My Biker Husband Is a Murder Suspect

Chapter 7 - The Ghost Named Rosa

I see you, Wren.

I show Cain the screen with a hand that won't stop shaking.

"Could be anyone," he says, but his voice doesn't sound like he believes that. He's already scanning the hallway, the waiting room, the parking lot through the glass doors like the message came with a face attached he's trying to find.

"Could be Danny," I say. "Trying to scare us. Cover himself."

"Danny's been in a room with two detectives for the last two hours. It's not Danny."

My phone buzzes again. Same unknown number.

Ask Cain about Rosa.

I look up at him before I even finish reading it out loud, and something happens to his face that I've genuinely never seen happen to it before. Not guilt. Not fear.

Grief.

"Who's Rosa?"

"Not here," he says, and for the first time since I've known him, his voice actually breaks. "Please. Not here."

He takes me to an all-night diner two blocks from the hospital, the kind of place with cracked vinyl booths and a waitress who doesn't ask questions, and he doesn't speak again until two coffees are sitting between us going cold.

"Rosa was my sister," he says.

The word was sits between us like a stone.

"She died six years ago. Before I was VP. Before any of this." His hands are wrapped so tight around the coffee mug his knuckles have gone white. "She was running from a man. Bad man. The kind the club used to deal with, back when Marsh still pretended to care about protecting people instead of just profiting off them."

"What happened?"

"I asked Marsh for help getting her out of the city. Same kind of help I gave Eli — money, a clean car, somewhere to disappear to." His eyes are somewhere far away now, somewhere I can't follow. "Marsh said he'd take care of it. Three days later her car went off Route 9."

The same road. The exact same road Eli's accident was staged on.

The diner goes very quiet around me.

"Cain. Are you telling me Marsh killed your sister too?"

"I didn't know. Not for six years. I told myself it was bad luck, same as I let myself believe about half this club's worst years, because believing Marsh was capable of murdering my own sister was a door I wasn't ready to open." His voice cracks down the middle. "Then Eli came to me wanting the exact same kind of help, on the exact same road, and I felt something twist in my chest that I'd spent six years refusing to look at directly."

"That's why you helped him so fast. That's why you set up the account."

"I told myself if I helped Eli disappear clean, it would be like undoing what happened to Rosa. Like I'd finally get it right." His eyes meet mine, wrecked open in a way that makes my chest physically ache. "I failed both times, Wren. Your brother and my sister died on the same stretch of road because I trusted the same man to keep them safe."

I reach across the table without deciding to. My hand finds his, and he holds onto it like it's the only solid thing left in the room.

"Why would someone bring up Rosa now?" I ask. "Tonight, of all nights?"

"Because somebody wants me destabilized," Cain says slowly, like the pieces are assembling themselves in real time. "Somebody who knows exactly which wound to reopen to make sure I can't think straight tonight."

"Somebody who knew about Rosa, knew about the account, knew where we'd be tonight—"

My phone buzzes a third time. We both go still.

Marsh isn't the only one who's been lying to you. Ask Cain what happened the night Rosa really died. Ask him whose idea the off-the-books account actually was. — A friend.

The mug slips from Cain's hand and cracks against the table.

"That's not possible," he says, but his face has gone the color of old ash. "Nobody knows that. Nobody alive knows that except—"

He stops himself.

"Except who, Cain?"

He doesn't answer. He's staring past me, out the diner's front window, at the dark parking lot beyond the glass, and when I follow his gaze I see a figure standing under the broken streetlamp at the edge of the lot, hood up, perfectly still, watching us through the window like they've been standing there long enough to read every word on both our faces.

Cain's already on his feet, chair scraping back hard enough to make the waitress look over.

"Stay here," he says.

"Cain, who is that?"

He doesn't answer me. He's already moving toward the door, and through the glass I watch the figure under the streetlamp finally move too — not running, not hiding, just turning, slow and deliberate, to walk straight toward him like they've been waiting their whole life for exactly this moment.

And right before the door swings shut behind him, cutting off whatever's about to happen in that parking lot from me completely, I catch one clear look at the hood falling back from the figure's face under the streetlight.

It's a woman.

And she looks exactly like the photograph of Rosa I caught a glimpse of once, years ago, on Cain's nightstand — the one he told me, the very first week I knew him, belonged to someone who'd been dead for six years.