Little Dark Secret (Storm's Soldier Book 2) by Paige Notaro Read Free Book Online

always seemed to end with me lighting the candle and then burning myself out.
    Two weeks. That’s how long this relationship had lasted. Two and a half weeks if I was being generous.
    No, I wasn’t going to be generous. I was too generous with myself. That’s how I ended up dating a freaking racist. Oh, he could call himself whatever he wanted, but that’s what he and his family stood for.
    I’d thought he was so different. He was a family man. He was loyal. He was protective. Turned out, that all made him more messed up than ever.
    How had I missed the signs? All I had seen was a tall, hot man and gone wet. I had even ignored the obvious violence in his history. That said so much about me, none of it good.
    God, what a screw-up I was.
    I counted the birds croaking outside the open window. These weren’t local birds. They were visitors on their way south, maybe to Florida, some maybe even as far as South America.
    Later, they would come right back along their path. Every year, like clockwork, they made that journey. I had only done it once and I had lost something at each stop. First my childhood home, then my father himself. What did I have left to lose here? My future, maybe.
    I wiped tears out of my eyes, just thinking about the story I had told Calix last night. The words hadn’t captured an ounce of how it felt. They couldn’t capture a shadow of the memory that still lay fresh in my mind.
    It had happened on a bright, cloudless day, just before noon. We were walking past an abandoned parking lot on the cracked sidewalk. Our neighborhood in Miami wasn’t nice, but it should have been safe at the time. My father was dressed in his Sunday striped button-down and tan slacks, mouthing the grocery list in Spanish. I was buried in whatever passed for a cellphone back then, texting friends.
    I didn’t even notice a thing until my father roughly shoved me behind him. I peeked out and saw three men sauntering up, filling the whole sidewalk. In Caracas, we would have run if young men approached us so steadily. My father had given up his good government job, and taken us away from my parent’s childhood suburb to escape this sort of stuff.
    It found us anyway.
    I hadn’t seen what happened, just my father standing like a tall plantain tree, blocking me from the sight of the men huddled around him. There had been a low, almost casual request for money, then my father’s soft murmur of assent. His hand swiped down for his wallet.
    Once it was out, the men’s shadows moved away. I had been trembling the whole time. I just wanted my father to wrap my arms around me and tell me it was over.
    Instead, he grunted. It was a wrong sound for a good man to die to. A last set of footsteps had scraped away hastily.
    My father turned to me. A dark red was spreading rapidly across the lines of his shirt. He had clasped my hand. His always-so-calm mahogany face was twisted in deep sorrow.
    It was like he could see what this would do to me.
    I ran to the store for help, but by the time we called the police and came back, he was unconscious. By the time we got to the hospital, he was dead.
    I could still feel the pulse fading from his grip as I held it in the cold metal interior of the ambulance. It had been faint, and then it was gone from the world completely.
    I blinked backed the tears, but there were only a few. Usually that memory turned my cheeks into waterfalls. Now, what water came was hot and sparse, like a desert creek. I wasn’t sad. I was disappointed.
    I’d told Calix the story to show him how it hadn’t broken me. But, it had. It was so clear now. Deep down, I had always been looking for a man who would not have died that day. Who could have faced those men and broken them.
    Calix would have survived. He might even enjoy breaking some Latino skulls. Is that what Papá would have wanted for me?
    The whole relationship had been a waste. I’d been wallowing in it and others just the same my whole adult life. Enough was