Read Little Dark Secret (Storm's Soldier Book 2) for Free Online

family,” she said harshly. “I probably shouldn’t, but I’ll give that to you. But actions are easy to change. Can you change your mind so easy?”
    The corner walls focused her fury and hung it like a cloud over my ears. A couple people came in holding trays and gave us nervous looks before sitting on the other side of the room.
    “No,” I said. “You can’t.”
    She blinked, dimming the sear of her eyes a bit. “So you’re still in agreement with your racist biker friends? The Storm Soldiers or whatever?”
    “No. I mean that my ideas have been diverging from theirs for a long time.”
    “And what ideas are those, Calix?”
    “Violence.” I hung my head. “That’s all the Storm’s Soldiers are about. I can see that clearly now. I joined the army hoping to fix what was broken in them. Instead I came back to find that they’d rebuilt the pieces into something I could not support. I only abandoned them recently, but I left them mentally long ago.”
    “We’re not talking about violence,” she said sharply. “You know I meant race. It sounds like your views didn’t change an inch if you came back looking to fix your old club.”
    I studied my own hands, the pale of my palms despite the darkness of my tan on the other side. I might be ok living with two different worlds in my head. Of course, Rosa wouldn’t. This day had always been coming.
    “They did,” I said. “Of course, they did. The army opened me up the world. The Soldiers and I might have gone our separate ways no matter who they were.”
    “What exactly were you hoping to turn them back into? Were they just some sweet, little racist biker gang at some point?”
    “They’re not racist,” I said, out of years of saying it.
    Then I thought back to the men I knew inside: Homer and Thurgood and all the rest. Most would be fine even with perpetrating genocide. My father and I had laid down principles, but their violence had infected those along with everything else.
    Rosa waited, eerily silent. I knew my words mattered.
    “They were not meant to be racist,” I said. “The club was founded on white nationalism.”
    Those were not the right words. Rosa’s tiny nostrils blared smoke. ”What the hell difference does that make?”
    “It wasn’t about putting people down. It was about preserving a way of life.”
    “A life of racism. Of exclusion.”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “It’s about…” I sighed.
    All the words I could have used had come straight from my father’s mouth. I had no idea anymore what exact thing we were trying to preserve. I looked at Rosa and saw I had an inch of rope left. I had to find a deeper truth to all this. One that I could still believe in.
    “It was about honoring my mother’s death,” I said, glumly.
    Her face softened. “What do you mean? How does this have anything to do with your mother’s murder?”
    I thought to the image of the gas station, a broken father, red and blue flashes on dark windows.
    “She was killed in downtown Atlanta,” I said. “She and my little brother had pulled in to a gas station just as someone robbed the place. The guy killed her trying to take her car, then saw my brother in the backseat, panicked and ran away.”
    “That’s awful.”
    I shook my head. “She was supposed to me pick me up late after class, but my father got me earlier that day. I would have been in the front if I had been there. The robber would have seen me before shooting. We probably wouldn’t even be in that gas station.”
    Rosa’s lips lay shut now, and she shook her head. Her hand edged toward mine on the table, but it didn’t reach it.
    “That’s awful,” she said, “But I don’t see how that would lead you to becoming what you are.”
    “The guy that killed her was black.”
    The words sounded suddenly feeble. Rosa’s face turned and I struggled to get more out. “The part of downtown she was in was dangerous at night. My father had always told her to avoid it. I was with him at