You want me to hear you? You should have heard me first.
The door was shaking harder — from Asher’s shoulder now, probably, the frame starting to splinter around the strike plate. Maybe ten more seconds. He didn’t need ten seconds.
He sat down on the bathroom floor with his back against the tub.
This is how you learn. I’m going to keep doing this until you understand what I’m asking for or until there’s nothing of me left for you to keep.
“LEVI —”
He put the glass against the side of his throat and drew it across.
The cut was clean and the blood came immediately — warm, a rush down his neck and his chest — and the shard dropped into his lap as he leaned his head back against the edge of the tub because his neck no longer wanted to hold it up.
The banging on the door was getting through in pieces.
Levi felt tired.I love you. And you are going to understand.
The door’s strike plate gave. The wood splintered one last time before the door wrenched open, but he was getting sleepy, so he closed his eyes.
“Levi — no no no no no —”
Asher’s palm was warm. Levi felt the warmth and felt Asher’s thumb against his cheekbone and that was the last thing he felt.
26
Q
Therewasalampon the nightstand and this was the loop he was going to use it. Asher’s eyes were still opening when Levi rose up on one knee beside him and brought the brass base down across Asher’s temple.
The sound it made was not a sound he would forget.
Asher’s eyes rolled back and his body went slack against the sheets, a line of blood opening along his hairline where the edge of the base caught him, and Levi did not stop to look at it because looking was the thing that would make him hesitate if he let himself do it.
The hallway was empty and Asher was not behind him. The absence of his presence at Levi’s back was wrong in a way he didn’t have time or emotional energy to name, so he didn’t. He moved past a new laundry door that hadn’t been there before, past the empty rooms, past the lounge where the morning sounds of coffee and conversation drifted into the hall —Maddie’s voice, Jasper’s laugh, Owen reading something aloud, the script running on its rails without him.
He did not stop at the lounge.
The foyer was at the end of the lodge, a big open space with a tall ceiling. The main entrance had double doors now, made with dark wood and with glass panels at the top. The fog outside pressed against them so hard that the glass was a solid wet grey except for where the shadows drifted in and out of view.
Levi crossed the foyer. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten. His bare feet on the wood. The door was heavy, but it pulled open easily against the weight of the fog pressing from the other side, and for a second the fog held its shape against where the door had been, like it was waiting for an invitation inside.
Then it poured in like it always did. Like water.
The shapes came through with it, arriving inside the foyer; two, then four, and then more than he could count.
He didn’t move as the fog surrounded him.
The fog was at his waist. The cold was in his chest. A shadowy hand closed around his neck from behind, pulling, pressing a chill through his skin as it sank below his skin, freezing his throat.
Another hand closed around his throat from the front and the cold of it punched through his skin; his breathing stopped. His vision was going — the grey coming up past his chest and into his eyes.
“Lev — Levi —” Asher’s voice, slurred, the vowels soft, the consonants not finishing. He was in the foyer, coming across the wood floor, and Levi could hear him, but couldn’t turn his head, because the shadows’ grips had decided his head didn’t turn anymore. “Levi — what did you — what did you do —”
He just closed his eyes and let the fog pour into him.
27
U
