Chapter 33 Soul Shadows
Chapter thirty-three
Soul Shadows
Nyomi
Great job, Nyomi. Real smooth.
I swallowed hard.
I didn't mean to hurt them.
But intention didn't erase consequence.
The corridor narrowed as we walked on. The walls got closer. The lights slightly lowered. The air shifted—colder, quieter, as if the hallway itself were absorbing our heightened emotions.
Behind me, the twins moved in perfect silence.
My stomach twisted with the kind of nausea that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with knowing I'd broken something I couldn't fix.
I wanted to turn around.
Wanted to say, I'm sorry or I didn't mean it like that or please don't hate me.
But every possible apology felt worse than saying nothing at all.
I shouldn’t have told them what I thought.
It was the story I'd built around my reasoning that truly hurt them.
The one where a child took a blade and carved himself open to match his brother's trauma. Where their love was also shared mutilation. Where being identical meant no one had to carry their pain alone.
God, what kind of childhood leaves scars like that?
My throat burned.
I should have kept my mouth closed.
But my stubborn ass wanted to know if I was right.
Are you happy now?
I kept my eyes forward, following Hiro's steady pace, but my mind was stuck back in that moment—the way Yuki's jaw had worked without sound, the way Aki had looked away first, fingers touching that scar like it still hurt after all these years.
My chest felt too tight. I focused on breathing—in through my nose, out through my mouth—trying to steady the sick churn in my stomach.
There was no more fun conversation about Scooby-Doo or anything else.
The twins remained silent and guarded while Hiro kept my pace with a strained expression—probably doing damage control in his head, figuring out how to manage the Tiger who'd just emotionally gut-punched his brothers and most loyal killers.
I’ll have to make this right somehow.
My fingers curled into fists at my sides.
I wouldn't apologize right now because anything I said right now would sound like an excuse, and they didn't deserve that. They deserved space. Time. The dignity of processing what I'd said without me hovering over them like some guilty, hand-wringing mess.
So I kept walking.
Kept my mouth shut.
Kept hoping that somehow, eventually, they'd understand I hadn't meant to weaponize their trauma.
I'd just been too honest about what I saw.
Alright. I’ll fix this later.
We turned the corner—and my guilt was immediately replaced by something else entirely.
When I saw the first massive painting on the wall, I stopped dead.
Horror shot through my chest.
This hallway wasn’t like the others. No modern prints. No minimalist frames. These walls were lined with ancient paintings, each one encased in carved dark wood lacquered to a mirror-shine.
The glass was museum-grade, the kind used to protect priceless artifacts from humidity and heat. The gold leaf edging around each frame glowed under the warm overhead light, catching on the brushstrokes like tiny sparks.
Wealth.
Power.
Lineage.
People filled the canvases—women in ceremonial robes, warriors in armor, children kneeling beside low tables, men fishing at dawn.
But none of that was what caught me.
It was the animal-shaped shadows behind the people.
What the fuck? Can this day get any crazier?
This wasn’t stylized inkwork either. Some of the people in the painting had winged shadows. Others had horned shadows. One had a shadow with a feline body and a tail.
I stopped in front of the painting and parted my lips.
Hiro looked at me. “What’s wrong?”
I was so fucking speechless I just walked on to the next painting and stared at it for several seconds.
In it, a man kneeled in prayer with the shadow of a monkey rising above him.
I got a closer look.
The man’s human body stayed small and humbled with his forehead touching the floorboards.
Meanwhile, the monkey-shadow towered over in darkness. Gold tinged its outline. The monkey’s limbs stretched long. Its spine arched.
And there was this wild intelligence in the monkey shadow’s face.
The brushwork was so detailed I could see individual strands of fur, each stroke devoted and deliberate, like the artist had loved and feared this shadow at the same time.
My skin prickled.
Hiro watched me. “Nyomi?”
I walked on and stopped at the next painting with a woman kneeling beside a stone well—her actual form serene, peaceful, but the crane-shadow behind her was enormous, wings curved like a crescent moon and a beak tilted toward the sky.
I looked at Hiro. “Why. . .did they paint shadows like this?”
He shifted his gaze to the painting. “These are old paintings. Kenji jokes that they came with the island.”
I shivered. “What does that mean?”
“When his mother’s people gave him the island, they also gave him these. He keeps them here because he says that the images make him feel odd.” Hiro shrugged. “Anyway, we should go.”
“But. . .” I held up my hand. “Do you know why they painted these animal shadows behind the people?”
“Not really, but I have a few guesses.”
I snapped my view to him. “Could you tell me?”
“When we were children, Kenji’s mother used to tell us a story. I think it was a legend from her clan.”
“A legend?”
He nodded. “She said that every person walks with two shadows. The one the world sees. . .and the one only your true love can see. The person’s soul mate.”
A chill rolled down my spine.
Slow.
Electric.
Heavy.
I swallowed. “So what are the shadows in these paintings?”
“My guess is that they are the second shadows. The ones revealed only to the person meant to see your soul without armor.”
My chest tightened.
I stared at the painting again—at the ink, the wings, the impossible enormity. At the way, the shadow curled protectively around the woman’s body.
“Did you believe Kenji’s mother?”
He let out a muted laugh. “I was a child. I believed everything she said. Kenji too. We used to talk about how our wives would see the shadows. We were kids. What did we know? But later. . .”
“What?”
“When we were older. . .she told us not to put faith in it anymore.”
“Why not?”
He glanced toward another painting—a man in ceremonial armor bowing toward a shrine. Behind him, a massive hornet-shadow rose like a crown made of storm clouds.
“Because,” Hiro said softly, “she told us that the Fox never saw her shadow so. . .”
Something in me cracked open.
Hiro continued, “She laughed when she said it, but not in a happy way. She said the legend was probably just an old village superstition.”
My heart thudded once.
Or the Fox wasn’t her true love, and it made her sad to realize that after having kids with him.
Hiro’s expression turned firm. “We should go.”
“You’re right.” I went back to walking down the long hallway. Still, my gaze drifted back to the paintings.
A warrior with a wolf-shadow, jaws open in silent howl.
A tiny girl kneeling in the snow with the shadow of a massive elephant rippling behind her like wind.
An elder with a bear.
A painting with a breathtaking mother holding a baby while a tiny dragon unfurls behind the newborn.
I looked at him. “The people in the paintings were Kenji’s mother’s family?”
“Yes. Her bloodline. Her clan. They gifted my brother with this island and people.”
“People?”
“Yeah. I jokingly call them The Silent Ones. They blend in. Staff, gardeners, vendors. Some stay in the hidden wings. Some choose the shadows. They serve him without ever being invited. They answer to no one except his mother’s last wishes to protect him.”
My eyes drifted to one last painting—a fisherman pulling a net from the sea, the shadow behind him was a crouched leopard.
So. . .I haven’t been hallucinating all this time? I really do see Kenji’s dragon-shadow.
The realization hit with a force I wasn’t prepared for.
This wasn’t just a metaphor or a poetic moment between lovers. This was something older—something that sat outside anything my rational mind could classify.
A pressure built behind my ribs as I tried to take it in. I wasn’t losing touch with reality. I wasn’t imagining things out of fear or desire. I was seeing something other people had painted, documented, passed down.
Something his mother’s bloodline accepted as fact.
The dragon-shadow is absolutely real.
My brain scrambled to make sense of it, but this was beyond the edges of my mental bandwidth.
Some truths weren’t meant to be solved.
Some were simply meant to be witnessed.
My grandmother used to say that the world had layers—one for the body, one for the mind, and one for the spirit that only opened when the person stopped pretending, they were in control.
Then, there were stories about déjà vu that wasn’t just coincidence, about odd dreams that arrived with warnings, about hearing one’s name in an empty room right before life changed direction.
I thought of synchronicities—meaningful coincidences—I'd brushed off before. Moments when the universe nudged me. The way 11:11 kept appearing on clocks, receipts, license plates—patterns that felt too deliberate to ignore.
The instinct to turn left instead of right and avoid something dangerous.
The sense that someone was standing behind me when no one was there.
This animal-shadow concept felt like that.
Bigger than logic.
Bigger than fear.
Bigger than me.
I exhaled slowly and let the truth settle. I wasn’t imagining shadows. I wasn’t unraveling. I was standing inside a world where some people walked with two silhouettes, and I was one of the few who could see the second shadow because. . .I truly loved Kenji and was his soul mate.
A strange validation warmed my chest.
Yet, I was still so confused and had even more questions that I honestly didn’t think would ever get answered, probably due to his mother’s secret lineage and how it seemed they really kept a lot of knowledge close to their chest.
And maybe understanding wasn’t the point.
Maybe accepting it was.
Hiro motioned ahead, grabbing my thoughts back to the moment. “The Personal Scales’ suite is close.”
I steadied myself. “Okay.”
My adrenaline picked up.