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?”

“Maybe, who the fuck knows,” answers Eli. “We were starting to branch out into other states, but we were still flying under the radar. When the club backed Meg, the Riot became very aware of us. The Riot was pissed we never asked their permission to form, never asked for their permission to ride, and we sure as hell didn’t have their permission to keep their daughter and granddaughter.”

“How did they react to that?” I ask.

“For two years it never stopped. Our guys would be hanging out at bars and the Riot would hunt them down and beat the hell out of them. It became a game to them to see how many of our cuts they could collect and hang on their walls. They’d try to run our guys off the road. Cause problems for us at every turn.

“It took a toll on me and a bigger one on Meg. Twice she told me she was going to leave. She packed her and Emily’s stuff, but both times I talked her down. Then one night she got a phone call from her brother, asking if he could meet with her. Meet his niece. He told Meg it was a peace offering.”

I lower my head. Even I know nothing good would have come out of that.

“Meg went, not telling me because your dad had been beaten up bad the night before and I was at the hospital watching his back. Meg thought she could fix everything.”

Eli trails off and my hand tightens into a fist. I’ve never heard this. I’ve never heard that my father was taken down by the Riot so badly he was hospitalized. “What happened?”

“The bastard tried to take Emily. He hit Meg. Multiple times. Her own fucking brother hit her...in front of my daughter. Meg screamed and people heard her, so she and Emily got away, but then Meg came home and I saw the bruises on her body and I saw the terror on Emily’s face.”

I close my eyes. The rage I had felt the night before when I saw that guy grabbing Emily courses through me. “You went after him.”

Pure anger flashes from Eli’s dark eyes. “Fuck yeah, I did. That bastard hurt the woman I loved and my child. His club had sent my best friend to the hospital. Cyrus and the Terror wanted to wait a few days for me to calm down and then vote on how to handle this in Church. I wanted retaliation because every single time we called the police and the Riot faced a judge they got a slap on the hand because the police couldn’t or wouldn’t prove shit.”

This is what I was raised to believe: that Emily’s uncle had hit Meg and Eli had gone after him. They left out the part where this was linked to the Riot. They left out that Emily had always been a target. I was also raised to believe that... “Meg snitched. Dad said that Meg was the one that ratted you out.”

“She did. She told me that if I went after her family in retaliation then I was no better than them. She told me up front that she’d call the police on me and that she’d leave with Emily. Meg knew me. She knew how mad I was and she knew her brother. She knew one of us was going to end up dead and she couldn’t live with me dying. She also knew I couldn’t live with being a killer so when I left to meet her brother, she called the police.”