Chapter 12 Marcello
Marcello
I fucked up.
There was no clever way to say it. No polished version. No strategic reframing that made it sound less ugly than it was.
Just the truth.
Raw and oppressive. Sitting heavy in my chest like something dead I kept trying to pretend wasn’t there.
If this had happened any other time in my life, I would have called Alessio.
Not Atlas.
Alessio.
He had been the one who listened all the way through before saying a word. The one who never let emotion drag a situation off course. He could take the ugliest mess and strip it down to its bare bones, lay every piece on the table, and tell you exactly where it was broken.
Not cruelly. Not softly, either. In all honesty.
Alessio had a way of making the truth hurt without making you feel humiliated for not seeing it sooner.
He’d been my balance. My buffer. My last decent thought on the days when my temper got there first.
And he was dead.
So Atlas would have to do.
Yet it wasn’t the same.
Atlas thought first and felt later—or at least that was how it looked from the outside.
He led with instinct. With loyalty. With the kind of violence that came easily to men like us when the world gave us a reason.
He would back me. He always did. But he wasn’t Alessio.
He wouldn’t pick through the wreckage with careful hands and steady logic.
Atlas dealt with problems the way a storm dealt with trees. He hit them until something gave. Still, he was all I had.
Some people would’ve believed none of this would have happened if Alessio were still alive. That he would have seen the cracks before they split wide open. That he would have stopped me before I crossed the point where things couldn’t be uncrossed.
They would’ve reasoned that I wouldn’t have been so far gone with grief—so twisted up in rage and guilt and the need to feel something other than loss—that I painted an alley red and dragged a half-conscious woman into a nightmare she never asked for.
Maybe they would’ve been right. Maybe Alessio would have looked at me once and known I was already halfway to ruin.
But hypotheticals were useless.
They didn’t clean blood. They didn’t undo damage. Nor did they give a woman back the voice I stole from her in the name of saving her.
It happened. Now I had to live inside it.
Atlas was in his office when I found him.
He didn’t tell me to sit. He didn’t offer a drink or ask if this was business or family.
He took one look at my face and knew it was both.
I gave him the facts and only the facts.
The alley. The men. The accents. The blood. The girl.
What I did. What I didn’t do.
The choices I made—fast, brutal, irreversible—and the ones I never gave myself time to think about.
I kept my voice level. Dead. Controlled.
Because if I let even a crack form—if I let one sliver of what was sitting under my ribs slip through—I would come apart in front of him.
Atlas listened. That was the first mistake. No—worse than that. That was the first warning that this was not going to end well.
He stood at the window while I spoke, one hand braced against the sill like he needed something solid to hold onto. His back half-turned, his reflection cutting through the glass—dark, still, unreadable.
He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t curse or react. He just listened in silence. And the longer he remained silent, the more something ugly started coiling in my gut. Because Atlas doesn’t stay quiet unless he’s about to destroy something.
When I finished, the silence didn’t settle. It pressed. Thick. Suffocating. Alive.
Then he moved. Slow at first. A single turn from the window. Then pacing. One end of the room to the other. Sharp. Controlled. Like a predator mapping the cage.
His hand dragged through his hair. Dropped. Curled into a fist. Opened again. Again. Again.
He was thinking. Not just what I’d done—but what it meant. For the family. For the streets. For him. For me.
And with every pass he made across the room, the air grew tighter.
He was getting angrier. I could feel it building in him like pressure behind steel.
Finally—he stopped pacing.
“Albanians, you claim?”
His voice was flat.
“As far as I could tell,” I said. “We didn’t exactly stop for introductions.”
His jaw flexed.
“And the girl?”
“I’ve got a name.”
“A name.”
“Samira.”
He repeated it once under his breath, like he was carving it into something permanent. Then he looked at me. And that’s when it came.
“You have nothing else because you stole her voice, her sight.”
It didn’t feel like words. It felt like a blade cutting through me. Clean. Precise. Striking exactly where it would do the most damage.
My mouth flattened.
“What would you have done differently?” I asked.
There was a beat. Then Atlas snapped. He didn’t explode. He detonated.
“For fuck’s sake, Marcello—!”
The room shook with his rage. His voice cracked through the walls, through my chest, through whatever thin control I was still clinging to.
“Pull. Yourself. Together!”
Each word hit harder than the last. Not wild or messy. But targeted, brutal, unforgiving.
“Stop letting your grief run the fucking show!”
That one landed. Because it was true. Every reckless decision. Every fight. Every body. Every woman. Every night I chose noise over silence because silence meant I was lost in my thoughts of him—Alessio.
Gone. Gone and not coming back.
Atlas stalked toward me, each step heavier than the last.
“Alessio is dead.”
There was no softness in it. No mercy. He didn’t ease me into the reminder. Just a raw and unrelenting truth,
“He’s gone.”
Another step.
“And you tearing yourself apart—burning everything around you—”
Now he was right in front of me.
“—isn’t going to bring him back.”
Something inside my chest cracked.
I looked away. Just for a second.
“What do you want me to say?” he demanded, voice rising again, sharper now. “You want applause?”
His laugh was short. Empty. Cutting.
“You want me to congratulate you because you dragged a girl out of an alley like some kind of savior?”
I clenched my jaw.
“Is that it?”
He stepped closer.
“You want me to tell you you did a good job?”
“You don’t know what happened—”
“I know exactly what happened!” he roared.
The sound struck through the room, unhindered.
“You saw something broken, and instead of thinking—instead of stopping—you took control.”
His finger jabbed into my chest.
“You decided for her.”
Another jab.
“You moved her.”
Another.
“You stripped her of every choice she had left because you’re too far gone in your own head to tell the difference between saving someone and controlling them.”
“That’s not what I did—”
“You can’t control the narrative of everything, Marcello!” he shot back. “You can’t control death!”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Atlas leaned in, his voice dropping—low, lethal.
“You made yourself judge, jury, and fucking executioner.”
Each word was measured, deliberate. More dangerous.
“Because you don’t know how to live with the fact that you couldn’t save him.”
His words buried me. My hands curled into fists at my sides.
“You think I don’t see it?” he went on, relentless now. “You think I don’t see you throwing yourself into every fight, every mess, every piece of chaos you can find because it’s easier than standing still and feeling something?”
His voice broke—just for a second. But it came back sharper. Harder.
“You’re not the only one who lost him.”
Silence. Heavy. Violent. Because there it was. His grief. Not loud like mine. Not reckless. But just as deep. Just as consuming. And somehow—worse. Because he carried it. While I became it.
“You’re destroying everything,” Atlas’s voice was low. “And you don’t even have the decency to admit it.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt her.” My voice came out rougher now. Fractured.
“I know.”
That stopped me. I looked at him. His eyes were steady. Unforgiving.
“I know you didn’t mean to,” he agreed. “That’s what makes it worse.”
The words sank in slow. Like poison.
“In hurting her,” he continued, “you hurt yourself.”
I swallowed hard.
“And you don’t get to outrun that.”
For a second—just one—I saw her again.
Samira.
With her hand steady against the wall. Blind. Silent. Following the sound of my voice like it was the only thing in the world left that she could trust.
And I—I had taken even more from her.
Something inside me twisted. Ugly and guilty.
Atlas saw it.
“She’s your responsibility.”
“Tone’s handling it—”
“No.”
Just that one word. Final. Absolute.
“She stays with you.”
My head snapped up.
“Until she’s strong enough to leave.”
His gaze locked onto mine. Cold. Unyielding.
“You don’t get to hand this off because it’s inconvenient,” he snapped. “You don’t get to pass her to someone else and pretend this isn’t your fucking mess to clean up.”
I felt something coil in my gut.
“She shouldn’t be near me.”
Atlas didn’t even blink.
“That may be true.”
A beat.
“But she is.”
There was silence before he went on.
“Maybe living with what you’ve done will remind you what being human actually costs.”
That one gutted me.
We stood there in it. In the weight. In the ghost of Alessio hanging between us like unfinished business.
“You think your grief gives you permission to become less than what he believed you were,” Atlas hissed.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.
“Well, it doesn’t.”
And there it was. The final blow. Because Alessio—he had believed in me. Even when I didn’t believe in myself. Especially when I didn’t.
Atlas turned away, dragging a hand over his face. For a split second—I saw it. His grief. His exhaustion.
The weight of holding everything together while I tore it apart.
“That girl isn’t your punishment,” he said, back still to me. “It’s your test.”
My voice came out hoarse.
“Of what?”
He glanced over his shoulder. And whatever was left of me—he aimed straight for it.
“Of whether there’s anything left of you worth saving.”
Then he walked out. Just like that. He left me standing there. Alone. With the silence. With Alessio. With the truth I’d been running from.
I saved Samira from monsters in the dark. And then— in my own way—I became one.