Page 27 of Veil of Death and Shadow (Order of Reapers #1)

27

MAREENA

Approximately Seven Years Ago, Nine Months Before The Undoing

T he sun was gone, the final low rays of orange and pink that cast a faint glow over the water disappearing from sight. I floated, my foot dangling in the water over my board, trying to get the energy to get up and leave.

There was an unusual chill as the few remaining water droplets from my swim cooled against my skin. Shivering, I briefly debated the merits of tipping back into the water, stealing one last lap through the bay before fall truly started to settle in.

I knew it was a bad idea. Swimming alone out here, once it was dark, was asking for trouble. It was only too easy to slip beneath the surface, and let the quiet stillness take over—a small reprieve from the strange metallic air I’d been suffocating on for months.

Before I could think too much about it, I shoved my board onto the dock, piled my dry bag and oar on top of it, and then kicked off, plunging into the dark depths, savoring the sharp chill of the water like it was a rich, luxurious dessert.

With slow, smooth strokes, I swam into the middle of the bay. It was rare having the whole area entirely to myself like this. The quiet isolation, marred only by the handful of lights on in the surrounding houseboats made it feel like the entire lake belonged to me. Like I belonged to it.

As I shifted onto my back, staring at the gray-streaked sky above, the murky edges of the moon faded and brightened, as if a light switch had been flipped behind it.

This was, perhaps, the first moment of peace I’d felt all summer.

Things had been strange in the city. Intense.

There’d been countless disappearances, strange accidents, and odd stories on the news that hardly seemed explainable. Not to mention that the weather had been wildly unpredictable, even more than climate scientists could explain. In one day, we’d encountered all four seasons—ice storm to blazing-dry heat—unprecedented shifts in the temperature.

But even stranger than the unexplained events was the steady presence of something darker. Something suffocating.

Death.

I couldn’t put it into words, but I felt him growing closer, like a phantom slowly shedding its translucence, becoming solid.

Sometimes, I swore I could almost taste the traces of him in the air.

Oddly, it wasn’t an altogether threatening presence like I might expect—though I wouldn’t call it particularly inviting either. It was something cold and sharp, asserting his existence in the few moments I almost let myself forget he was there.

Even Sora, who’d spent our entire friendship declaring that there were no such things as curses or omens, seemed to sense that something was changing, shifting in the world—like we were on the precipice of something big, something the world could never come back from.

She didn’t speak of it often, only in the quiet moments of the night, when we were alone, coming home from a night out into the soft safety of our apartment.

I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not by this—that I wasn’t alone in this awareness. Other people didn’t really speak about it openly, usually only in the dark recesses of a bar where the steady buzz of booze gave them the courage to whisper about the strangeness, the sense of immanence in the air. But even when people didn’t discuss it, couldn’t put a name to it, I felt their lingering fear, their uncertainty clawing at me with every tight smile and averted gaze.

It was like the entire city was positioned on a cliff, and one small breath might send it plunging over into something new, something we could only imagine. We didn’t know what it was, what it might mean, but I knew we all felt it, on some level—a bubble waiting to burst on the next, deep inhale.

Mostly, I tried to ignore it. But here, with the steady waves rolling over me, I let myself linger in the heaviness for a moment, to take a breath and let the fear pour out of me, somewhere I could leave it behind for the next few months.

I let myself sink below the surface, watching the gentle light of the moon ricochet above me as the world stilled to a quiet.

It would be so easy to stay here, to just float away and fill my lungs, until the edges where my body ended, and the lake began, started to blur and overlap—an inevitable end I was simply rushing along.

Maybe Levi had been right. There was no fighting fate.

I closed my eyes beneath the water, my finger tracing the ring, as flashes of Sora pierced through the fog. It wasn’t fair to her—to leave her alone with this, another sister to grieve, not after everything she’d been through.

Slowly, I swam back to the dock, savoring each breath as it carved through my lungs.

When I pulled myself up, the biting wind sank into my bones.

Fuck. I hadn’t brought a towel with me. I wasn’t planning on a night swim and had counted on the heat of the sun to dry my skin from my earlier plunge.

It wasn’t until after I slid my shorts over my wet bikini bottoms and tugged my tank top over my head, resigned to being cold and miserable until I made it back home, that I noticed the lurking presence behind me.

Sliding my apartment keys between my fingers, a makeshift weapon familiar to every woman, I spun around, my jaw aching with how hard I clenched it.

“Hey Mars.”

Levi.

He stood there, an unreadable expression on his face, dressed head-to-toe in black, looking as mysterious as he always did—like a shadow made solid.

My breath caught, and it felt as if I was drowning, as if I’d never reemerged from the lake at all.

“You’re alive,” I said, not bothering to fight the quiver in my voice.

“I am.” Something flashed in his eyes, there and then gone, before his careful mask was back. “How’ve you been?”

For several seconds I couldn’t speak—couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

And then I snapped.

“How have I been?” I popped the seal on my paddleboard so it could start deflating. Then, with rigid restraint, grabbed my oar to start disassembling the pieces. “How’ve I fucking been?” I tossed the metal back onto the dock, abandoning the pursuit where I started it, and walked up to him. “Fifteen months.” I jabbed my finger into his chest, keeping my sightline there, because I couldn’t stand to meet his eyes. Couldn’t bear what I might find there. “It’s been fifteen fucking months of no word.”

“I—”

“You showed up on my doorstep a breath away from death, disappeared in the morning, and I haven’t heard from you since. Not a,” I bent down, folding my board to hurry up the process, my back to him, “‘Hey Mareena, I’m doing fine by the way, hope you’re okay.’” My fingers trembled as I stuffed the board back into its bag, not bothering to take the usual care to dry it off or make sure everything fit inside properly with the pump. “Not even a damn phone call.”

I threw the bag back on the dock, abandoning the useless endeavor.

“Mars,” he said, and I felt him close the distance between us, though he was careful not to touch me. “Mars, look at me?—”

“You don’t get to call me that,” I snapped, finally meeting his stare.

He flinched at whatever he saw reflected in mine.

Good.

“You want to know why I hate when anyone but Sora calls me that? Because nicknames are for people who fucking stick around. She’s stuck around, that’s why she’s the one exception I’ve made. You . . .” My voice cracked. He wasn’t going to get to see my cry over him. “You fucking let me think you were dead for over a year, Levi. I thought . . .” I swallowed back the knot in my throat. “I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead because of me. That I, my curse, killed you. I—and all this time?—”

I hunched over, burying my head in my hands as I tried to calm down, to maintain some shred of composure, though I knew it was futile at this point.

Something curled around me, enveloping me in warmth and the soft smell of spicy citrus.

I felt him sit down on the dock next to me, though he was smart enough to keep some distance between us.

For a moment, I considered tossing his stupid hoodie back in his face.

But I was cold, and as angry as I was, I couldn’t deny that there was something comforting about being cocooned in its warmth right now, like he was handing over a piece of my armor I’d long abandoned in his presence.

So, instead, I shoved my arm through the holes and pulled the cotton down over my knees.

“I broke a lot of rules that night,” he said, cracking through the thick silence. “I shouldn’t have come to you in that condition, shouldn’t have done that to you.” He let out a frustrated sigh. “I should have never inserted myself into your life in the first place, but I did.”

His words cut like a knife through my chest, burning as they slid through my veins.

That was what I’d wanted, right? No more friendships, no more . . . whatever the hell this had been.

I’d spent over a year wishing that I’d been stronger, that I had pushed him away and ignored his attempts at friendship, diet and regular alike. That if I’d followed my own damn rules, he might still be alive.

So why did hearing that he shared that same regret twist and strangle so much?

I watched him from the corner of my eyes, not ready to look at him properly, not trusting what my brain might conjure up with the full view of him.

The last fifteen months had been filled with nightmares in which he had a starring role—of his death, of that night—but somehow the worst were the dreams that weren’t nightmares, the ones that imagined possibilities of what our lives might have looked like if I wasn’t haunted by this curse. If he didn’t have the life or job that he did. If we’d been permitted the space to enter into an easy, simple friendship—maybe even something more. Of what it might have looked like to be loved by someone other than Sora.

Waking up from those dreams, to the absence of him, to his presumed death, was like losing everyone I’d lost all over again.

Seeing him now, I realized how off my dreams had been— a pale imitation of the man next to me. My brain didn’t have the capacity to create the exact storm of his eyes, or the way his expression shifted so slightly when he was battling some inner demon he didn’t want me to see.

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 my feet. “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.

I’d been so naive I didn’t even consider it, didn’t think to see it coming. That he would leave because he chose to, not because he died. Not because of the curse, but because he didn’t want to stay.

Something about that broke something deep inside of me and I hated myself for admitting it, even just to myself. Hated myself for giving a fuck about Levi, because there was no putting an end to it. Even as angry as I was, I couldn’t deny that I did care about Levi No Last Name. It didn’t matter how much I wished I didn’t.

I knew better, and I fucking let myself care anyway.

My vision blurred as I fought to keep the film of tears from becoming a full-blown breakdown. The last thing I wanted was for him to know how much he affected me; how much he’d gotten under my skin—burrowing under there until it felt more like it belonged to him than it did me.

He rubbed his hands up and down my arms and the friction of the contact sparked down my spine, all the way into the soles of my feet. “Mareena.”

With a deep, steady breath, I calmed the storm churning through me, blinking back any trace of emotion. It was a skill I’d mastered years ago, and I’d never been so glad for it as I was now.

I turned around, finding only a foot of distance between us, the reality of his here-ness, his alive-ness impossible to ignore or deny.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and because I did know him—fractured as the shards were—I also knew that he meant it. Deeply and intimately and in that annoyingly sincere way that only Levi seemed able to convey. “The very last thing I meant to do was hurt you. It might seem like a lie, but it’s not. I stayed away to protect you. I didn’t even think about the possibility that you might assume I was dead.”

“Well,” my chin quivered, but I bit my lip before I did anything ridiculous like cry, “I’m glad that you’re not, I guess.”

When I let myself glance up, let myself meet his eyes again, my head felt light and dizzy at the depth of his stare—at the unreadable turmoil that I found there.

At the way he looked at me, like it hadn’t been fifteen months but fifteen years—like he was mapping out every inch of my face, recommitting it to memory. Like I wasn’t real, but he was trying to convince himself that I was.

I knew that look, that desperation, because I found myself staring at him the same way.

And then warm, sheer relief shot through my chest at the realization that he was here—a gnarled knot in my stomach, one I realized only now had existed since the morning I found him gone, finally loosened. He was, all things considered, okay. He was alive.

Except here I was caring again, and I didn’t know what to do with that feeling, the impossibility of it, so I just tangled it right back up with hot, righteous rage.

I shook my head. “You know, you can’t just do that. You can’t just look at me like that and say that you’re sorry and exp?—”

But whatever else I was about to say was instantly lost, devoured by the press of his lips against mine.

His kiss was hungry and hot and demanding, and when he pulled me close to him, one hand pressing against my lower back, the other twined through my hair, I sank into it, into him.

I wrapped my arms around his neck, my fingers digging in at the base of his skull, holding him closer, closer, closer—and when my tongue finally traced the seam of his mouth to meet his, a deep, possessive groan vibrated against me.

He tasted like bourbon and dark chocolate, and I couldn’t remember a single kiss that had ever completely unraveled me like this—none that had even come close.

When he pulled back, eyes closed, he pressed his forehead to mine, and I realized that my cheeks were wet.

I didn’t recall crying, but there they were—tears. Over a boy.

“I’m sorry. I just—” With gentle, almost reverent hands, he cupped my face. His eyes were still closed, and there was a soft, sad smile on his lips. Lips that I’d just kissed. Lips that I desperately wanted to kiss again, as angry as I was at the rest of him. “I needed to do that. Just once.”

“You’re leaving again.” I froze, my heartbeat thudding in my ears. “The curse? Is that what you’re worried about? We can go back to the old rules. Diet?—”

He shook his head, his eyes snapping open as they landed on mine. “No. I told you before that I wasn’t afraid of death. If given the choice, I’d choose you over a long life any day of the week.”

“But you’re leaving,” I repeated, my body suddenly numb with the loss as I watched the truth unfold in his stormy stare. “And you’re not coming back. You’re leaving for good this time, aren’t you?”

A muscle worked in his jaw, then an imperceptible nod as I pulled away from his touch.

“Then why did you come back at all?” I asked. My voice cracked, but this time I didn’t bother trying to suffocate the pain. “Why did you spend so much time and energy trying to convince me to be your friend? To make me—” I sucked in a ragged breath. “To just leave all over again.”

“I shouldn’t have,” he said. “But you have to understand, before you—before you, I was lost. I didn’t give a fuck about anything. I was perfectly content to just watch the world crumble around me. And then I met you, and suddenly I found myself wanting to do everything that I could to save it.” He took a slow, deep breath as his eyes searched mine. “I just—I needed to see you one more time, to remember what this was all for.”

“What are you talking about? What what was all for? Levi, why—” And then, because I knew in my gut that I wouldn’t get the chance again, I asked the question that had been plaguing my thoughts for more than a year.“What are you?”

Instead of an answer I knew he would never give, he pressed a kiss to my forehead, his lips lingering on my skin for a few breathless moments, before he pulled back far enough to whisper. “Yours. Please take care of yourself, Mareena.”

Then, he left.

And as usual, he kept his word. I never saw him again.