My Biker Husband Is a Murder Suspect

The ring is still on my finger when Dean throws the box of my stuff onto the sidewalk. "Get your sister's photo too," he says. "I don't want anything of yours touching anything of mine." A framed picture skids out of the box and cracks on the concrete. My brother Eli's smile splinters down the middle. "Dean. It's raining." "Should've thought about that before you went crying to my coach about my gambling." I didn't. I never said a word to his coach. But Dean's the kind of man who needs a villain, and tonight it's me. Behind him, his new teammates spill out of the house, laughing, drinks in hand. Six months ago that was my house too. My name was on the mailbox. Now I'm standing in the street in my socks because he didn't even give me time to find my shoes. "Dean, please. I have nowhere to go." "Should've married someone who actually loved you, then." The door slams. The porch light clicks off like a period at the end of a sentence. I stand there in the rain with a box of broken photo frames and four hundred dollars in my checking account, and I let myself cry for exactly ten seconds, because that's all I can afford right now. Then I pick up the box and I walk. The only place I have left is the garage on Halsey Street. I hate that it's the only place. I hate that I know the address by heart, that I know which door doesn't stick, that I know the smell of motor oil and cigarette smoke better than I know my own apartment, because I don't have an apartment anymore. The Sons of Hollow Creek own three blocks of this city. They own the garage, the bar next to it, and apparently, now, a chunk of what's left of my family. Eli owed them money before he died. Forty thousand dollars of money I didn't know about until a man named Marsh sat across from me at the funeral reception and told me, very politely, that debts don't die with the person who made them. I've been working it off for two months. Books. Inventory. Whatever they need that doesn't require getting on the back of a bike. Tonight I just need somewhere dry. The bar's still open. Of course it is. It's always open. I push through the door dripping rainwater and a dozen heads turn, and I want to disappear, but there's nowhere left to disappear to. That's when I see him. Cain Reyes is sitting at the end of the bar like he owns the air in the room, because he basically does. VP of the club. The man everyone says will run Hollow Creek in another year, when Marsh finally steps back. He's got a tattoo crawling up his neck and a face that should come with a warning label, and the first time I met him I told myself I would never, under any circumstances, look at him the way I'm looking at him right now. He looks up. Takes in the rain, the box under my arm, my ruined makeup. "Your ex throw you out?" "How did you know that?" "Because you've got a wedding ring on a hand that's not wearing a wedding band anymore, and you're soaked through and carrying a box like it's the last thing you own." I set the box down on the bar like that's a normal thing to do. "It is the last thing I own." Something shifts in his face. Not pity. I'd have walked right back out into the rain if it was pity. Something closer to recognition. "Marsh isn't here," he says. "But you can sit. Dry off. Nobody's going to bother you tonight." "Why do you care?" He doesn't answer right away. He just looks at me the way he looked at me the very first day I walked in here owing money I didn't ask for, like he's trying to solve something. "I don't," he says, finally. "I just don't like watching people get rained on twice in one night." I don't know what that means, but I sit. He slides a towel across the bar without being asked, and our fingers brush when I take it, and it's stupid, it's so stupid, that something in my chest goes quiet for the first time in hours. "You knew my brother," I say. I don't know why I say it. Maybe because I'm tired of being the only one in every room who remembers Eli was a person and not just a number on a ledger. Cain's hand stops on the bar. It's small. A half-second. If I weren't trained to watch men's faces for the moment before they lie, I'd have missed it completely. "Everybody knew Eli," he says. "Good kid." "You sound like you knew him better than 'good kid.'" "Drink your coffee, Wren." He never told me his coffee order. He never asked mine, either. He just knows I take it black, no sugar, same way I have every single time I've come in here for two months. I'm still trying to figure out how he knows that when Marsh walks in, takes one look at me sitting at Cain's end of the bar, and goes very, very still. "Cain," he says, quiet and even, "a word." Cain doesn't move right away. He looks at me first, like he's checking I'm okay, and that look does something dangerous to the careful wall I've spent two months building around my heart. Then he stands, and as he passes behind me, he leans down just enough that only I can hear him. "Don't trust anything Marsh tells you about your brother." He's gone before I can ask what that's supposed to mean.