesn’t. I let the front desk know we are picking up everything ourselves—no deliveries to our door or hers.
They don’t like it. I don’t care.
We spend the late afternoon at Sagebrush cleaning glass and logging everything missing. We add serials to a list and send it to the police. Houston walks the room, taking a second set of photos. Salem bolts a bar across the inside of the back door that you can’t defeat without making a lot of noise. I sweep and bag the glass. The scratches on the faders…I hate those lines more than the broken window.
Houston’s right. This was personal.
We call it at six and go back to the hotel. I keep my voice level when I brief Lou at the table. I share everything with her, and she nods through all of it. I think she’s almost as upset as we are.
The next morning Quincy calls at eight. He doesn’t waste my time. “I’m hearing from a lawyer who says Troy is considering an injunction claiming ownership of the group’s early ideas. He won’t win fast or easy, but he can make noise that will disrupt the album release.”
I breathe and write while he talks. The behind-the-scenes footage we’ve already captured shows dates and hands and faces doing the actual work for this album. That will help. But earlier work will require proof, and some of that was stolen from Sagebrush. That’s not the only studio we’ve recorded at, but it’s where we did our earliest work.
At noon, I check on Sagebrush and meet the glass installer. He measures and promises laminated panes in forty-eight hours. I pay a rush fee and add a tip. The guard logs a vendor who tried to walk in without calling. We adjust the policy: no one crosses the threshold without ID and approval.
I ask Lou to take a walk with me after lunch. We go down the back corridor and out to the loading bay so we can talk without being overheard. It’s hot out—Vegas—and we hear the traffic from the Strip, but otherwise, it’s nice out here.
“The guilt lives in my bones.” I rake a hand through my hair. “I keep thinking I can fix him if I just hold the right line long enough. I saw that footage, and all the old reflexes came back. Hide it. Explain it away. Cover for him until he stops.”
“You can’t?—”
“I didn’t. I’m done doing that. It still hurts.”
She listens without trying to patch it with words I don’t need. Then she says, “Guilt is wasted energy if you don’t pair it with a plan. You can’t fix him. You can fix the parts he breaks when he gets near you.”
I nod. “That’s what today is.”
The talk helped, but the day still feels off. Probably will for a while, I guess. The injunction threat sits in the air like weather. I don’t talk about it while the work is on the table. I pull Quincy into a call at seven and ask what we need to do to be ready.
He says, “Don’t throw a punch first. Build the defense file of proof of ownership so clean it looks like a museum. If he files, we answer without emotion. If he doesn’t, we never tweet a thing.”
After that, I help Lou move into her suite because that was the deal. After getting her things settled, we stop at her door. She looks at me like she has more to say and then doesn’t. She unlocks and steps in, and I wait in the hall until I hear the latch.
I should go. I don’t.
I knock once.
She opens the door again and leans in the frame. Her gaze is irritated, as she has been through the quick move. But her lips curve all the same. The contrast is strangely seductive. “Are you lost?”
“I keep hearing his voice when he was a kid asking for water after a set, and I want to hand it to him. I don’t know how to stop wanting to fix him.”
