Chapter 2 Marcello
Marcello
Three things happened the year I turned twelve.
Not the kind of things anyone marks with cake and candles. No smiling photos. No neat little memories pressed into scrapbooks.
It was the kind of year that splits a boy down the middle and leaves him to figure out which half survives.
Lamb.
Alessio.
My mother.
Before all that, I used to think my childhood was made of ordinary things—sunlight bleeding across the vineyards, my mother humming in the kitchen while she cooked, Atlas teaching us how to throw a punch without shattering our knuckles.
But grief rewrites everything.
It burns away the soft edges of memory until only the wounds remain.
Lamb was the first.
She was younger than us. Too soft for the world we were born into. She laughed easily, trusted too freely.
My mother called her the gift because she’d been told after having me that there would be no more children. Lambada had been the miracle that proved the doctors wrong.
She was light where the rest of us were already learning how to live in shadow.
Then Neve’s father ran her down.
An accident, they said.
Wrong place. Wrong time.
But there is no such thing as wrong timing when fate decides it wants blood.
Her death hollowed our house.
Atlas stopped smiling.
I started breaking things.
My father couldn’t stand the silence Lamb left behind. Couldn’t stand watching his sons buried inside their own grief. So he did what men like him always do when faced with something they can’t repair.
He tried to replace the loss.
That’s when he brought Alessio into our family.
Sweet, reckless Alessio.
He arrived like a sudden storm of noise and life. Loud where we’d gone silent. Curious where we’d turned inward. He threw himself into our family with an open heart that never seemed to doubt whether it would be caught.
And for a while… it worked.
The ache eased. The house breathed again.
Alessio had a way of doing that. Of stepping into the middle of broken things and convincing them they could still hold together.
God, I wish I had stopped him.
My mother was the second thing that year took from me.
Lamb’s death broke something inside her that never healed.
People like to say she died of a broken heart.
I think she just grew tired of surviving.
And when she went, the last gentle thing in our house disappeared with her.
Atlas hardened.
I learned how to carry anger like armor.
And Alessio—God—Alessio tried harder than ever to keep us together.
Then fate dropped Neve into our lives.
Atlas had been sent to kill her.
Everyone knows that story.
But when he looked at her, he didn’t see a target.
He saw something small and wounded and stubbornly alive.
Later, I understood what it was.
He saw Lamb.
That same fragile courage. That same way of looking at the world like it might hurt you… but loving it anyway.
If Atlas had killed her, none of this would have happened.
Or maybe it would have.
That’s the curse grief leaves behind—you start bargaining with the past like it’s a contract that can be rewritten.
If Lamb hadn’t died, Alessio might never have been pulled into the dark with us.
If my mother hadn’t broken, maybe we would’ve stayed a family instead of becoming a pack of angry wolves.
If Neve hadn’t stepped 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 hold Atlas together after Alessio died… I might have lost both my brothers instead of one.
There’s no way to know.
The rage inside me is a living thing. It sits behind my ribs, breathing slow and heavy. It tightens in my throat every time I remember my phone lighting up that night.
Buzzing.
Insistent.
Ignored.
I stand in the bathroom staring at my reflection.
The man looking back at me doesn’t feel familiar. His eyes are red. Hollow. Too old for the face he’s wearing.
The curls people always liked fall around my face like a reminder of someone I used to be.
There’s a razor in my hand.
For a moment, I don’t even know what I’m going to do with it.
Grief does that. It pushes you toward edges you didn’t know existed.
Then I press the blade against my scalp.
Hair slides into the sink. Thick curls falling away like pieces of the past I don’t deserve to carry anymore.
I keep going.
Again.
Again.
Until the sink is full and my head is bare beneath my fingers.
Cold.
Raw.
I lift my eyes to the mirror.
The stranger staring back now looks harder.
Sharper.
Stripped down to something simpler.
Because softness had gotten Lamb killed.
Softness had broken my mother.
Softness had let Alessio die while I ignored my phone.
I wipe my face and hold my own gaze.
The only way to honor Alessio isn’t to follow him into the dark.
It’s to live.
To carry him forward.
To remember him in the choices I make.
To make sure his life wasn’t just another casualty the world swallowed and forgot.
Three things shaped me.
Three fractures buried so deep in my bones they’ll never heal clean.
And every step I take from here—every decision, every mistake, every drop of blood spilled—will carry the weight of them.
Whether fate approves…or not.
I walk through the back corridor of the club. A guard nods as I pass. I return the gesture.
No words are needed.
Blood has a way of marking you, even when no one can see it.
Alessio had been different from Atlas and me.
Same blood.
Different wiring.
Atlas and I learned early what force could buy—fear, obedience, silence.
Alessio learned something else.
That listening could dismantle a man faster than breaking his jaw.
That patience was leverage.
That calm could be a weapon.
I used to think that made him soft.
I was wrong.
He remembered names.
Not just faces—patterns.
He noticed when someone started drinking more than sleeping. When a joke stopped landing. When a man was two steps from breaking.
He didn’t loom over people. He sat beside them.
He didn’t threaten. He made people feel seen.
“You don’t always have to break things to control them.”
I laughed when he said that.
Told him power had to be loud. Bloody. Obvious. If you wanted control, you took it and left proof of the beast behind.
He only smiled. That gentle patience. Like he already knew how I’d learn the lesson.
Now he’s gone. And everything around me proves he was right.
I step outside into the cold night air.
Engines idle on the street. Voices drift from passing groups.
But none of it drowns out the sound in my head.
My phone buzzing.
Relentless.
Too late.
Alessio called me twice that night.
Atlas called again and again.
I didn’t answer.
I was inside a girl whose name I can’t even remember now.
Five minutes of distraction.
Five minutes where I chose numbness over blood.
While I was doing that, my brothers were being shot.
Alessio died.
Atlas almost did.
There’s no version of that night where I’m innocent.
I was unreachable.
That truth doesn’t move.
Maybe if I hadn’t been so selfish.
Maybe if I’d answered.
Maybe if I’d done one thing differently.
The maybes never stop.
They grind through my head until they feel louder than my own thoughts.
What if.
If only.
What if.
If only.
And none of it changes anything.
I’m still standing where I was months ago.
Over my brother’s grave.
Watching dirt hit the coffin.
Knowing I’ll never get him back.
I shaved my head after the funeral.
Stood in front of the mirror like punishment might count as penance.
Like if I stripped enough away, I could scrape the guilt out with it.
It didn’t work.
The hair grew back.
The guilt stayed.
So I started dismantling myself slowly.
I pulled my motorcycle out of storage and rode like a man with nothing left to lose. No helmet. Corners taken too fast.
I stopped pretending to belong in boardrooms.
Leather replaced suits.
Bruised knuckles replaced cufflinks.
I picked fights and stayed in them longer than necessary.
Long enough for the pain to follow me home.
People called it grief.
But grief alone doesn’t hollow you out like this.
Atlas was the one who stopped it.
Not with comfort.
Not with words.
He slid the keys to the club across the table and gave me something heavier than sympathy.
“You need somewhere to stand.”
His body had still been stiff from the bullets he took.
His eyes hollow.
That’s when I realized I wasn’t the only one who’d lost a brother that night.
So I stayed.
I took the club and let it swallow me whole.
Night after night.
Because stopping isn’t an option.
Atlas gave me the club to keep me breathing.
Alessio would have given it to me because he believed in me.
That’s the difference.
Every good thing in this place carries his ghost.
When I make security walk women to their cars—that’s Alessio.
When I shut down a fight before it turns bloody—that’s him.
When I let a man leave with a warning instead of a shattered jaw—that’s my brother’s voice in my head, still trying to make the world less cruel.
He’s everywhere.
In the rules.
In the mercy.
In the parts of this place that still pretend to be human.
He should be here.
He should be the one behind the desk, calling the shots, turning this place into something better than a den of wolves.
Instead, I hold the keys where my brother should have stood.
I carry Atlas’s trust.
And beneath all of it sits the truth that never loosens its grip on my throat.
When Alessio needed me— I wasn’t there.
So I don’t stop. I don’t slow down.
I keep the lights burning. The doors open. The monster fed.
Because the moment I stand still… the guilt finds me.