I planned the whole memorial myself. I even tested the coffee urn twice. What I didn't plan for was the widow standing up to thank the one man who'd been lying to me for a year.

My name is June Cross, and I keep the books for the Hollow Creek Motorcycle Club. Every dollar, every run, every debt this outfit owes — it goes through my hands in my own blue ink. I'm the one who buried my brother without crying because somebody had to order the pallbearers' gloves. I'm the one who gave my husband a whole year of grief, give him room while he left our bed at midnight and came home smelling like cold air.

Then Abel's dead best friend's widow stood up at the memorial and said his name like it meant something.

And nobody in that room looked surprised. Nobody but me.

So I did what I do. I opened the books. And what I found wasn't just a husband on somebody else's porch at two in the morning for eleven straight months. It was worse. It was every one of those nights logged as a club run — in my handwriting. Because they didn't just let it happen. They took a pen, and they ran it straight through the one thing I'd never think to doubt. My own records. They made me the filing cabinet for the lie.

Now the men who spent nine years of my trust want me back at the desk. My husband won't beg — he's too smart for that, and I told him words are the cheapest thing he owns. He just keeps showing up in the dark, fixing what's broken, asking for nothing, paying down a debt I never invoiced.

But here's the part that's mine, the part none of them get to touch. My brother said something before that road took him. Three sentences. And there's exactly one man alive who heard them — the same man who carried them around for fifteen months and never once brought them to my door.

I know why the club hid the affair.

I don't yet know why my husband hid my brother's last words.

And I'm not sure which betrayal I'll never forgive.

A slow-burn, emotionally brutal MC romance about a grief that got buried alive, a marriage that has to be rebuilt in daylight, and a club that finally learns the difference between protecting a woman and spending her. Scarred, honest, and paid in full. No cheating you can't come back from — and no forgiveness that comes cheap.

DELLA RHODES

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