Chapter 56 Marcello
Marcello
Three things happened the year I turned twelve.
Not the kind of things you celebrate with cake and candles.
No smiling photos. No neat little memories tucked into a scrapbook.
It was the kind of year that cracks a boy open and leaves the pieces where they fall—the kind that decides, long before he understands it, what sort of man will crawl out of the wreckage.
Lamb.
Alessio.
And my mother.
I used to think my childhood was full of small, forgettable moments—sunlight in the vineyards, my mother humming in the kitchen, Atlas teaching us how to throw a punch without breaking our knuckles.
But grief has a way of rewriting memory.
It strips everything back until only the wounds remain, bright and undeniable.
Lambada was the first.
She was younger than us. Too soft for the world we were born into. She laughed too easily, trusted too freely. My mother called her the gift, because she’d been told after having me that she couldn’t have any more children. She was, indeed, a gift.
Then Neve’s father ran her down.
An accident, they said. Wrong place, wrong time.
There is no such thing as wrong time when fate wants blood.
Her death hollowed our house. Atlas stopped smiling. I started breaking things.
My father couldn’t stand the silence that followed her. He couldn’t stand watching his sons dwelled inside their own grief. So he did what men like him always do when faced with something they can’t fix.
He gave us a new toy. A sibling to coddle and smother with our love. He brought Alessio into the family. It was sweet, reckless Alessio who cured the ache in our hearts and gave us a renewed purpose in life.
He was a well timed distraction, and it worked. At least for a while.
Alessio threw himself into our family with the same open heart he gave to everything. He wanted to prove he was worth keeping. Worth loving. Worth not losing.
God, I wish I had stopped him.
My mother was the second to go.
Lamb’s death broke something inside her that never healed.
People say she died of a broken heart.
I think she just got tired of surviving.
And when she went, the last gentle thing in our house went with her.
Atlas became harder.
I became angrier.
And Alessio became… more desperate to hold us together.
Then fate threw Neve into our lives.
Atlas was supposed to kill her. Everyone knows that. He saw something in her instead—something small and wounded and familiar. I know now what it was.
He saw Lamb.
That same terrified courage. That same fragile defiance. The same way she looked at the world like it might hurt her… but she would love it anyway.
If Atlas hadn’t let Neve live, none of this would have happened. Or maybe all of it would have.
That’s the curse of grief—you start bargaining with the past like it can be rescinded.
If Lamb hadn’t died, Alessio wouldn’t have been dragged into the dark.
If my mother hadn’t broken, we might have stayed a family instead of becoming a pack of angry wolves.
If Neve hadn’t come between Atlas and fate, maybe Alessio would still be alive.
Or maybe fate would have taken him anyway.
And if Neve hadn’t been there to anchor Atlas when Alessio died… I might have lost both my brothers instead of one.
There was no way of knowing. There was only now. And Alessio was gone.
The rage in me was a living thing. It filled my chest, my throat, my hands. It burned hotter with every second I remembered the phone lighting up and me not answering. One stupid, careless moment that may have changed everything.
Or maybe not.
I stood in the bathroom, staring at my reflection.
A man I didn’t recognize stared back. Red-eyed. Hollow. Furious. The curls that everyone always loved fell around my face like a mockery of the boy I used to be.
There was a razor in my hand. For a moment, even I didn’t know what I was going to do. Grief makes you reckless like that. I lifted the razor to my scalp and pressed.
Hair slid down into the sink. Thick, dark curls falling like pieces of the past I didn’t deserve to keep. I kept going. Again and again. Until my head was bare and cold and raw beneath my fingers.
I looked up.
A stranger stared back now. Harder. Piercing. Stripped of softness.
Because softness had gotten Lamb killed.
Softness had broken my mother.
That same softness had let Alessio die while I ignored my phone.
I wiped my face and met my own eyes in the mirror.
The only way to honor Alessio wasn’t to follow him into the dark.
It was to live.
To remember him.
To carry him.
To move forward so his life hadn’t been for nothing.
Three things had shaped me.
Three fractures that carved their way into my bones and stayed there.
And every step I took from that moment on—every choice, every mistake, every drop of blood spilled—would carry the weight of them.
Whether fate approved of it… or not.