All Chapters of Veil of Secrets: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

49 Chapters

Chapter 11 - Draven

The world came back in pieces. It wasn’t a dream, that’s for sure. Nothing like sleep. More like forcing my body up out of the muck at the bottom of some godforsaken ice lake, lungs gasping, eyes splintering, everything cold and burning all at once. I felt every jagged piece of broken magic still loose inside me, shooting off ribs and scraping along bones that stubbornly refused to knit themselves back together properly. Not yet. Not without a stabilizer. Except that there was. Something else. A pull. A scent. She was gone. My eyes opened to the same dust-choked, half-forgotten cell tucked into the depths beneath the library’s lowest floor. The wards were thrumming all around me, frayed but still alive. Their light was dimmer than I recalled, and I realized someone had reanchored the perimeter spells while I slept. Someone who hadn’t shorted out my kill switch when they got too close. The stone floor was still warm where she’d been sitting, knees pulled up tight. Tight enough

Chapter 12 - Evelina

It was a subtle reaction. No flinch, no intake of breath, no visible shudder of his hand as he put the flask down. But I saw it. Knew it. Saw it in the way his body tensed into a pose that didn’t look quite natural for someone who was sitting. It was the tensing of a coiled spring, of a sword in motion, of a cage sprung. And for a moment I thought I had misread him. He didn’t look at me. He just stared at the stone between us like my voice had awakened some long-forgotten language in him. In his eyes. Something locked away so deep that it hadn’t seen the light of day for years. The air seemed to shift around us, too, curling as if the walls themselves were bracing for impact. The hairs on my neck were standing on end, my instincts telling me this was no calm. This was recoil. He swallowed it down. Faked it, back into oblivion. Eyes neutral. Posture relaxed. That aloof disinterest of someone for whom he wasn’t invested. It was far too late for that. I’d seen behind the eyes. Tra

Chapter 13 - Draven

The door stayed shut. For hours. Then days. The first night, I told myself good. She was smart. Smarter than most. She’d read between the cracks in my voice and seen what I didn’t say. Maybe she’d even found the files that the school hadn’t buried, and figured out exactly what I was. Not a man. Not a mistake. Not even a threat. A weapon. The second night, I reinforced the wards again. Just for something to do. Told myself I wasn’t waiting. That the tension in my gut was from the instability of my magic, not the absence of her scent in the air. Not the empty space beside the stone where she’d once sat. The third night, I stopped lying. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this. She’d only been here a few times. Less than a week. Long enough to learn my name, to see behind the mask no one was ever meant to notice. Long enough for something inside me to want. And that was the problem. Wanting was dangerous. It made you soft. Sloppy. Turned the blade inward. I stood at t

Chapter 14 - Evelina

I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw his. Not when they were glowing or haunted or clouded with violence, but in that moment after I’d said my name. The quiet crack behind them. The break he tried so hard to hide. I should’ve been afraid. I was afraid. Draven Kael wasn’t just some myth whispered in hallways after the spring attack, he was the reason those whispers had weight. And now I knew for certain. He wasn’t a rumor. He wasn’t a cautionary tale. He was real. Breathing. Broken. And watching me like I was the only thing anchoring him to the present. I kept telling myself I’d made the right call, walking away. Putting distance between us. But I hadn’t really walked away. My magic still hummed with the memory of his. My pulse still felt the phantom tether. And my mind, gods help me, kept circling back not just to who he was, but to how. How had he survived the collapse? How had he broken from the Interregnum’s leash when no one else had? How had he st

Chapter 15 - Draven

The words shouldn’t have landed the way they did. Soft. Heavy. Real. They hung in the air between us, turning on themselves like smoke, curling around ribs that had never quite righted themselves the way they should. Evelina stood there like she hadn’t just handed me a weapon, because that was what a secret was. One left unfiled. Unclaimed. Undefined. One no one else could take from her. I should’ve told her to leave. Right then. Should’ve said what I had to say to push her away for good. But instead, I asked, “Do you want to?” She blinked. “Want to what?” “Archive me.” The change in her expression was slight. Quiet. A narrowing of her eyes, a slight furrow of her brow, like she wasn’t sure if this was a test or a trap. But she didn’t flinch. “I think I’m afraid of what I’d find if I did,” she said, voice soft but sure. “And what it would make me.” There it was. That clarity, I didn’t know how to combat. Evelina Dray didn’t bluff. She dissected. She weighed every layer,

Chapter 16 - Evelina

The scrolls were still warm from the preservation wards when I shoved them into the pocket of my coat and slipped out of the archive. No one had stopped me. No one had even looked twice. That was the privilege of being me. If I wanted to vanish, I could. Two days. Two days since I’d seen Draven. Two days of feigning interest at dry lectures and endless enchantment drills, of avoiding Maeve’s sideways glances and evading the question I couldn’t answer. Why him? I didn’t know. But I couldn’t stay away. The ruins embraced me as they always did, half-swallowed by creeping ivy and choked by strangled spells older than most tombs. But below the rot and stone, something pulsed. Something alive. His magic. I felt it before I saw him, a soft ripple in the air, like the moment before lightning strikes. The wards around the perimeter were already evolving, hidden layers of new sigils I didn’t recognize, and hadn’t been there the last time I’d been here. Which meant he was changing. Ad

Chapter 17 - Draven

She approached my wards like a bomb technician instead of a bomb maker. I remained in the shadows of the west alcove, as still and quiet as usual. She ran her fingers over the curve of my perimeter spell, and the anchor threads didn’t pop. She didn’t force it to yield to her as others had. She didn’t tear it down to show her skill. She listened to it. Conformed. Evelina was not challenging it. She was respecting it. My mouth went dry, and it felt like I’d swallowed rocks. For years I had spent, tinkering with wards to make them impossible to read. Not because they were particularly complex, but because they weren’t built the way normal spells were. They were not cast from one source and tied to a natural ley line. Mine had always been a Frankenstein’s monster, pieced together with bits of other bloodlines, forced to stay together, layered with trauma. She did not wince. She cocked her head to the side as she straightened one of the rune lines near the threshold, her lips pa

Chapter 18 - Evelina

Maeve found me in the northeast tower on the third floor, surrounded by two crumbling books and a stack of rune decoder sheets I never intended to sleep next to. “You’re difficult to locate when you don’t respond to your runes,” she chastised me, setting a wrapped cookie next to my arm like a white flag. I rubbed my eyes and stretched, cracking my neck. “Didn’t mean to ignore you.” She narrowed her gaze. “You did.” I offered no defense. I’d ignored my rune calls six times. Hidden it under a silencing field. Not because I didn’t want her to hear from me, but because I didn’t want to lie to her. Maeve didn’t ask why. Instead, she sat down across from me and fixed her face into something sterner. Pinched. “There’s a new hex signal,” she muttered, chopping. “South wing of the old library. Sealed passage. Someone breached the structural wards. Multi hexing. Whoever did it knew what they were doing.” My heart lurched. Not anxiety so much as dread. Not worried so much as already

Chapter 19 - Draven

She hadn’t kissed me. She’d leaned in. Close enough, I could hear her heartbeat echo between us. Close enough, I could smell the ozone buzz of her magic humming just beneath her skin. But she hadn’t kissed me. And it was killing me. I hadn’t moved all night. Had sat cross-legged in the center of the circle long after she’d cleared out, back pressed to the crumbling brick behind me, trying to tell myself that my heart wasn’t pounding so loudly in my chest. That it would stop. That it was just the tether. Tattered and sparking between us. But I was no good at lying, least of all to myself. It wasn’t just the tether. It was her. The smell of dust and lavender still lingered on my jacket where she’d grasped it. Her body, slight as hers was, had molded to me deeper than any scar I’d earned on the battlefield. And goddammit, she’d looked at me. Really looked at me like I was something worthwhile. Not an armament. Not a mistake. Not a disappointment. She didn’t kiss me. But sh

Chapter 20 - Evelina

I woke to warmth. Not the heat rising from the rune stones or the enchantments radiating off the barrier wards that were still thrumming quietly around the room. Something else. Something close. Warm like skin. My brain needed a moment to process. Cold floor under me. Scrolls stacked where my head had been resting, bunched awkwardly at my shoulder. Satchel half-open on the floor, with ink dried around my wrist. And sigils still floating lazily around the room, casting their little mote of light onto the walls. And him. Draven. Perched probably less than a foot away from me, knees pulled up to his chest and hands slung loosely over his knees. Gazing up at me. His gaze was always penetrating, but this. This was silent. Patient. No defenses. No growls. Just Draven. Defensive, yes, but there was something in him that had softened overnight like he’d finally stopped resisting the pull. I blinked lazily, rubbing sleep from my eyes. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” I whispered

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