My Biker Husband Is a Murder Suspect

Chapter 6 -The Hidden Account

The silence breaks when Cain's weight shifts off me.

"Wren. Wren, look at me."

I do. He's fine. Not a mark on him. Relief slams into me so hard I almost don't hear the second sound — a body hitting concrete, somewhere past the workbench.

I push up just enough to see.

Marsh is on the floor. Halloran's still got his gun raised, smoke curling off the barrel, his face pale in a way that tells me this isn't something he does often.

"He fired first," Halloran says, more to himself than to us. "He fired first."

Marsh isn't dead. Not yet. He's gasping, hand pressed to his shoulder, blood soaking through his fingers black in the bad light, and even shot, even bleeding, his eyes find mine across the garage floor like he's got one thing left he needs to say before anyone stops him.

"Cain didn't kill your brother," Marsh says, voice wet and thin. "But ask him what he did the night after. Ask him where the money actually went."

"Marsh—" Cain's voice has an edge to it I've never heard.

"Ask him, Wren." Marsh's eyes are losing focus, but his mouth keeps moving, vicious right up to the end. "Ask your hero where thirty-six thousand dollars of his own club's money disappeared to. Ask him whose name is on the account."

Halloran's already moving, radio up, calling for paramedics, but I can't look away from Cain.

He's gone very pale.

"Don't listen to him," Cain says. "He's bleeding out and he wants to take me down with him."

"Then tell me he's lying."

Cain doesn't answer fast enough. Just like he didn't answer fast enough in Marsh's office. I'm starting to understand that with Cain, the silence is always the truth, and the words that come after are just damage control.

"It's not what you think," he says.

"That's what people say right before it's exactly what I think."

Two hours later I'm sitting in a hospital hallway in a borrowed jacket that smells like Cain, giving a statement to a second detective while Halloran works a different room with Danny, and somewhere behind a closed door, surgeons are deciding whether Marsh lives long enough to be charged with murder.

Cain hasn't said a word to me since the garage.

He's three chairs down, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor like it owes him an answer. Every time I glance over, he's already watching me, and every time, he looks away first.

When my statement's done, I corner him in the corridor by the vending machines, because I am done waiting for him to decide when I'm allowed the truth.

"Tell me about the money."

He exhales slow, like he's been bracing for this exact sentence for hours.

"There was an account," he says. "Off the books. Club emergency fund — money set aside in case anyone ever needed to disappear fast. Witness protection money, basically, except for people who can't go to actual witness protection."

"And your name's on it."

"My name's on it because I'm the one who set it up. For Eli." His jaw tightens. "He came to me wanting out. I told him I'd help him vanish clean, no debt, no club, nothing tying him back here ever again. I moved thirty-six thousand dollars into that account so he'd have something to start over with."

The hallway tilts a little.

"You're telling me the missing money was never missing. You gave it to him."

"I gave it to him three days before he died," Cain says. "He never got to use it. It's still sitting in that account right now, untouched, because the only two people who knew it existed were him and me, and one of us is dead."

"Why didn't you tell anyone? Tell Halloran, tell me, tell anyone—"

"Because the second that account becomes part of an official investigation, it becomes evidence the club had a 'slush fund' for disappearing witnesses," Cain says. "Which means it becomes evidence I've been running my own operation under Marsh's nose for over a year. Which means even if Marsh goes down for murder, I go down right next to him for conspiracy."

"So you let me believe you might have killed Eli rather than admit you tried to save him."

"I let you doubt me for one night," Cain says, "because the truth would've put a federal target on both our backs before we even had Marsh in custody."

I want to be furious. Some smaller, exhausted part of me just wants to put my head down somewhere safe and stop being afraid for one single hour.

"There's more," Cain says, quieter now.

Of course there is. There's always more.

"That account isn't just sitting there," he says. "Someone tried to access it two days ago. Whoever it was failed — the security on it is good — but they tried, Wren, and the only two people who knew that account existed are you and me now."

My stomach drops. "Eli's dead. So who—"

"I don't know," Cain says. "But somebody else knew about that money. Somebody Eli must have told before he died."

He looks at me, and for the first time tonight, the fear on his face isn't about himself at all.

"And if they know about the account," he says, "there's a real chance they know exactly who you are, too."

That's when my phone buzzes in my pocket. An unknown number. A text, three words long, sent from someone who apparently already knows exactly where I am tonight.

I see you, Wren.