The President's Old Lady

*You were in the office last night.* Cassie does not ask it as a question. She stands in the garage doorway with her arms crossed, watching the prospect wipe grease off a socket wrench while the morning light comes through the bay doors in hard yellow slabs. She saw him. The filing cabinet was open. Shane Delacroix has an answer ready. He was looking for a crescent wrench, and Jack keeps a toolbox in the office. Jack also keeps a toolbox in the garage, right where Shane is standing. She slaps him. He catches her wrist before the second swing, his thumb on her pulse point like he is counting her heartbeats, and then Jack is in the side door telling her to let it go. Jack Hollister is president of the Devil's Warhorses. He is twenty years older than Cassie, and she is his old lady, which buys her a chair at his right hand and no answers at all. So she goes looking for them herself, with a bobby pin she keeps in her hair because Old Man Preacher taught her never to walk into a situation without a tool for the lock. What she finds first is on a bleeding man in a motel with no name, while she has a needle in her hand and his blood on her wrists. Under the serpent ink, something that should not be there. *It's a fucking federal tattoo.* What she finds after that is worse, and it is all Jack's: fentanyl moving through the Warhorses for the Iron Serpents, a brother of the club who is dirty, and a signed agreement between Jack Hollister and a man named Victor Martell with a clause about incident resolution *that read like a euphemism for murder.* Shane is not chasing the club for its own sake. He is chasing the pipeline above it, and the men who killed his brother Dom. And Cassie has to decide whether to use the phone in her hand or drop it in the toilet and go back to being exactly what her cut says she is. A dark motorcycle club romance about an undercover agent, an old man of a club trying to save something that existed before the money, and a woman who has spent years seated beside a man she is going to have to help bury. The romance is closed-door.