Chapter 41 Marcello
Marcello
Gianni’s voice sounded all wrong when I answered his call. He hadn’t been tense or irritated. Just… empty. A hollowed-out version of the man I trusted with my life.
“Where are you?” he asked, the words tight enough to snap.
“With Maya,” I muttered, scrubbing lipstick off my cheek with the back of my hand. “Why?”
“You need to come to the penthouse.”
I scoffed. “Gianni, can it wait? I’m—”
“No.”
One word. Flat. Cold. Absolute. No, it could not wait.
The silence that followed burned everything in its wake. Something ancient and primal went still in my chest.
“Atlas?” I forced out, already knowing I wouldn’t like the answer.
Another silence. Longer. Deeper. It slithered into my bones.
When Gianni finally spoke, his voice was a whisper, scraped raw as he tried to release it.
“Marcello… it’s Alessio.”
My pulse stopped. A full, dead halt. My hand lost feeling around the phone.
“What about Alessio?”
The words scraped out of me. Barely recognisable. Hardly sane.
Gianni exhaled, and it sounded like something that resembled darkness and ruin. Something in his voice was shaky, fractured. He wasn’t the type to break for anything, but he broke now.
“Come now,” he murmured.
The world lurched sideways. My vision tunneled. My knees buckled, and I drove a hand against the wall to stay upright. The hallway swam. My heartbeat was violent, stabbing up into my throat.
No.
No.
No.
My mouth tasted like metal.
“I’m coming,” I rasped, though the sound barely qualified as human.
I hung up. And I ran. I tore through the night like a feral animal, because there was only one truth left ringing in my skull. Something unspeakable had happened. And whatever I found in that penthouse, there was no coming back from it.
There was blood everywhere.
It wasn’t splattered or pooled. It was everywhere.
It clung to the floors in thick, dragging streaks.
It was on the walls in wild, violent arcs—handprints, smears, the desperate signatures of a fight I wasn’t here for.
The once-clinical white décor was drowned beneath it, swallowed whole by a harsh, living red that pulsed in the corners of my vision like it was still warm… still fresh… still bleeding.
The whole penthouse reeked of copper and death, like the place itself was screaming.
Gianni met me at the door, his face hollow. I shoved past him.
Atlas was gone—transported to the emergency safehouse—but the blood was still everywhere. Thick streaks across the marble. Dark droplets drying on the walls. A bullet lodged in the frame.
But it was the lump under the blanket in the entryway that stopped my heart.
I walked to it. Slow. As though approaching an altar.
Gianni tried to stop me. “Marcello—maybe don’t—”
I ignored him. My knees hit the floor beside the body. I lifted the blanket. And time ended.
My little brother. My sunshine. My headache. My favorite problem. The only person who could make Atlas laugh without trying. The kid who always saved the last cannoli for me because he knew I pretended not to care.
Alessio.
His face was too still. Too calm. It looked wrong against the happy-go-lucky persona he’d worn his whole life.
My breath left me in a guttural, animal sound I didn’t recognise. My hands shook as I touched his hair, pushing it out of his eyes like I’d done since he was six.
“He was just a kid,” I choked. “He was just—fuck—he was just—”
Gianni knelt beside me, eyes wet. “He died protecting the door. They got him before they got inside.”
I bowed my head and pressed my forehead to Alessio’s. “You stupid, brave little shit.”
The tears came hot and violent. My chest cracked open. A raw, gutted sound tore out of me—so vicious that Gianni flinched. I didn’t care. Let the whole building hear me. I wanted the whole city to hear my pain before I burned it to the ground.
When I finally lifted my head, something new sat behind my ribs.
It wasn’t grief or shock. It was a cold, perfect rage.
“What’s Atlas’s status?” I asked him, softly, because everything in the room felt like it might shatter if I raised my voice.
Gianni stood near the doorway of Atlas’s penthouse, staring at nothing, hands stained red where he hadn’t bothered to wash them yet.
Alessio’s blood. Atlas’s blood. He’d been soaked in both, and now he wore it like a second skin.
His jaw was locked so tight I could hear his teeth grind every time he breathed.
“Critical. But alive.”
Those three words were a mercy and a curse all at once. Alive meant hope. Alive meant more pain to come. I nodded once, slow and careful, and forced my focus back to Gianni instead of the hollow screaming inside my chest.
“Get someone to clean this place up,” I told him.
He frowned slightly, like he didn’t understand.
“He’s not going to want to see this when he wakes up,” I added. “He’ll come back here.”
Because Atlas always came home. That was the rule. The universe could do whatever ugly shit it wanted to him, but he always came back.
Gianni hesitated. His eyes flicked to the floor, to the dark stains still smeared across the marble, to the outline where Alessio had died.
“Whatever you’re planning,” he warned, “maybe we should wait.”
Wait.
The word felt obscene in my mouth.
“What are we waiting for?” I snapped. “For the Russians to finish the job?”
“We haven’t even buried Alessio yet.”
The words tore out of Gianni, raw and jagged. The sound echoed off the walls like a wound.
That’s when I saw it, and understood it. The grief.
It was written all over his face, carved deep and ugly. Gianni looked like someone had ripped his spine out and left him standing anyway.
He was the one who had found Alessio.
He was the one who had dropped to his knees beside our little brother and known instantly there was nothing to be done.
He was the one who had held Atlas in his arms, begging him not to die, blood soaking through his clothes, while everything he loved tried to bleed out at once.
And on top of all that?
His wife was pregnant.
There was a life growing inside her while death had just torn through our family like an avalanche.
The weight of it all was crushing him. I could see it in the way his shoulders sagged, in the way his eyes kept drifting to the door like he was torn between running back to her and staying here with us.
Family pulling him in two directions. Both of them bleeding.
“I know,” I added quietly, stepping closer. “I know you’re not okay.”
He didn’t look at me.
“I’m fine.”
The lie was thin.
“You’re not. You’re standing in a room where one of your brothers died and the other nearly followed him. You’re allowed to not be fine.”
He swallowed. Hard.
For a second, I thought he might say something. Might crack. Might let a single piece of it out.
But Gianni was built to hold things together while everything burned.
“I just—” His voice roughened. “I don’t want this to get worse.”
I studied him. The blood on his sleeves. The hollow in his eyes.
“It already is. Alessio is dead. Atlas is barely alive. There is no version of this that isn’t already hell.”
That finally made him look at me.
“And you think vengeance fixes that?”
“No. But it gives the pain somewhere to go.”
Silence stretched between us, thick with things neither of us wanted to say out loud.
Gianni’s gaze slid back to the floor.
“He was just a kid,” he whispered. “Just a kid trying to prove himself.”
My throat tightened.
“He died protecting his brother. That counts for something.”
“Neve is missing,” Gianni remarked, almost as an afterthought, and I wondered how I missed that fact.
“You think the Russians took her?”
Gianni shook his head.
“The lift in the kitchen was used. I’m sure Atlas put her in there. What happened after she got out is anybody’s guess.”
“We need to find her, Gianni. The moment Atlas wakes up, he’s going to ask about her.”
Gianni closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, something cold had settled behind them.
“Tell me what you’re planning, Marcello.”
I met his stare.
“War,” I told him.
And this time, he didn’t argue.