Chapter 2 - The Biker VP Let Me Stay
1044 Words
I don't sleep. I spend the night on the cot in the back office because Marsh tells me, flatly, that's where I'm staying until further notice, and I'm too tired and too out of options to argue.
Every time I close my eyes I hear Cain's voice. Don't trust anything Marsh tells you about your brother.
By morning I've decided three things. One, I'm going to find out what he meant. Two, I'm not going to let Marsh see that it shook me. Three, I am absolutely not going to think about the way Cain's hand felt brushing mine over a bar towel.
I fail at number three almost immediately.
He's in the garage when I come out, sleeves pushed up, arms deep in the guts of a bike that isn't his, and the
morning light through the bay door makes him look like something out of a magazine I'd be embarrassed to admit I
read.
"You look like hell," he says, without looking up.
"Thank you. You look like you slept in your clothes."
"I did."
That gets a half-smile out of him, fast and gone, like he doesn't trust himself to keep it. I file that away. Cain Reyes doesn't smile easy. I want to know what it costs him.
"Tell me what you meant. Last night."
He sets down the wrench. Wipes his hands on a rag slow enough that I know he's buying time.
"Forget I said it."
"My brother is dead, Cain. I don't get to forget anything about him."
That lands. I watch it land. His jaw goes tight.
"Eli came to me three weeks before he died," he says finally. "Wanted out of the club's books. Said he had a way to
pay it all off clean and walk."
My heart is suddenly very loud in my ears. "What way?"
"He didn't say. He just said he needed time, and he needed Marsh to not find out he was trying to leave."
"Why does that matter?"
Cain looks at me for a long beat, like he's deciding how much rope to hand a woman standing at the edge of a cliff.
"Because two weeks later he was dead in a car that the cops ruled an accident," he says. "And I've never once
believed that."
The garage goes very quiet. Somewhere behind me a radio is playing something cheerful and tinny and completely
wrong for this moment.
"You think someone killed him."
"I think your brother was scared of something the week before he died, and I think whatever scared him is the
reason Marsh showed up at his funeral with a number in his hand instead of a condolence."
I have spent two months telling myself Eli's death was just bad luck. Wet road. Bad tires. A boy who liked to drive
too fast paying for it the way reckless boys sometimes do.
I don't know how to hold the other version of the story Cain's handing me. It doesn't fit in my hands. It's too heavy.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you keep looking at me like I'm someone you can trust," he says, "and I'd rather you know everything I
know before you decide that for sure."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
The door to the office bangs open and Marsh fills the frame like he's been listening at the worst possible moment, and maybe he has.
"Wren. My office. Now."
Cain's eyes flick to mine. Something passes between us, fast, wordless — be careful — and then he's back to the
bike like none of this happened, like he didn't just hand me a grenade and walk away before it went off.
Marsh's office smells like old cigars and older secrets.
"You're getting comfortable with my VP," he says, not sitting, which means this is meant to feel like a threat.
"He gave me coffee."
"He gave you a story, is what I hear." Marsh's eyes are flat, unreadable, the eyes of a man who has spent thirty
years making sure nobody reads him right. "Cain likes to play hero with pretty things that walk into this club broken. You're not the first. You won't be the last."
"What happened to my brother?"
His face doesn't move, but something behind it does. Just for a second.
"Your brother got in a car after too many drinks and didn't make the turn on Route 9. That's what happened to your
brother."
"That's not what Cain says."
"Cain says a lot of things to women he wants in his bed." Marsh leans forward, slow, deliberate. "I'd be careful,
Wren. Whatever he's telling you, ask yourself why a man who's spent his whole life lying for a living suddenly wants
you to believe him."
I want to argue. I want to defend Cain, which terrifies me more than anything Marsh has said so far, because I have
known this man for fourteen hours and I am already standing here ready to fight for him.
"You still owe this club thirty-six thousand dollars," Marsh says, switching tracks so fast it's clearly deliberate. "I'd
focus on that, if I were you. Not bedtime stories from a man who'll forget your name the second he's bored."
He slides a folder across the desk. Inside is a payment schedule with numbers so far beyond what I can ever make
at a bar that my stomach drops straight through the floor.
"This is impossible."
"There's another way," Marsh says, and something in his voice changes, gets softer, more careful, the way men get
right before they ask you for something you don't want to give. "Cain's stepping up to run this club in a year. He needs a wife who looks good next to him and keeps her mouth shut about club business."
I go cold all over. "You're not asking what I think you're asking."
"I'm telling you there's a way to erase that number completely," Marsh says. "All you'd have to do is marry the man
you're already half in love with."
He smiles like he's just handed me a gift instead of a cage.
"All you'd have to do," he says, "is not ask him what really happened to your brother."
- Writer
