Chapter Seven – Mico #2
The truth is, I should have stayed close. I should have come back sooner. But guilt’s a loud bastard. Louder even than grief. And when Marco died… it hollowed something in me I’ve never quite patched up.
I turn into the hotel’s underground parking, headlights catching on polished concrete and empty spaces. I shift into park, kill the engine, and sit for a long second before reaching for the door.
And she deserved far better than a man like me. Someone broken. Someone who still flinched at the sound of glass shattering. Someone who couldn’t sleep without checking every door lock twice.
But none of that mattered the day her mother sat us down.
It was just after the funeral, her father had died, suddenly.
The scent of lilies still clung to my shirt.
The living room had gone quiet, guests filtering out, some leaving half-finished cups of stale coffee behind.
Chiara had looked tired but sharp as ever.
She motioned for me and Marco to follow her into her study.
It was a small room at the back of the house—lined with heavy books, old newspaper clippings, and the faint smell of lavender and dust. The curtains were drawn. A single desk lamp threw pale light across a thick envelope sitting on her desk.
“You’re both my sons,” she said, her voice firmer than I’d ever heard it. “And I need you to hear this as such.”
I remember glancing at Marco, expecting him to roll his eyes or make a face. He didn’t. He just folded his arms and waited.
And then she told us.
She told us about the man she loved before she met her husband. A man deep in the underbelly of something dark and old. She had loved him, ran away with him, carried his child. And lost it.
When their house was attacked—when gunfire ripped their peace apart—he hadn’t been able to protect her. She left him. But before she did, she made him vow that if he ever rose to power, she and her children would never want for anything.
He agreed.
Years later, he made good on his promise. He didn’t just offer her wealth. He handed over deeds. Entire branches of his empire. But there was a clause, it would only take effect if one of her children married one of his.
It was the only way the bloodline could intertwine and the power stayed consolidated.
“Marco,” she said, turning to her son with a gaze that was almost pleading. “It has to be you.”
We laughed.
God, we laughed. I actually snorted.
Until she pulled out the documents.
Wax-sealed. Signed. Stamped. Copies of the deeds. The inheritance clause, printed in stark black ink.
Marco went pale. I stopped breathing.
He stood up first. Hands braced on the back of the chair.
“I’m not doing this,” he said. “I don’t want this blood money. I’m joining the navy. I can take care of my sister without any of this.”
Chiara just stared at him. Then she nodded slowly and said, “And what if you can’t, Marco? What if one day you’re gone, and she has nothing left? You think I want this life for her? I want her safe . You both know what’s coming for her if she inherits this on paper but has no one by her side.”
She turned to me then.
I still remember her eyes. That desperate, brittle kind of love only mothers have when they know they’re running out of time.
“With this wealth in her name,” she said softly, “Lira is like prey. I give my blessing, along with my plea. Marry my daughter. Be her official protector. Be her anchor.”
Her voice had wavered slightly at the word protector . It wasn’t just symbolic. The role was legal. The documents allowed for a secondary heir to be named—a guardian whose signature could override hers if ever she was incapacitated or in danger.
A failsafe.
Marco groaned. “Oh, come on, Mom.”
“She loves him,” she snapped, turning on him with a tired kind of fury. “Can’t you see? Can you not accept her?”
I hadn’t meant to look away. But I did.
Because the truth was, I did love her.
I always had.
More than even Marco knew.
And maybe that’s why I did it. I looked Chiara dead in the eyes and nodded.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
The pen trembled in her hand.
Chiara signed first, her signature small and sharp like a violin clef. Then she passed the document to me, and I felt it—how final the parchment felt beneath my fingers. She wrote my name with a fountain pen, just below Marco’s, on the line marked Secondary Protector .
That was the legal title. The language is cold and perfunctory.
But it meant everything.
It meant if Marco ever couldn’t shield her, it would fall to me.
It meant she would be mine to guard, to represent, to speak for if she ever lost her voice.
It meant we were bound—not in love, not in vows, but in protection. In blood.
I didn’t say it aloud. But some part of me whispered it in the back of my head:
If you touch her, it will be with a sword in your hand, not a kiss on your lips.
Chiara sealed the document inside a fireproof folio, then gave us access codes to a joint inheritance account—held under a pseudonym and keyed to three names: Lira Marceline Falco, Marco Falco, and Domenico Salviati.
I remember walking out of that room with the whole thing feeling… theatrical. Unreal.
Like we were playing roles in some century-old tragedy.
And yet, life didn’t crack open. It just kept moving.
Marco and I shipped out not long after.
Basic training, then the dive program. We bunked together in Darwin. Got caught in a storm on the Coral Sea. Laughed ourselves breathless after a training op gone wrong and I swallowed seawater through my mask.
We made it to the clearance unit. He said, We’ll do one year. Then I’m done.
He wanted to go back to Melbourne, take night shifts, and support Lira while she finished her degree. Said she had dreams—Paris, Salzburg, film scores, orchestra life. Said she’d already given up enough to hold their little family together after Chiara passed.
And when Chiara did die...
Christ.
I didn’t cry in the church. Neither did Marco. We held it in like steel cables stretched tight.
But I heard him sob in the hotel room that night. The kind that comes from deep in the ribs. Like grief was trying to claw its way out of him.
“They’re gone, Mico,” he whispered, curled into the corner of the couch. “Both of them. Just me and her now.”
I wanted to quit the service with him. I told him we could figure it out, make it work. But I knew he needed the promotion.
Just one more year, I told him. Hold on for that. Then go home.
I thought I was helping.
But I wasn’t.
We were stationed off the Horn of Africa when it happened.
Nothing special. A quiet patrol. Sky like a dull blade.
The deck smelled of rust and oil. I was checking communications gear, half-tuned out, when the alarm blared—a short burst. I remember the way Marco moved—fast, fluid, always five seconds ahead.
He climbed above deck to reroute the antenna manually while I looped around the port side. We thought it was a signal fault.
It wasn’t.
There was no warning. Just one sharp crack. Not an explosion. Just… a pop. Like someone slapping wood. I turned slowly. By the time I reached him, he was on the ground, blood streaked across the deck like spilled ink. One eye open. Breathing shallow.
He didn’t look at me. He looked past me. Like he was already slipping.
And then—barely audible, lips cracked, a whisper more than a voice—he said it.
“Please… take care of my Lira.”
Then nothing.
No dramatic gasp. No parting wisdom. Just that. His final plea.
I pressed my hand to the side of his skull, trying to stem the bleeding, but it was already done. He was already gone.
The medics called it a clean shot. Instant cerebral trauma. No pain, they said. But I didn’t believe them. You don’t die like that without leaving something behind.
After that, I couldn’t breathe right for weeks.
I couldn't sleep. Couldn’t look at a violin case without feeling like my chest was cracking.
The girl he begged me to protect was back home in a city I hadn’t seen in three years.
And I hadn’t even written to her. Not once.
Not after the funeral. Not after Chiara.
Not after I signed my name next to Marco’s.
I used to think grief was sharp. A blade, something that split you open clean. But it isn’t. It’s slow. Heavy. Rotting. Like wet earth pressing down on your lungs until you forget what air tastes like.
I watched her fall apart piece by piece. From a distance. Always from a distance.
After Marco died, she didn’t cry at the funeral.
She didn’t speak. She just stood there, spine rigid in that black dress, hands clasped so tight the knuckles went bloodless.
I stood ten feet behind her the entire time, close enough to catch her if she collapsed—but not close enough to be seen. Not close enough to tempt fate.
Because if I went to her, she would look at me like I was something good. Like I could fix it. Like I was her last anchor.
And I wasn’t.
I wasn’t a hero. I was the reason her brother stayed one year too long.
I was the voice that told him to wait. I was the one who watched the inheritance clause unfold like it was a story in a book and didn’t burn it to the ground.
Every time I thought about putting my arms around her, all I could see was Marco’s face, blood in his mouth, whispering her name with his last breath.
So, I watched.
Watched as she moved through the city like a ghost, a violin case clutched to her chest like a shield.
Watched as the light bled from her eyes, little by little.
She stopped playing. Stopped answering calls.
Moved out of the conservatory dorms and into a studio flat on the edge of Fitzroy that stank of incense and stale cigarettes.
I told myself she was surviving. That she just needed time.
Then the overdose call came.
They found her in her bathtub, barely breathing. Pills on the floor. No note.
I signed her into rehab myself. Drove through the night. Paid cash. Never gave my full name. Stayed in the city for three weeks in a shit motel off Sydney Road just in case she needed someone, even if she didn’t know it was me.
She never saw me.
But I saw her.
The third week, she started to hum again. Quiet, fractured little melodies that broke off halfway through. I watched her from behind mirrored glass while she threaded beads onto a string with shaking hands. She was still in there. Damaged, yes. But alive.
And then—I ran.
Because if she looked at me with gratitude, I would’ve shattered.
I left Melbourne that night. Took the first out-of-country contract I could get. Romania. Then Istanbul. Then Singapore. I told myself I was keeping her safe by staying away. That distance was penance. That exile could be redemption if I let it rot me slow enough.
I lived with my sins. Slept beside them. Named them.
And then the message came.
Nicola, sobbing. “She’s gone.”
I didn’t ask who. I didn’t have to.
The name carved itself into my chest like it had been waiting all along.
Dantès.
The old patriarch was dead. Whispers had already started—estate divisions, internal fractures, blood oaths resurfacing. And if the lines were being drawn, Lira wasn’t just legacy... she was leverage. And they had her. Right in the middle of a war she didn’t even know had started.
I slam the car door shut, the sound echoing across the garage like gunfire. My boots hit the concrete harder than I intend. The air tastes like dust and engine oil. I take the service elevator up—fifth floor, end of the hall—and already something feels off.
My hotel room door is closed, but there’s something wedged in the frame.
A letter.
Heavy stock paper, cream-toned, folded crisp.
I pull it free.
No wax seal. No name. Just an address printed in neat, archaic script across the top.
Dantès Estate.
Below that, a line of coordinates. No room for misinterpretation.
And at the very bottom, a final sentence, written in black ink so dark it nearly bleeds through the page:
She is with me.