“I thought—” My throat closed.“I thought he?—”
She stroked my hair gently.“You’ve been through something terrible.Rest now, child.”
“I ran,” I choked.“I ran and I don’t know if he—” Another sob tore loose.“I don’t know if he lived.”
She held me tighter.
“You survived,” she mused.“That is the first mercy.”
I pressed my forehead to her shoulder, letting the sobs rip through me until the stone floor beneath me blurred into nothing and the darkness finally pulled me under.
47
Marcello
There was only one year between me and Atlas — my brother came first, loud and stubborn and already half feral by the time I arrived in this world.We had grown up like twin storms, always fighting, always bleeding, always ready to tear the world apart for each other.
Then Alessio happened.
I had been twelve the day my father walked through the door holding a scrawny six-year-old by the shoulders.The kid had looked like he’d been dragged through hell — he was too thin and too pale, his eyes too big for his face.
A stray.
That was what I had thought.That was what everyone had thought.
Father hadn’t offered explanations.As the Don, he had carried the privilege of silence.He had just brought that little ghost into our home and said, “This is Alessio.He’s staying with us.”
At the time, none of us had known what that meant.
It wasn’t until years later — when whispers turned into rumors and rumors turned into truth — that Atlas and I had understood the full picture.
Alessio hadn’t been some lost child my father had found wandering the street.
He had been our half brother.
The product of an affair my father had had seven years before.
The son of a woman who had slid into heroin and never crawled back out.
The boy no one had claimed until she died and Father had been forced to take responsibility for the actions of his dick.
But none of that had mattered the moment Alessio stepped into our house.
There were people in this world who fit like they were cut from the same cloth — family by blood, family by loyalty, family by fate.Alessio had clicked with us from the first moment.He hadn’t cried.He hadn’t shied away.He had just looked up at me and Atlas with those huge, wary eyes… and somehow we had known.
He belonged.
He hadn’t been a Cavalho in name.Father had made that abundantly clear.Alessio would never have the title, never stand at the head of the table, never inherit the power or the legacy.Illegitimacy had marked him like a curse — something written into his bones before he had ever taken his first breath.
But Alessio hadn’t needed the legacy.
He had built something stronger.
While Atlas and I had fought to lead, Alessio had fought to protect.Quietly.Without complaint.He had been the one who cleaned our wounds after street fights, the one who stole from Father’s liquor cabinet to distract us from the beatings, the one who sat between us when we tore into each other so we never went too far.
He had become our shadow.Our shield.The silent spine that held our family upright.
A crucial part of us.A piece we hadn’t realized was irreplaceable — until now, when someone ripped him out of our world and left nothing but blood in his place…