Page 111 of Veil of Death and Shadow

The one night I spent so much energy trying desperately to forget.

Some truths were better kept secrets. Not just for my sake, but for Levi’s, too.

Plus, Sora and I had sworn to never speak of the details of that night again. Doing so now felt like a betrayal. There was also the fact that I’d killed someone that night and, if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t want Levi to see me as a murderer. As resistant as I was to let him close, I also didn’t want him to disappear on me altogether either.

“That one.” He pressed his thumb between my brows, smoothing out the line there, his touch surprisingly warm and gentle. “That’s the one I want. The one that’s making you make that face.”

“I can’t tell you that one,” I said, the words automatic. “Some secrets are good, necessary, even.”

“Yeah, I get that.” His lips turned down slightly. “How about you tell me the parts of it that you can? The parts that you want to tell me?”

Muscle memory had me wanting to immediately resist, to pluck something else, something trivial, from my experiences. But there was also a part of me that wanted to tell him something deep below the surface, something coveted like this particular truth. To actually give the diet friendship a chance—to test the limits of my curse and dare to imagine a future where it was, indeed, broken. Where I could build connections beyond just myself and Sora.

So, instead of fully unpacking the events of that night, something I rarely allowed myself to do even alone, I streamlined and tucked them into something that could be shared—but still something no one but Sora and I knew.

“Um—” I started, not entirely sure where to go from there. It was kind of an odd feeling. I’d pushed that night down so far, and for so long, that I didn’t really know how to pull it back up to the surface, how to craft it into something I could give words to. “Sora and I were in the same foster home for a few months,” I said, finding my in. “Usually, when you hear the awful stories about foster care, it’s the parents you hear about.” I shook my head. “But Cheryl and Joe were pretty decent for the most part. They fed us, housed us, made sure we went to school and did our homework. I’d definitely been in less comfortable set ups over the years—as had Sora. Their son, however, was the problem—there was something sadistic about him, something not quite . . . right.”

A muscle in Levi’s jaw pulsed and his expression grew hard, but he didn’t say anything, his eyes silently urging me to continue at my own pace.

I ran through the details of the night in my mind, mining for what I could share.

Rina lived in that house with us too, and at first, she’d been fascinated by their son, Blake. She may have even had a bit of a crush for a little while.

Blake loved the attention even though he was a few years older, just shy of eighteen at the time, and shouldn’t have been thinking about her in that way. But he did, and where her interest had been brief and fleeting, nothing more than a school-girl crush, he’d quickly grown obsessed with her.

When she rejected him, that—well, that was when everything started to change.

And it changed quickly.

Blake was used to getting whatever he wanted. He didn’t know how to process the word ‘no.’

He took the rejection out on Rina the best way he knew how, by fucking with the people she loved most—me and Sora.

His cruelty manifested in small ways at first. He’d lock one of us in the closet, or we’d wake up to find ourselves handcuffed to our beds, where he’d leave us for hours until his parents got home from work.

But after a month or two, his pranks got darker, more twisted.

“Things got bad,” I continued, glossing over the details. “At first his parents tried to ignore it. Whether they truly didn’t believe that he was capable of violence, or they just tried to convince themselves otherwise, I’m still not sure.” Parents always want to believe the best about their children—Cheryl and Joe were no different. But we were the ones who had to pay that price. “Eventually, though, things got bad enough that even they couldn’t pretend what was happening was okay. They sent him away for a while to stay with some extended family—hoping distance would make things better, that his obsession was justa temporary fixation that could be corrected through some distance and time. And in the meantime, they started looking into getting us set up with a different home.”

They obviously hadn’t explained that their son was the main reason for this sudden relocation, or they would have moved things along more quickly. Joe was running for a local office, and he blamed the intensity of his campaign on the need for a change—told them he and Cheryl could no longer provide the attention we needed. It was an unusually slow process because there wasn’t any urgency.

But he clearly underestimated the depths of Blake’s obsession with Rina. He must have casually mentioned that we were leaving to his son, because when Blake showed up that night, he was angrier than I’d ever seen him. Years later, and I could still remember with iron clarity, the bolt of fear that shot through me when I saw the look in his eyes. It was a darkness I’d never seen in another human before, a desire to inflict as much pain as possible.

Levi shifted slightly, until his leg was lined up against mine, the gentle warmth and pressure of him sinking into me.

I fidgeted with my nails and pressed them into the soft flesh of my palm, stopping when Levi clocked the movement, brows tipped in concern.

“Anxious habit,” I said. “Don’t even usually realize I’m doing it.”

He handed me the label he’d already peeled from the wine bottle. “I have those, too.”

I took the label and started peeling it into thin strips, as I let myself think about that night for the first time in a long time.

The first thing I remembered was waking to Sora’s screams. Joe was out, and Cheryl was an absurdly deep sleeper—aided, most nights, by a few pills.

When Rina and I tore from our rooms, we found Blake hovering over Sora in the hallway, a knife pressed against her abdomen, his eyes wild with rage. I could smell the alcohol on his breath, like it had perfumed the entire hall.

Rina screamed and ran towards him, using all her weight to pull his arm away from her sister, but he lashed out. He threw her into the corner of the wall, where it lined up with the banister, his knife lodging inside of her abdomen.

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