Chapter 51 Neve
Neve
I woke in the small infirmary room, wrapped in blankets that smelled faintly of lavender and old wood. The window was cracked just enough to let in the night breeze. Crickets hummed in the distance.
For a moment, I pretended the world was still whole. Then memory crashed back, suddenly cold.
Atlas. Gunfire. Zelda shoving me. Running. The train. Mist. Strangers’ pity.
My chest had tightened painfully.
I sat up too fast, and the room swayed. My hands shook as I pressed them to my eyes. My pulse thundered at my throat, a frantic reminder that I was alive when I wasn’t sure I should be.
Sister Ana sat beside the bed in a creaking wooden chair, watching me with soft worry etched across her features.
“You cried in your sleep.”
Heat had flooded my face. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize for having a heart.”
I had swallowed hard. “Did I… say anything?”
“You called his name.” She was gentle when she spoke. “Atlas.”
My breath left me in a rush, like someone punched the air from my lungs.
“Is he dead?” I whispered.
She hesitated. And that hesitation was worse than any truth.
“I don’t know, child. I’ve heard that…Tuscany is burning with violence.”
I stared at the wall, fingers tightening in the blanket.
“He hasn’t come for me. It’s been days.”
Sister Ana exhaled slowly, her voice tender but firm. “Men like Atlas walk the line between life and death more often than we like to admit. Sometimes the world pulls them under for a while. Sometimes they claw their way back.”
I lowered my head.
“But if he were alive,” I whispered, “wouldn’t he have found me? Wouldn’t he have tried?”
Her hand rested lightly on mine. “Hope is a fragile thing when it’s carried alone, child.”
I didn’t respond.
Night settled deeper around us. The candles burned low. And somewhere outside, a storm began to roll in, wind rattling the shutters like restless ghosts.
I laid back down, closing my eyes. But sleep didn’t come gently. When it did come… it brought nightmares.
I dreamed of Atlas lying still, eyes closed, blood pooling beneath him. I dreamed of reaching for him and feeling only cold. I dreamed of running, always running, and never escaping the moment I left him behind.
I woke gasping, drenched in sweat, clutching the blanket like it might anchor me to the world. Sister Ana sat in the chair near the bed, rarely leaving. Her presence steadied me.
But every time I blinked, I saw Atlas’s face - the moment before the shots rang out, the moment he shoved me behind him, the moment he sent me away and I didn’t come back. I curled inward.
“What if he’s really gone?” I whispered.
Sister Ana closed her eyes briefly.
“Then you must learn to live,” she replied “even when the world insists on taking those we love.”
I fell in and out of life as the days slid past in a soft, sickening haze. Sometimes I woke drenched in sweat, heart pounding, convinced I was still running. Other times I woke numb, the world muffled and distant, as if someone had pressed cotton into my ears and grief into my bones.
When my strength finally returned enough to stand without collapsing, I left the infirmary bed and drifted into a routine that felt less like living and more like floating.
I swept floors in the mornings - slow, repetitive strokes that gave my hands something to do while my mind circled the same unanswerable thoughts.
At noon, I knelt in the herb garden beside Sister Elara, pressing my fingers into the earth. The soil was cool, grounding. But even that small comfort fractured when the wind shifted and carried the scent of cypress - the same scent that had clung to Atlas’s clothes.
In the afternoon, I mended habits until my fingers throbbed. The needle pricks became familiar, tiny points of pain I willingly chose because all the other pain inside me was out of my control.
I took my meals in silence. Bread and broth with water because it was all I could stomach. Everything tasted like ash.
The other sisters gave me space - more than I needed, but exactly enough to keep me from breaking in front of them. They recognized the expression on my face. The look of someone grieving before the funeral had even been announced.
I moved through the convent like a ghost of myself. Some days, I barely spoke. Some days, I forgot I was allowed to. But nothing filled the ache inside me. Nothing silenced the fear curdled beneath my ribs or the constant thrum of his name beneath every thought.
I waited.
Every morning, without meaning to, my feet carried me toward the courtyard gate. I stood there, fingers curled around the iron bars, staring down the path as if sheer willpower could summon his silhouette out of the mist.
Every evening, I returned to the chapel. Candles flickered low, stained glass darkening with dusk. I sat alone in the front pew, whispering prayers into the hollow air. Prayers that felt too fragile for a world like this.
Sometimes Sister Ana joined me, sitting beside me in silence. She didn’t question me. She just existed next to me like an anchor - quiet, steady, and unwavering.
But even her presence hadn’t stopped my thoughts from tearing themselves apart.
One afternoon, while we harvested basil in the herb garden, I overheard two of the younger sisters whispering.
“They say the violence hasn’t stopped,” one whispered, her voice tight with nerves. “Tuscany is red this season.”
My spine stiffened. I held my breath.
“And the Cavalho family?” the other asked.
A beat.
“Retaliating,” the first one explained. “As they always do.”
My hands froze in the soil.
Cavalho. Atlas.
The blood drained from my face. My heart stuttered painfully, tripping over itself. Retaliating could have meant he was alive. Or it could have meant someone else was wearing his rage. I didn’t know which possibility terrified me more.
Sister Ana noticed my stillness and squeezed my shoulder gently. “Come,” she whispered. “Take a moment.”
I nodded, though my body felt too heavy to move. Somehow, I made my way to the chapel. The pew groaned under my weight as I sat, folding into myself. I pressed my forehead to my clasped hands. My fingers trembled while my breath shuddered out in broken pieces.
“Please,” I whispered into the quiet. The words tore from somewhere deep, raw, unrefined. “Just let him be alive.”
The silence that followed was thick. Heavy. Merciless. There was only quiet and dread. And the echo of a world that might have swallowed the only person who had ever made me feel like I belonged in it.
I didn’t hear Sister Ana when she took a seat beside me. I didn’t notice her until her hand brushed mine, gentle and warm.
“Hope is painful,” she murmured, her voice wrapping around me like soft wool. “But so is giving it up.”
I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand, ashamed of how wet they were.
“I don’t know how much longer I can wait,” I admitted, my voice cracking. “It feels like… like I’m holding my breath, and if I exhale, it will be the end.”
She linked her fingers with mine in a rare show of tenderness.
“Then don’t wait. Live. And if he returns, he will find you living.”
Her words sounded kind. Wise. But they didn’t land. Because I couldn’t live. Not when every breath felt unfinished — suspended, hanging between what was and what might never be.
Not when every night I saw his face right before the sound of gunfire. Not when I heard Zelda screaming at me to run and guilt gnawed at me for leaving. I imagined him lying somewhere cold, alone, bleeding out because I wasn’t there.
And so, in the quiet moments — when the chores were done, when the candles burned low, when the stone walls echoed back nothing but my own heartbeat — I whispered his name into the stillness.
Soft.
Broken.
Desperate.
“Atlas…”
And I hoped — against reason, against terror, against the way this world chewed through good men — that he was still out there. That the world hadn’t stolen him from me.