My Biker Husband Is a Murder Suspect

Chapter 12 - Final Reckoning

"Which airline," Cain says, already moving.

He doesn't ask me. He asks Rosa, directly, and Rosa gives him the information like she's been waiting for someone to take the wheel since she stepped out from under that streetlamp — gate, terminal, the flight number, ninety-one minutes and counting.

I put her on speaker. We're already moving.

"He's travelling under his own name," Rosa says through the phone. "That's either confidence or stupidity and I can't tell which. He booked it from the team hotel — he's been staying there instead of his house for the past week."

"Since Marsh got shot," I say.

"Since two days before that. He saw which way the wind was turning." A pause. "He's not running blind. He has a plan."

"Then we make sure the plan doesn't work," Cain says.

"Halloran should be making the arrest," I say. "Not us."

"Halloran had the documentation for five months and did nothing," Cain says. "I'm not trusting him to move in the next ninety minutes."

"Rosa." I lean toward the phone. "Is there anyone else? Federal? Anyone who can intercept him at the airport legally?"

"I've already sent the recording to the federal tip line with a timestamp and my sworn statement attached," Rosa says. "But federal response time at this hour, at a regional airport, for a warrant that doesn't exist yet—"

"Won't make it," I finish.

"It might. Might not." Her voice is careful. "What I can do is make a call to someone at the airport who owes me a favor. Delay his boarding by twenty minutes, maybe thirty. I can't stop him. I can slow him down."

"Do it," Cain says.

"There's something else." Rosa goes quiet for a second in a way that feels like someone choosing which grenade to mention. "Dean's not travelling alone. The booking shows two seats."

"Who's with him?"

Another pause. Longer.

"The second passenger," Rosa says, "is listed as a Marcus Webb."

Cain's whole body goes rigid beside me.

"Say that again," he says.

"Marcus Webb. He's—"

"He's my lieutenant," Cain says. "The one Dean's original debt was registered to."

The car is very quiet for about four seconds.

"Your lieutenant is running with my ex-husband," I say.

"My lieutenant knew about Dean's debt. Which means my lieutenant knew about the transfer to Marsh's ledger." Cain's voice has dropped into something cold and absolutely controlled. "Which means Marcus has been feeding information between Dean and Marsh for three years, inside my own operation, and I never saw it."

"Cain—"

"He's been in my house," Cain says, and for the first time since I've known him, genuine fury comes through — not the controlled, directed kind, but something animal and raw. "He's been at my table. He was at Rosa's memorial."

He said that last part so quietly I almost miss it.

"He stood at your sister's memorial," I say.

"Knowing exactly what happened to her." He stops. He gets his face back under control in a way that looks like it costs everything he has. "Okay. Here's what we're doing."

He's talking to Rosa now, voice back to flat and focused.

"Call your airport contact. Get us the delay. Then get yourself somewhere safe and stay there — do not come to that terminal."

"Cain, I've been keeping myself safe for six years—"

"I know. Do it anyway. Please." The last word is different from the rest of the sentence — smaller, rougher, all the grief he's not dealing with right now packed into one syllable. "Please, Rosa."

A beat.

"Twenty minutes," she says. "That's what I can get you."

She hangs up.

We drive. The city is brightening fast, that flat grey pre-dawn giving way to the dirty gold of actual morning, and the airport is twenty-two minutes from here.

"He was the one watching," I say. "Marcus. He's the one who saw Eli and Rosa planning to run together. He told Marsh."

"And then stood back and collected from both sides while Marsh cleaned it up," Cain says. "He's been a double ledger for years. One column for me, one for Marsh, and nobody ever looked at the books hard enough to find the overlap."

"Until Marsh started talking."

"Marsh doesn't know about Marcus," Cain says. "Whatever Marsh is giving Halloran, it's coming from his side of the ledger. He probably never knew Marcus was the original source."

"So Marcus is the one person who hasn't been touched yet."

"Was," Cain says. "Past tense."

We hit the airport approach road. Long-term parking, short-term, departures sign lit up green in the grey morning. Cain pulls into short-term without slowing down, takes the ticket from the machine, parks in the first available space, and we're moving before the engine stops ticking.

Inside, departures board. I find it fast — Dean's airline, his gate, his flight still showing on time because Rosa's contact hasn't moved yet or the delay hasn't landed in the system.

"Gate fourteen," I say. "Security checkpoint B."

We don't have boarding passes. We can't get past security.

I'm already thinking through it when Cain says: "I have a TSA contact."

I look at him.

"I know everybody in this city," he says, without apology. "Give me ninety seconds."

He steps aside with his phone. I scan the departures hall — early-morning travelers, rolling bags, a family with too much luggage, a man in a suit reading something on his phone—

Dean.

He's standing forty feet from the security line. He hasn't checked in yet. He's got a single carry-on and his phone in his hand, and he looks the same way he always looks — put together, at ease, the kind of man who moves through the world like it was built to accommodate him — and I have never in my life wanted to break something more than I want to break that composure right now.

He hasn't seen me.

Beside him, a step behind, stands a man I recognize from the club. Not from any specific conversation — just a face that was always in the background of the garage, always nearby when Marsh was present. Marcus Webb. Mid-thirties, lean, the careful stillness of someone who has survived this long by being very good at being forgettable.

He sees me first.

And for one second, before he can manage it, I see exactly how afraid he is.

Then he leans toward Dean and says something I can't hear from here.

Dean's head turns.

Three years of marriage. Three years of a life I thought I understood. He looks at me across the departures hall of the Hollow Creek regional airport at six-seventeen in the morning, and his expression goes through three things fast — recognition, calculation, and then something I never once saw on his face in all the years I was married to him.

Fear.

"Dean," I say, not loud, not a shout, just his name dropped into the space between us like a weight.

He doesn't run. He's smarter than that. He just stands there and waits to see what I've got, and I realize, with a cold clarity that surprises me, that I've spent three years being afraid of disappointing this man, and standing here with Eli's voice loaded on my phone and Rosa's photograph in my jacket pocket and Cain three steps behind me, I am not afraid of him at all.

Not even slightly.

"We need to talk," I say. "Right now. Before that security line."

Dean glances at Marcus. Something passes between them.

Then Marcus reaches slowly into his jacket.

And Cain's hand clamps down on my arm and pulls me sideways, hard, just as the sound of shattering glass explodes somewhere above our heads and the departures hall erupts into screaming.

But it's not a gun Marcus pulls from his jacket.

It's a phone. And whatever is on its screen, when he holds it up to show Cain, is enough to make Cain go completely, catastrophically still.

"Tell her to walk away," Marcus says, low and conversational above the chaos. "Or I make one call and what's left of your operation burns to the ground tonight. Every location. Every asset. Every name."

He smiles. It doesn't reach anything.

"I've been preparing that call," Marcus says, "for three years."