My Biker Husband Is a Murder Suspect

Chapter 3 - Marsh Offered Me a Deal

I don't tell Cain what Marsh offered me. Not at first.

I tell myself it's because I need time to think. The truth is closer to this: some part of me is scared that if I say it out loud, I'll watch his face for a reaction, and whatever I see there will either break my heart or ruin the only safe thing I have left.

I spend two days carrying the secret like a stone in my chest. Then it cracks me open anyway.

It happens in the garage, late, when everyone else has gone home and it's just me doing inventory and Cain doing whatever Cain does when he can't sleep, which is apparently exist near me with no explanation.

"You've been weird for two days," he says.

"I'm always weird."

"You're weird in a new way. What did Marsh say to you?"

I should lie. I'm not good at it, not with him, not with the way he looks at me like he's already three steps ahead of

whatever I'm about to say.

"He offered to erase my debt."

"How."

"By marrying you."

Cain goes very still. The kind of still that scares me more than anger would.

"He told you that."

"He told me you're stepping up to run the club and you need a wife who keeps her mouth shut. He told me it would

make my brother's debt disappear." My voice cracks on the word brother, because of course it does, because that's the part that matters. "He told me all I'd have to do is stop asking what really happened to Eli."

Something in Cain's expression breaks open, just for a second, raw enough that I see exactly how much this costs

him.

"He's using you," Cain says. "Same way he's used every piece on this board for thirty years. You're not a wife to

him. You're a problem he wants solved and a debt he wants collateralized in the same move."

"Is that all I'd be to you, too?"

The question comes out smaller than I mean it to.

Cain crosses the garage in four steps. He doesn't touch me. He stops close enough that I can feel the heat off him,

close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep looking at him, and the air between us goes thin and electric

and dangerous.

"You know it's not," he says, low. "And that's the problem. Because the second I admit that out loud, Marsh has

exactly the leverage he wants."

"Then don't admit it."

"I think it's a little late for that, Wren."

He's looking at my mouth like he's at war with himself, and I am one heartbeat away from closing the distance

myself, when his phone buzzes on the workbench, sharp and ugly in the quiet.

He glances at it. His whole face changes.

"What."

"It's Marsh," he says. "He wants both of us in his office. Now."

Marsh is waiting with a man I've never seen before — older, gray at the temples, a cop's posture even out of

uniform, sitting in the chair across from Marsh's desk like he's done this a hundred times.

"Wren," Marsh says, too pleasant, "this is Detective Halloran. He worked your brother's case."

My stomach drops.

"There's been a development," Halloran says. "We pulled new evidence on Eli's accident. Forensics flagged

something we missed the first time."

"What kind of something?"

Halloran looks at Marsh before he answers, which tells me everything about who's really running this conversation.

"The brake line on your brother's car was cut," he says. "Clean, deliberate cut. This wasn't an accident, Ms.

Calloway. Your brother was murdered."

The room tilts. I grab the edge of the desk because my legs have stopped being reliable.

"Then find out who did it," I say.

"We have a suspect," Halloran says.

And then he looks straight at Cain.

"Cain Reyes was the last person seen near that vehicle before it left the lot that night," Halloran says. "We have a

witness who puts him at the garage, alone, with access, twenty minutes before your brother drove off."

The world goes very far away. I look at Cain. I need him to laugh, to look outraged, to say something that makes this

absurd instead of possible.

He doesn't.

He goes white. And for one terrible second, before he gets his face back under control, I see something in his eyes

that isn't innocence.

It's guilt.

"Cain," I say, and my voice comes out as a whisper. "Tell me it isn't true."

He opens his mouth.

Marsh cuts in before he can speak, smooth as oil. "Detective, perhaps we should let Cain explain in private. Wren's

had a long week."

"No," I say. "I want to hear him say it. Right now. In front of me."

Cain looks at me like a man standing at the edge of something he can't take back.

"I was there that night," he says quietly. "I had access to that car. I'm not going to lie to you about that."

"But you didn't do it."

He doesn't answer right away, and that silence is the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life.

"Cain." My voice breaks completely now. "Did you kill my brother?"

He looks at me, and for the first time since I met him, I can't read his face at all.

"I need you to trust me," he says, "for about thirty more seconds, before I answer that."

Marsh's hand moves toward the drawer of his desk, slow and careless and deliberate all at once, and I realize, with

my heart in my throat, that I have no idea which one of these two men is about to lie to save himself — and which

one might already be reaching for a gun.