Page 151 of Veil of Death and Shadow

His gaze lingered on the water ahead of us, and I realized that this Levi was different from the one I knew before. He’d changed in the year since I’d last seen him.

There was a hardness in his features, a darkness that clouded him. An edge that I’d seen echoes of that first day at Frank’s diner, then later, in the bar with Ace, but never so clearly as now.

He was colder, looked more weathered—as if he’d experienced a lifetime of days in the time we’d been apart. But he also seemed lost, the loneliness he always carried now evident in every line of his face, each angle of his body. Like he was half in this world and half out of it. Unknown to me. Even more a stranger than he’d been the day we met.

But when I glanced down at his wrist, giving up altogether now on the pretense that I wasn’t just straight up studying him, I saw a thin black band.

A hairband.

The one I’d had in my hair that night, the one he’d taken from me to fidget with while he settled in for sleep.

He still had it, and he wore it, and I wasn’t sure why exactly, but that realization had my chest squeezing in on itself, like it might collapse.

As if sensing the object of my focus, he shifted to cover it—but I had his hoodie, so his arms remained bare, the band in plain sight.

“It was selfish of me,” he said, “forcing my way into your life like I did. Pretending like our worlds could mix. After—after that night, I thought the best thing I could do for you was stay away.” He took a breath, and when he released it, he added, “And so I did.”

He pressed his palms into the dock and leaned back, the muscular lines of his arms thicker, more filled out, like he’d spent the last year growing into himself, growing stronger.

Meanwhile I was curled inside of his hoodie, tensed up in a ball like a feral little gremlin. “Then why are you here now?”

A muscle worked in his jaw as he fought to work out an answer.

“And how the fuck did you find me here anyway?” This was my spot, yeah, but I realistically only made it here once, maybe twice a week—and it was late enough in the season, and colder than it usually was this time of year, that most people had already long abandoned their summer hobbies on the water.

He turned, shifting towards me, the movement stiff and then rushed, like he was losing a battle with himself, the same one I’d already lost, until I felt his eyes rove over my face. They swept over every inch, cataloguing me with an intensity that made me flush, and I wondered, briefly, how much I’d changed in his eyes, since he’d last seen me. “Stopped at Frank’s,” he said finally, “then your apartment. Sora was there, she said you might be here.” He winced. “She . . . wasn’t happy with me either.”

“What happened to you that night, Levi?” I asked, the questions refusing my attempt to suffocate them a moment longer. “How did you survive that? I spent weeks studying those wounds—thinking about how much blood there was. No one should have survived that.” I tried to ignore the way he looked at me, his eyes half hunger, half desperation. “And why are you here now?”

He dropped his gaze, his lips curling into a sad shadow of the smirk I remembered, no dimple in sight. I fought the urge to press my thumb to the corner of his mouth and stretch until I found it. “Truth for truth?”

“No.” I curled my hands into fists inside the hoodie. He hadn’t earned any more of my truths, not after this year, not after everything I’d been through. “I don’t want to play any more of your games. I want answers. I—I deserve answers.”

When he didn’t speak, I knew I wouldn’t get any. With a frustrated groan, I stood up and started collecting my things together. I didn’t need to sit through this, didn’t want any more half-truths. That was all he ever offered—fractures of himself, sharp as shards and just as painful.

I didn’t know anything about him, about his family, about his job, about where he lived or how he spent his time.

The only truth that mattered now was that I didn’t know him at all, and I never would.

Why did I care? Why had I spent so many sleepless nights worried sick to my stomach about him? When all this time, he’d been alive and well, and just chose to let me simmer with concern and, eventually, grief for fifteen fucking months?

I was done.

No more caring about Levi?—

Hell, I didn’t even know his last name. How ridiculous was that? To have spent so much of my time thinking about someone whose name I didn’t even know. No more.

After a brief battle with my paddle board bag, I gave up on it, wrapping the thin material around the board, holding the awkward bundle to my chest, as I bent down to collect the dry bag and oar.

“Mareena.” He grabbed my shoulder, the shock of his touch enough to spill the precariously piled mess in my arms at myfeet. “Please, talk to me.” He let out a humorless chuckle. “Fuck, just look at me, even. Anything. Just don’t leave. Not yet.”

Rage, hot and angry boiled in my blood as I stared at the useless equipment spread over the dock.

A lot of that rage was directed towards Levi, but there was a not-small part, some might even say a decent majority, that was directed squarely at myself.

For caring, for letting him chisel his way in, for not insisting over a year ago that we end things before he had a chance to matter—to mean something to me.

Because the most frustrating fucking part was that I always knew how this was going to end. That I’d end up hurt. I just hadn’t expected it to be in this way.

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