He Cheated With My Cousin, So I Totaled a Biker President's Harley novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Road

The Black Anchor president reads the registration and wants to know if she is Holzer's plant. Her brother says she is his sister, and Betsy hands over her phone with the video herself. A county cruiser tops the hill.

My brother got off his bike and stood in the road with his helmet in his hand.

He looked at me, and then at the man holding my registration.

"Dread," Alec said. "She's my sister."

The man read the paper again. "Betsy Holzer."

"Betsy Toland," I said. It came out before I thought. "I was Toland until I made a mistake."

Nobody laughed.

Thirteen men stood around me in a loose ring, and not one of them looked like he had ever been sorry for anything.

The tall one still had my papers. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped off his fingers onto the asphalt.

"I'm Brogan McFadden," he said. "They call me Dread. You hit my bike."

"I know. I said I'd pay."

"You're married to Clint Holzer."

"For about an hour more."

A heavy man at the edge of the ring laughed through his nose. "A deputy's wife drives into the president on a Friday. Convenient."

"Shut up," Dread said, without turning his head.

The heavy man shut up.

"Who sent you?" Dread asked me.

"Nobody sent me. I was crying and I looked at my phone."

"Give it to me."

He held out his hand, scraped raw, and he did not say please.

I looked at my brother. Alec didn't look back.

"No," I said.

The ring moved a half step closer.

"I'll give it to you myself," I said. "Nobody takes it out of my hand today."

I opened the phone with my thumb, found the video, and held it up in front of his face.

"It's short," I said. "Watch all of it."

He watched.

I heard Candace's voice come out of the little speaker, small and breathy. Don't make this bigger than it is.

I heard my own voice answer, flat and quiet. Say it again.

Dread's face did not change. When it ended, he tapped the screen and played it a second time from the start.

"Is that your bed?" he asked.

"It was."

"Who is the woman?"

"My cousin. She sleeps on my couch." I swallowed. "Slept."

Somebody in the ring said a word under his breath that I won't write down.

Dread handed me the phone back, and his thumb left a streak of blood across the glass.

"Alec," he said. "Did you know she was married to Holzer?"

"I knew," my brother said. His voice was rough. "I didn't go to the wedding. I told you that."

"You told me you had family you didn't talk to. You didn't tell me the family was married to Holzer."

"She doesn't know what he is."

"What is he?" I said.

Silence.

Dread looked at my face, and for a moment it seemed he was deciding whether to answer.

"Three years ago," he said, "my brother Wade got picked up on a traffic stop in this county. He had a busted taillight and a bag in his glove box that wasn't his."

The wind pulled at his vest.

"Your husband made the arrest. Wade was in the holding cell for eleven hours. Then they called our mother and told her he'd hanged himself with his own shirt."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came.

"He was twenty-nine," Dread said. "He had a girl he was going to marry in the spring."

"I didn't know that," I said. "I swear to God, I didn't know."

"Nobody says it in front of the wives."

My eyes went to Alec. He was looking at the road.

"Did you know?" I asked him.

"Bets."

"Did you know that?"

"I knew Wade," my brother said quietly. "I rode with him."

The sun was going down behind the cornfields, and it was getting cold, and my forehead hurt.

I touched it, and my fingers came away red.

Dread dug in his saddlebag, which had burst open on the asphalt, and tossed me a clean shop rag.

"Hold that to it," he said. "Hard."

I held it. It smelled like oil and cedar.

"Nobody touches the Camaro," he told his men. "You, call the shop for the flatbed."

"It's evidence," the heavy man said. "Her husband's a cop."

"Her husband is the one I want to talk to, and I want the car where he can't take it."

"Dread."

"Call the shop."

The heavy man took out his phone.

I looked at the man who had just told me my husband might have killed his brother, and who was now giving me a rag for my head.

"Why are you helping me?" I asked.

"I'm not." He wrapped his own arm in a strip of his shirt. "I'm making sure you stay where I can see you."

Then, down Route 9, over the hill past the grain elevator, blue and red lights came flickering over the crest of the road.

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