The night we buried my brother, they gave my chair to another woman.
My name is Marlowe Cassidy. I keep the Kingsnakes' books, their secrets, and most nights their whole world standing while it falls apart around me. My husband wears the president's patch. I wear the quiet. That was always the deal.
Then Danny died on a run he never should have taken alone.
They called it an accident — a good man, a bad road, thirty feet of desert between his body and his bike. But my brother didn't ride alone. Not ever. And in the weeks before the end, he came to me with questions that didn't add up: how the club really moves its money, which meetings my husband keeps off the books. I waved him off. I told him it was nothing.
It was the last thing I ever said to him.
Now the soft-eyed girl in my seat watches me a little too closely. My husband can't hold my eyes. And the man who has loved me from ten feet away for eleven years is the only one left who won't lie to me.
A war is coming for the Kingsnakes. Someone at our own table already lit the fuse.
And the wife they all underestimated is the one holding the answers — and the match.
