Page 127 of Veil of Death and Shadow

“Good. Then it won’t be a bad surprise.”

I snorted, then leaned back, feeling suddenly exhausted and deeply grateful to get a chance to sit for the next twenty or so minutes.

I closed my eyes, listening with amusement as Sora drilled Levi with questions. He was a good sport about it and surprisingly answered most of them, only occasionally steering her gently away from whichever topics he wasn’t comfortable discussing. Which, for Levi, was anything that got too personal.

More surprising, though, was the fact that Sora didn’t fight him on his caginess or push for more information.

She liked him—I knew the dips in her tone well enough to tell—and something in me eased at that realization. I foundthat I wanted them to get along—a realization that then fucking terrified me.

Because that meant that I was getting used to Levi’s presence. Growing fond of it, even.

After a few minutes of silence, I felt him leaning closer to me, his breath warm against my cheek.

“Truth for truth?” he asked, his voice quiet.

I opened my eyes and noticed Sora’s head pressed against the glass.

I chuckled. She was asleep. This wasn’t an entirely surprising feat for her—she had a habit of burning hot and bright with excitement one second, and then crashing the next. Kind of like a toddler. Or a golden retriever.

“Okay.” I turned towards Levi, suddenly very much aware of how close he was. His shoulder brushed against mine every time the bus driver took a turn, and my stomach made an annoying lurch each time that it happened. “But I need to think of one.”

“You don’t like hugs,” he said, the sentence on the tip of his tongue, like he’d been doing his best to hold it in all this time. “Can you tell me why?”

I shrugged, dropping my eyes. It was too hard to focus when he was looking at me like that, all wide-eyed and curious, close enough that I could see the different shades of gray bleeding into each other.

“You don’t know, or you don’t want to talk about it?” he asked. “I can come up with a different question, if you’d rather something else.”

“No,” I shook my head. “It’s not that. I’m just trying to nail down the reason.” Truthfully, I couldn't quite identify the boundaries of the preference. It had changed over the years, becoming an uninterrogated fact about me. My memory bubbled with a vision of Blake, the way he’d often hold me down or lock me in somewhere, just to press Rina’s buttons—the acerbicterror that would crash through me like an unrelenting tide when he’d do more than simply hold me there. “In part, I think I don’t really like feeling restrained or being touched when I’m not expecting it.”

His expression shifted, eyes widening with concern. “That day, when I taught you how to fight . . . when I grabbed you?”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he hissed. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

Many people said the words ‘I’m sorry’ like an afterthought, an impulsive phrase used to brush their own discomfort away. Levi said the words like he meant them, down to the marrow of his bones.

“That wasn’t your fault,” I said, blinking away the closeness of him and shifting my focus to the worn plastic on the seat in front of me. “You were teaching me to defend myself. It was a very expected next step, I’m just not . . . normal about that sort of thing, I guess.”

“Normal is relative,” he said, then added after a beat, “But you said in part. Is there another reason? Other than feeling restrained, I mean?”

A moment that felt impossibly long stretched between us like taffy.

My chest tightened as the edges of something much sharper than Blake’s cruelty curled into me—a truth I hadn’t whispered into life maybe ever. One I’d hardly even acknowledged to myself before now. “Yes, but you can’t laugh.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, his voice dripping with earnestness.

“I didn’t used to hate hugs.” I kept my voice even, clinical—as if I was dissecting someone else’s memory. “I think I started associating bad things with hugs the day my aunt died. It was my birthday,” I added, as if the specificity of the date added distance to the pain. But then I remembered the smell of her, the waftof rosewater and mint that clouded her embrace, and clinical distance suddenly became more difficult to perform.

Levi’s fingers brushed against mine, the touch so featherlight and soft, there and then gone, that it could have been nothing more than an accidental brush, the natural result of the bus’s winding path along the bend in the road.

“She’d just given me my present, a family ring,” I continued, fiddling with the skin around my nail beds as if they held the key to compressing the imperceptible waver in my voice locked down. “The last thing I did was give her a giant hug. I ran to put the ring away, too afraid to wear it right then, like I might lose or damage it somehow, and when I came back into the kitchen, she collapsed. That’s . . . when she died.” I took a deep breath, dispelling the tightness in my chest and let out a forced laugh. “In the chaos of the aftermath, I didn’t even grab it—the ring I mean.”

Truthfully, other than the clothes that fit in one suitcase, I hadn’t brought anything when I was taken from her house. It was like, on some level, I knew that anything I held onto would carry the weight of those memories—the reminder of everything I’d lost.

“Anyway,” I exhaled, sinking deep against the stiff bus seat, “I know it seems ridiculous, and I know that my hug didn’t literally kill her. Of course, I understand that’s impossible.” I glanced up at him briefly, then turned away, trying to brush off the intensity of the moment, the way he so clearly hung on every word—as if he cared about this story as much as if it were one of his own. “But I think after that day, I just sort of internalized it on some level. That’s when I started really fixating on the whole curse thing. I’d more or less ignored the whispers of it before then, not really focusing on the family members who’d discarded me or overthinking about my parents. But once I lost the one person in my life who mattered, everything just sortof . . . shifted. Amto Amani wasn’t there to brush away the fear, to tell me I was being ridiculous. And I guess I just felt like I was, I don’t know—poisonous or contagious or something. And if there was even the slightest chance that I was?—”

He nodded, then finished the thought where I left it. “You’d rather not risk it.”

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