Chapter 34 Beatrice
BEATRICE
Iam weightless.
Not the kind of weightless you feel when you fall asleep on a plane or sink into hot water, but a terrifying, infinite kind, like I have slipped out of my body and the world has forgotten I was ever here.
There is nothing.
No bed. No ceiling. No walls.
Just a vast, pale silence that presses against my skin, if I even still have skin. I try to breathe and there is no air. I try to move and there are no limbs. All that is left of me is awareness, suspended in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
A tremor starts somewhere inside me. My whole being shakes, like I am made of loose glass that might shatter at the slightest touch. Panic claws up from a place that does not feel physical. It is deeper, older, the kind of fear that lives where the soul remembers every loss it ever suffered.
Then, through the muffled quiet, I hear something.
Voices.
Distant at first, like sound traveling through water. One is low and rough with strain. Matteo. Of course it is Matteo. Even here, whatever here is, I would know him. The other is higher, thinner, frayed with terror.
Daniele.
My son’s voice cuts through the nothingness, thin but sharp, like a thread of light.
“I love you.”
The words hit me like impact. Not in my chest, not in lungs that refuse to exist, but in the core of whatever I have become. Something convulses inside me. My whole self jolts.
I am on my knees before I realize I have fallen.
There is no ground but I feel it anyway, hard and cold beneath hands that are not really there.
I clutch at my chest out of instinct. Pain blooms there, fierce and consuming, not from a failing heart but from the thought of being pulled away from the two voices that mean everything.
“I love you!”
He says it again, louder this time, as if volume is the rope that might drag me back.
I try to answer. I try to scream his name, to call out to him, to tell him I love him more than any word he has ever spoken. My mouth opens. No sound comes. My throat feels full of static.
I claw at the emptiness, desperate to reach them. My arms swing through nothing. I am trapped in this between-state, this nowhere, and the harder I fight, the more it slides away from me like fog.
Somewhere beyond this void, a sharp beeping begins to race.
It grows louder. Insistent. A frantic, mechanical alarm.
My chest spasms. My back arches. I feel my body even though a moment ago I was certain I did not have one, and a wild, animal terror rips through me as if I am being dragged in two directions at once.
“CODE BLUE! Cardiac arrest!”
The shout tears through the dark.
I see flashes, broken images like shattered glass.
White light. Blue scrubs.
Hands pushing Matteo and Daniele back.
“Everyone out!”
The world jerks, and for a heartbeat my eyes open somewhere real.
Harsh fluorescence burns my retinas. The room swims. I see Matteo with his arms locked around our son, holding him so tightly his knuckles are white.
Daniele is screaming for me, his face wet and blotchy, his mouth forming my name over and over.
The sound tears right through me.
Then everything snaps.
Darkness swallows the room in one violent blink.
“Clear!”
A voice near my ear, brisk and focused.
Three, two, one.
A brutal force slams into my chest. My body jolts hard enough that I feel the pull in every tendon. Then nothing.
“Again!”
Three, two, one.
Another shock. My entire existence narrows to an explosion of pain and then a terrifying flat calm. Time collapses. The commands, the shocks, the shrill cry of machines, they all blur into a single sense of being yanked at, over and over.
Until that falls away, too.
Silence returns.
Only this time, the nothingness feels different.
I am floating again, but there is a pull now. A faint warmth that licks at the edges of the cold. I feel pressure. A weight. The gentle, careful weight of a hand wrapped around mine.
Not a memory. Not a trick. Actual contact.
Then I feel it.
One tear slips free and touches my skin, rolling over my knuckles and sinking into the spaces between my fingers.
“Please. Come back.”
The voice is rough, thick with something he never shows in the light. It is not Matteo.
It is Valerio.
I know him instantly by the edges of his tone, the way his words are usually controlled, measured, laced with sarcasm to hide what he really feels.
He doesn’t let another tear follow. A sharp breath, and whatever threatened to break is pulled back under iron control.
“You were not supposed to go yet,” he says quietly.
The silence between his sentences is weighted. His thumb barely skims my hand—a ghost of a touch, guarded, like he’s terrified of letting anything slip. I can picture him hunched in the dim glow, dark hair shadowing his face, his unblinking stare fixed on the only fight he’s terrified of losing.
“You should have seen Matteo when they wheeled you out of that room,” he goes on, his voice just above a whisper. “He is barely holding it together. Daniele hasn’t left your side. He keeps talking to you, hoping you’ll hear him.”
My heart aches at that. Even here. Even now.
“Me…” he pauses, the word scraped thin. I feel—rather than see—the shift in him, the faint tightening of his jaw, the steadying breath of a man who refuses to let emotion show on his face.
He is choosing his words carefully, the way a man does when he is walking across a line he promised himself he would never cross. “I am not good at this. Sitting still. Waiting. Feeling like I cannot do a damn thing to fix it.”
His voice is steady, but there’s a roughness beneath it. Not grief—he never shows grief. Something else. Something tightly contained.
A silence settles between us, heavy enough that it presses against my skin.
“I’ve seen a lot of things,” he goes on, slower now, “and I’ve learned to keep distance where it’s needed.” His thumb moves once over the back of my hand—a deliberate motion, small but unmistakable. “Lines help. They keep things clean.”
Another pause. Longer this time. I can’t tell if he’s searching for words or trying to swallow the ones he shouldn’t say.
“But there are moments…” His breath leaves him in a thin exhale. “Moments that don’t care about lines.”
My mind flickers, trying to grasp meaning through the fog. Here—in this half-world—every sound feels too sharp, every silence too loud. I don’t know if I’m hearing him clearly or if my fading consciousness is filling in the gaps.
He doesn’t say anything else for a long while. When he finally speaks again, his tone has returned to the calm, disciplined cadence I know.
“You scared us,” he murmurs.
There's the slightest shift before he adds, barely audible:
“Even me.”
The words land—quiet, heavy, undeniable.
A truth, or a trick of the mind. A slip, or nothing at all.
The words sink deep, heavier than anything else he has said. My chest tightens. My mind fights through the fog, reaching for that warmth.
Something inside me stirs.
A tingling runs down my arm, into my fingertips. For a moment, I am not sure if it is real or imagined. Then my index finger twitches. Just once. Small. But definite.
His breath catches.
“Bea?”
I drag in air that feels like swallowing glass. My lungs burn, clawing their way back into existence. A dry rasp tears its way out of my throat. It hurts to breathe but the pain is proof that I am here.
The brightness slams into my eyes when I force them open. The ceiling is all white and hard edges. The room smells like antiseptic and something metallic beneath it. The air is too cold on my skin, which feels damp and fragile.
I blink until the light stops stabbing. When my vision clears, Valerio is right there at the side of the bed, frozen mid-breath, his hand still wrapped around mine like a lifeline he is afraid to lose.
His eyes are wide, shock carved into every line of his face. He looks nothing like the unshakeable second-in-command I am used to. He looks like a man who has been staring at a door he thought might never open.
“You are awake,” he says. It is not elegant, not smooth, just honest.
I try to nod. The movement is small, but it is enough. Tears sting as they gather in my eyes, the emotion too big for a body that feels too weak. My throat burns when I try to speak, so instead I squeeze his hand as hard as my strength will allow.
He lets out a breath that sounds almost like a laugh and a sob tangled together.
“The doctors… they pulled you back,” he says, breath shaking. “They warned the next forty-eight hours are critical, but waking up means your system is responding.”
Relief roughens his words. For a second, I think he might actually lift my hand to his forehead, but he stops himself. I see the exact moment the walls he always carries start sliding back into place.
He loosens his hold on me slowly, like unclenching a fist that has been tight for too long.
“If I squeeze any harder, Matteo will accuse me of trying to break you,” he jokes quietly, giving himself an excuse to let go. It is half a deflection, half a promise.
Our eyes lock. Gratitude. Guilt. Loyalty. And a flicker of something he shuts down fast.
He withdraws his hand and steps back a fraction, straightening his shoulders, pulling the familiar armor over himself again.
“I’ll get the doctors,” he says. His voice is steadier now, his expression already rearranging itself into the version of Valerio the rest of the world is allowed to see. “And I’ll call Matteo. Your father’s here too. He was notified and flown in from Florence."
He turns to go, then hesitates. Just for a heartbeat. His gaze drops to my hand, the one that, moments ago, he had been holding like a prayer.
“Do not do that again,” he says softly, without looking up. “We’re not built to lose you.”
Then he leaves, and the door clicks shut behind him.
The room feels bigger without him there, but not empty. The echo of his words, the feel of his hand, the sound of Daniele’s voice from the void, they all linger, layered over the frantic flashes of light and the shouted “clear” that dragged me here.
I lie there, chest aching, lungs stinging, heart sore but steady, and I know one thing with absolute certainty.
I had one foot out of this world. For a moment, I almost let go.
But their love, their fear, their voices—and the pull of everything I’m not ready to leave behind—dragged me back.
Back to a world that isn’t finished with me yet.