Chapter 40 Marcello
Marcello
The coordinates dragged me off the road and into nothing.
Trees closed in hard and fast, the track narrowing until branches scraped along the sides of the car like fingernails.
Sunlight filtered through the canopy in broken shards, flashing and disappearing as I pushed forward.
Whatever had once passed for a road dissolved beneath my tyres, asphalt giving way to dirt, then stone, the car jolting with every uneven shift.
The sound of water grew louder the further I went.
It wasn’t a trickle or a stream. Something rushing. Heavy.
My unease sharpened.
I cut the engine before it could announce me and let the silence slam down around me. The absence of sound was loud in its own way, pressing in, making every small movement feel amplified. I stepped out immediately, the door barely clicking shut before my weapon was already in my hand.
Its weight was familiar. Grounding.
Every sense inside me snapped to attention.
I moved forward slowly, scanning as I went, letting my eyes adjust to the fading light.
The van sat at the edge of a small clearing.
Dark blue. Parked crooked, half-swallowed by shadow, like it had been dumped and forgotten in a hurry. One wheel was sunk into the mud, the angle wrong enough to tell me whoever drove it hadn’t cared about finesse.
The back doors were closed—but not properly. One sat slightly lower than the other, misaligned, the metal bent just enough to suggest it had been slammed hard and fast. With aggression.
The clearing was deathly still, with no sound of life.
There was no rustle of leaves, no insects or birds, like even they feared the calm before the violence.
No rustle of leaves. Even the wind seemed to have backed away.
And in that unnatural stillness, with the water roaring somewhere just beyond the trees, I knew with bone-deep certainty that after today, I would not be the same man I was this morning.
Then I heard it.
Barely anything. Almost nothing at all—thin enough to slip beneath the roar of the river and disappear if you weren’t listening for it. A sound so small it could have been mistaken for the night settling in.
A whimper that made everything in me go tight and cold.
I slowed instinctively, shifting my weight with care, every step placed cautiously. The ground sloped downward here, treacherous with mud and slick leaves that sucked at my boots. One wrong move would announce me. One wrong sound would end whatever chance she still had.
The air was thick with the smell of salt water and old earth—brackish, metallic, wrong. It coated the back of my throat, a warning my body recognized even before my mind did.
The sound came again.
Closer this time.
A whisper pain leaking out of someone who didn’t have the strength left to hold it in.
I followed it.
The trees thinned abruptly, giving way to open space, and the riverbank opened in front of me like a gaping wound. Mud stretched out underfoot, dark and churned, scarred with deep grooves where something heavy had been dragged across it. The marks told a story I didn’t want to finish reading.
The river was swollen and black, rushing hard and fast, the current violent enough to take anything that slipped in and never give it back. Sunlight skimmed the surface in dull flashes, but it never penetrated below. Whatever went under that water stayed there.
And then I saw her.
Samira.
She lay on the ground just beyond the treeline, half-curled into herself like her body was trying to fold inward, to disappear.
Her breaths came in shallow, uneven jerks, each one visibly costing her effort.
Mud streaked her skin and her clothes. One arm was twisted beneath her at an unnatural angle, unmoving.
She wasn’t struggling anymore.
She was past that.
Something inside my chest fractured clean through.
A man crouched over her.
His back was to me. Broad. Relaxed. Confident in the kind of privacy men only believe in when they’re sure no one is coming. His trousers were bunched carelessly around his ankles—an ugly, obscene familiarity to the posture that made my stomach heave.
He was close enough to her that his shadow swallowed her whole.
Close enough that whatever he thought he was entitled to, he believed he had time to finish.
My vision tunneled.
I didn’t catalog him. Didn’t note his height or the roll of his shoulders or the way his weight shifted as he adjusted himself. I didn’t allow my mind to name what he was doing—because the second I did, rage would flare, and rage was slow.
I didn’t have time for slow.
Everything inside me went flat and cold.
Fear shut off.
Thought shut off.
Even anger burned down to a clean, empty core.
There was only distance.
Only alignment.
Only the steady pressure of my finger settling against the trigger.
One shot.
The sound tore the night open—sharp, violent, final. It cracked across the riverbank and ricocheted through the trees like a sentence being carried out.
The bullet hit center mass.
His body reacted before his brain could catch up. Knees buckled. His torso pitched forward, momentum carrying him one step too far before gravity claimed him. He hit the ground face-first, hard and final, a collapse without dignity or redemption.
Then silence rushed back in.
Thick. Warped. Wrong.
The river kept roaring, indifferent, as if nothing of consequence had happened at all.
Samira didn’t scream.
That was what broke me.
She folded in on herself, curling tight—knees drawn to her chest, arms locked around her ribs like she was holding herself together by sheer force of will. Her entire body shook, violent tremors ripping through her so hard I could hear her teeth clicking together.
Her eyes were open.
But they weren’t here.
They were fixed on nothing, pupils blown wide, empty and distant—like she’d already fled somewhere unreachable. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t reacting.
She was gone.
Stripped down to something primal and raw—pure survival running on instinct alone. A body still breathing because it hadn’t yet learned it was allowed to stop being afraid.
“Samira,” I whispered.
Her name felt wrong in my mouth. Too soft. Too far away. Like it had to cross wreckage before it could reach her.
I dropped beside her, my movements suddenly clumsy, hands shaking as I reached for her. I lifted her cautiously, terrified she’d splinter if I moved too fast. She made a sound then—a broken, animal noise that tore straight through my chest and lodged there.
“I’ve got you,” I whispered, even though I didn’t deserve the words. “You’re safe. I swear to you, you’re safe.”
I pulled her head into my lap, cradling her like my body could become a wall between her and the rest of the world. She shook violently, muscles locked tight, breath hitching like it was afraid to exist. Her eyes stared past me, through me—still trapped somewhere I couldn’t follow.
I rocked her.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Her body told a story I didn’t want to read. Bruises already rising beneath my hands, dark and furious. Blood at her mouth. At her hairline. Evidence written everywhere I didn’t want to look.
She was so light.
Too light.
Alive—but balanced on the edge of something final.
The weight of it crushed my chest until breathing hurt.
I held her anyway.
Because if I let go now—if I stopped—I didn’t know if either of us would survive what came next.
Sirens cut through the night, loud and sudden, ripping apart what little calm was left.
Atlas arrived. His body was coiled like a killer’s. Then he saw Samira and stopped dead in his tracks.
I was still holding her. I didn’t know when my grip had tightened, only that my arms refused to open. When the medics reached us, hands closing in, a low sound tore out of my chest before I could stop it. I bared my teeth at them. Someone tried to pull me back. I shoved them away.
“Marcello,” Atlas snapped, sharp. Controlled. A warning.
I didn’t answer.
Atlas grabbed my shoulder, fingers digging in deep enough to hurt.
“She needs them,” he growled in a low voice, urgent, right by my ear. “She needs you to let her go.”
I didn’t let go until they lifted her from me. Until the stretcher was between us. Until my hands came away slick and red, shaking so badly I had to curl them into fists to stop it.
My chest wouldn’t settle. Every breath felt wrong, like I had missed the rhythm and couldn’t find it again.
I stayed close as they worked. Close enough to see her face. Close enough to hear her breathing when it stuttered and caught. I walked beside the stretcher when they moved her, ignoring orders. Ignoring looks.
I didn’t leave her. I wouldn’t.
Something had been broken open inside me, and there was no closing it again. Whatever I had been before—whatever I had told myself I could live with—didn’t exist anymore.
All that mattered was this: she had been taken. She had been hurt. And she was still here.
And nothing—nothing—was ever getting near her again without going through me first.