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“Hi.” It would be good to speak more, possibly explain that I’m not selling magazine subscriptions.
“I’ve waited a long time for this.” A hesitant smile eases across her face and my lips turn down. Something isn’t right.
A man walks up behind her. He’s older, has gray hair, but what causes me to start backward in the same rhythm of my pounding heart is the black leather vest on his body.
There’s a honk. A long one. A loud one. The heel of my foot dips off the back of the stairs and when I pivot to run, my hands smack into the chest of a man. He’s Mom’s age and he has the same eyes and nose as her, but there’s a scar that slices along his cheek.
“Hi, Emily,” he says. “Why don’t you come in? I know Mom’s been dying to meet you.”
I swivel back to the woman, begging her with my eyes to let me go. The man behind her angles to respond to someone in the room and on the back of his vest are the words that cause me to tremble: The Riot Motorcycle Club.
“Come on.” The guy Mom’s age lays a foreboding arm around my shoulder. “Let’s catch up.”
Oz
WE’RE A FEW miles out from Emily and I can’t sit still. Eli’s pressed the truck to the max, but it’s still not fast enough.
“We would have been faster on the bikes,” I say.
I hate how calm Eli is. Since the moment Violet called and told me what had happened, he’s been too calm. His entire expression smoothed out like marble. “Emily’s not going to be in the condition to ride safely on the back of a bike.”
A deadly snake slithers inside me, raising its head as it coils tighter in my gut. “If you think they’re going to harm her, then why isn’t anyone else with us? Why the hell aren’t we calling the police?”
Eli slows at a stop sign, looks both ways as if we’re on a Sunday stroll, and then turns right. Even though we told Violet to go, she hasn’t. She’s stayed right where she called me from—a spot a few houses down from where Emily went inside.
He parks behind Violet and it pisses me off how unhurried he acts. Emily’s inside. Emily’s inside with the Riot and what really makes me mad is that Eli won’t tell me why. I informed him of the situation, he told me to get in the truck and we took off.
Eli didn’t tell anyone else. He didn’t call for backup. We drove for an hour and a half and until a few minutes ago, he stayed silent.
“Why aren’t we racing in?” I bite.
“Because Emily isn’t in danger. You and I might be. Even Violet isn’t in the clear, but they won’t harm Emily. Thirty bucks says she’s in there with milk and cookies.”
I don’t know how he figures that, but there are more important issues here. “How are we going to handle this?” The gun’s strapped to my back and I eye the one that’s on Eli’s hip. He’s a felon and legally he can’t carry, but that hasn’t stopped him.
Eli waves to the two men in Riot cuts that exit the house and watch the two of us. “We’re going to give them a few minutes to assess us and to let them figure out that we aren’t coming in fast and hard. Then we’ll walk up and knock on the front door.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Were you expecting to go in guns blazing? You and Emily watch too much TV.”
There’s no way this is real. “How did she end up on the Riot’s doorstep?”
Eli circles the keys on his finger. “Meg’s father is the head of the Riot.”
It’s like someone opened a trap door beneath me. “You’re fucking with me.”
“Wish I was. It’s a long story. Long enough that I’m not sure I can remember all the working parts, but here’s the short of it. The Riot deals with some nasty shit. Illegal is in their veins and Meg got hurt by them in the process. In high school, her parents sent Meg to live with a grandmother in Snowflake to finish out high school and to heal from some emotional wounds.”
“And she met you.”
There’s an aching touch to the smile trying to form on his lips. “Motorcycle clubs were what she’d known. Grown up with. It was natural that she gravitated to us, but then she figured out that we were different. That we weren’t like the Riot, and Meg’s life began to change. Her parents were pissed when they found out about me and Meg and then they went radioactive when they found out she was pregnant.”
With Emily.
“Olivia and Cyrus had already fallen in love with Meg and insisted she move in with us when we told them about the baby. With the club’s backing, we promised to protect Meg and Emily from her parents and from her parents’ club and that was the day battle lines were drawn.”
“Did the Riot know that the Terror existed before then?”
