Chapter 43 Marcello
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.
Small. Thin. Scared.
Atlas had given him his jacket without being asked. I remembered that too. Watching him drape it over Alessio’s shaking shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like family didn’t need to be explained.
Now Alessio was gone.
I hated that the world kept moving when ours had shattered.
I leaned closer, resting my forehead against Atlas’s arm.
“You’re not allowed to die,” I whispered. “Not after he gave his life for you.”
My chest ached like something inside it was tearing apart.
“You were his hero,” I reminded him. “You know that, right? He followed you like you hung the stars. And now he’s gone because he was doing what he always did — protecting his brothers.”
I swallowed hard.
“And I don’t know how to live in a world where that kind of loyalty no longer exists.”
The room felt too small. Too quiet. Like even the air was holding its breath.
I stayed there, head bowed, holding Atlas’s hand like it was the last real thing left in the world.
And for the first time in my life, I was afraid.
Not of enemies.
Not of war.
Not of blood.
I was afraid of waking up tomorrow and having one less brother to love.
And I wasn’t sure my heart could survive that.
Raze Cavalho wasn’t someone you invited into your life.
He was something you unleashed. Sure, he was my first cousin, but he was the craziest one amongst us, and so we limited our interactions with him as much as we possibly could.
Things had become particularly awkward also after he lost his wife and son to the underworld.
I’d done my best to drag him out of the dark, and for a while it had worked
My thumb hovered over his name. A ghost. A promise. A mistake I’d sworn I’d never make again. But the decision cemented itself the more my rage festered.
I thought of Alessio and his stupid grin. Of the way he had believed the world was beautiful, and the way his life had ended with his blood soaked into marble.
I hit call.
It rang twice.
“Well, well,” a familiar voice drawled, lazy and dangerous, “If it isn’t my long lost cousin Marcello Cavalho. To what do I owe this resurrection?”
The only comfort in making that call was knowing he’d never erased my number—not after all these years.
The same way I’d never erased his.
We’d gone long stretches without speaking, each of us buried in our own battles. But brotherhood isn’t measured in phone calls. It’s measured in the certainty that when you finally reach out, the other man will answer.
“They killed Alessio,” I told him.
Silence swallowed the line.
Raze knew exactly what that meant.
When he finally spoke, the playfulness was gone, replaced by something low and lethal.
“Who?”
“Bratva.”
I heard it then — the inhale of breath. The tiny, involuntary fracture in his control.
Raze Cavalho didn’t hate easily.
But he hated the Bratva with the kind of devotion men reserved for religion.
“How can I help?” he asked.
Not if.
Not why.
How.
“They’re scattered,” I answered. “I want them in one place. And then I want that place gone.”
A slow whistle slid through the line. “You’re talking high-grade.”
“Yes.”
“You want to collapse a structure,” he added thoughtfully, “or level it?”
“Level it.”
No hesitation. No mercy.
A dark chuckle answered me. “Christ, cousin. I haven’t heard that tone in years.”
“Can you do the drop or not?”
“I can. But I’m not handing you toys and sitting this one out. I’m coming in with you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m not doing it for you,” he cut in. “I’m doing it because the Bratva are my problem too.”
My jaw tightened. “Still beefing with Mikhailov’s crew?”
“Oh, I’m past beef,” he told me. “That’s why I owe you, remember?” he continued quietly. “You dragged me out of the gutter when they killed my family.”
A memory crashed into me — fire and smoke and Raze on his knees in the driveway of his home, mourning the life of his wife and unborn son in a car explosion we had to drag him away from.”
“Then our enemies are the same,” I confirmed.
“And our ambitions are aligned,” he finished. “I’ll bring the arms. You bring the bodies. Gather every Bratva bastard tied to this hit. I’ll set the charges. And then we light the goddamn sky.”
“Fine.”
“And Marcello?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry about your brother,” he added quietly. “Alessio was a good kid.”
My throat locked. Grief and fury tangled so tight it hurt to breathe.
“Yeah.”
“He deserved better than this world.”
A promise — black and terrible — settled into my bones.
“He’ll get better,” I whispered. “I’ll make sure of it.”