“Just do as you’re told, Neve.Promise me.”
The train screamed again as it drew closer.She looked at me like this was goodbye.Like she’d already accepted her fate and she was handing me something sacred and heavy that I’d never asked for.
Her eyes shone with conviction.
“Promise me,” she whispered.
And I knew if I didn’t, she’d drag me onto that train herself.I knew she’d die before she let me.
I knew everything in my life had just cracked open under these damn train lights.
The world roared.The ground shook.The freight train barreled toward us, and all she wanted was my word.
43
Marcello
The machines kept Atlas alive.
The only sound in the room was the steady, mechanical hum of a heart that needed help remembering how to beat.
I rested my elbows on my knees and bowed my head like I was praying.
Maybe I was.
I wasn’t a religious man.But sitting here, watching my brother fight for breath through tubes and wires, I found myself begging anyway.Not for forgiveness or mercy.But for his recovery.
Atlas lay so still, it felt wrong.The man who used to fill rooms with his presence, who walked like gravity bent for him, reduced to a body stitched together by strangers.Bullet wounds hidden beneath gauze.Bruises blooming under pale skin.His hand lay open on the mattress, fingers slack — the same fingers that had once dragged me out of a burning car when I was seventeen and stupid and bleeding out in an alley.
I took his hand.It was warm.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” I whispered, my voice cracking like thin ice.“I’ll have no-one left.”
I pressed my forehead to his knuckles.
I was supposed to be the calm one.The strategist.The one who didn’t feel until the job was done.But Alessio was dead, and Atlas was breaking in front of me, and suddenly all my control meant nothing.
A memory rose up — uninvited, merciless.
We were kids again.Maybe eight and nine.Too young to know what monsters we’d grow into.
We’d accepted an exquisite piece of candy from one of Father’s men and sprinted all the way down to the lake beyond the house, because it was the only place Mother couldn’t see us.She hated anything sweet, said it rotted the teeth and the soul, and she would have snatched it from our hands if she’d caught us.
So we hid.
We sat on the edge of the pier with our legs swinging over the black water, the candy cradled between us like something sacred, breaking it apart and sharing it like a feast we’d earned through mischief and breathless laughter.
Atlas had shoved the bigger half at me.
“Take it, you’re smaller.”
“You’re the one who’s always hungry,” I’d shot back.
He’d just shrugged.“Doesn’t matter.You’re my brother.”
That was Atlas.Even then.Even before the blood and the guns and the weight of what we were born into — he had always been like that.Protective.Stubborn.Quietly generous in a way no one ever noticed unless they were looking for it.
And then Alessio came.