monsters did even worse things to fulfill their darkest desires.
Outside of the house of horrors that was your home wasn't much better. You were an American, but you couldn't change the incidental fact of your Chinese ancestry, passed down through genes by your parents. Of course some assholes believed that this is one nation under them and their skin color alone, and it wouldn't just be white kids who gave you at the very least funny looks that made you feel smaller and more alone inside as you walked down the halls of your school. Insecurity and ignorance that are the lifeblood of racism could never be limited to Caucasians. Even a couple of teachers looked at you with a measure of contempt, confused you in their bigoted minds with Japanese or even Vietnamese, depending on the origin of their hatred. You dreaded going to school, being tripped in the cafeteria when you carried your lunch tray, being followed by a pack of boys made bold by their numbers into a restroom. And every time it inevitably happened, every time a well-meaning teacher or hall monitor was not watching or if one of your few friends was not there to help you, you would have been reminded that YOU WERE DIFFERENT. You were hazed, insulted, jeered, slapped, and beaten. But no matter how much you dreaded school, you had the slight comfort to know it was better than...home.
Would living such a life have made you angry? Would it have made you so angry that one day, when you were fifteen, you beat the monster who called herself 'mother' to death? And when your 'father' came home, would you have also killed him? Would you have run, and then been arrested? Would you have been sent to a state-run facility with other juvenile offenders, many of whom were as bad as your parents? Would your life then shift to a constant fight-or-flight mode as you defended yourself against these wolves, often succeeding...but at other, more terrible times failing and then you would think to yourself that that it was a mixed blessing that you were still alive? And after the state released you at the age of eighteen...what then? Yes, perhaps you would have been angry. Angry with your birth parents for leaving you alone in a minefield called life. Angry with the ghosts of the monsters who took your childhood away from you. Angry with the world -- and everyone in it as a consequence -- for being so fucking cruel. Angry with any and all symbols and institutions of authority and rule of law. Angry with America, your home, God's Country, for you had been so beaten down in soul and temperament and identity that you didn't feel like this country was your home...that everything it stood for was one big joke. And you would have been angry with yourself for being a punk, for being so fucking WEAK.
That last thing you might have believed you could do something about. It would have taken years and your motivations would have remained unspoken to your teachers, but you learned the martial skills that would have made you strong. Given you the opportunity to exercise your anger, give it a target. What would your target have been? You would probably have decided it didn't matter. During your years of training you would have been noticed and then approached by a man working for a local Triad, and just like that you were prowling the streets with other young gangsters. You would have robbed, extorted, jacked, beaten, murdered and every other terrible thing to put the gang on top. But to be part of a group of street gangsters, while profitable, would have been too limiting for you. You would have gotten ambitious, desired to rise up in the underworld.
That was why Danny Choi left the Triads six years ago...but he lived to tell about it because he left them to join the family of Nico Roccoli. Also known as Boss Roccoli, leader of the most powerful crime family in Missouri and Illinois. And there Danny was, the most dangerous enforcer in the American Midwest, as he watched the inside of the club and secretly seethed with an anger that begged for release.
That was when the woman came in.
This immediately piqued Danny's interest: he knew for a fact those ethnocentric thugs
didn't care for anything or anyone outside of themselves. She proceeded forward into the showroom, leaving them behind. Through the smoky air, Danny noticed her eyes...
something in her eyes made him snap to full alert, and just like that he focused on nothing but this woman. She cast a glance to the stage and to the women dancing on it.
She settled on one dancer, a brunette with the stage name Delilah, who seemed to take her interest. For a moment Danny relaxed, but he told himself to stay alert and be ready for anything. Something about this woman made him apprehensive on a level he didn't want to admit...especially to himself.