Chapter 41 Marcello
Marcello
The machine beeped.
Once.
Twice.
A steady, indifferent rhythm. A sound without mercy or meaning.
It marked time between breaths, between heartbeats—between the fragile certainty of life and the yawning possibility of loss.
It didn’t care who she was. It didn’t care who I was.
It would keep counting whether I was ready for it to stop or not.
They didn’t know if she would make it.
That was what the doctor had told us.
Calm. Professional. His voice measured, practiced—trained to soften the blow without ever lying. His eyes had already prepared me for the worst while his mouth offered something gentler.
Critical but stable.
The next twenty-four hours are important.
We’ll do everything we can.
Everything sounded small when you were standing at the edge of a cliff, staring down into something bottomless. When the person you loved was slipping away and all the language in the world felt inadequate.
I sat beside her bed, my chair pulled so close my knee pressed against the metal frame. I didn’t trust distance. I didn’t trust anything that put space between us now.
She was so still it terrified me.
Too still.
The machines did the work her body couldn’t—tubes and wires running from her like lifelines, each one a reminder that she couldn’t do this alone. That she needed help breathing. Needed time to heal. Needed a miracle just to stay.
Her chest rose and fell, shallow and uneven, borrowed breaths measured out by something that wasn’t human. I watched it obsessively, afraid that if I looked away, even for a second, it might stop.
Her skin was pale beneath the harsh hospital lights, washed of all the warmth I knew she carried. Bruises bloomed dark and violent along her arms, her throat—angry fingerprints that made my vision blur if I looked at them too long.
Someone had cleaned her.
The thought twisted something deep in my chest.
They had washed the blood away. Changed her clothes. Dressed her in this thin hospital gown that barely covered her, fabric whispering over skin that had already been violated too many times. It felt like an insult. Like the world daring to pretend this was just another patient in another bed.
I reached for her hand and stopped myself at the last second, terrified of hurting her. Terrified of waking her. Terrified that she wouldn’t wake at all.
When I finally did touch her, it was barely there—my fingers brushing the back of her hand like a question I didn’t deserve answered.
She was cold.
My throat tightened, grief pressing in hard and sudden, like my body had finally caught up to everything my mind had been holding back since the riverbank.
I had been too late.
No matter how fast I’d driven. No matter how clean the shot. No matter that I’d pulled her back from the edge—I had still been too late to stop the damage.
“I’m here,” I whispered, my voice rough and useless in the airless room. The words felt childish now. Small. Like they couldn’t possibly carry the weight of what she’d been through. “I’m here. You’re not alone.”
The machines answered me instead.
Beep.
Beep.
I leaned forward until my forehead rested against the side of the bed, eyes burning, jaw clenched so tight it hurt. This—this was the part no one warned you about. The aftermath. The waiting. The helplessness of loving someone who was fighting a battle you couldn’t step into with them.
I would have traded anything to take her place.
Pain. Fear. The darkness she’d been forced into—I would have carried it all without hesitation. But all I could do now was sit and watch and pray to nothing in particular that she stayed.
Because if she didn’t—if the machine ever stopped counting—there wouldn’t be enough blood on my hands to make up for what the world had taken from her.
And I didn’t know how to survive a future where she never opened her eyes again.
Atlas’s hand settled on my shoulder.
“You need to get some rest.”
I didn’t look at him. My eyes stayed on Samira’s face, on the slow, uneven rise of her chest beneath the thin hospital blanket, on the faint crease between her brows that told me even unconsciousness wasn’t a full escape for her.
“I’m not leaving,” I told him.
I wasn’t being defiant. It was simply the truth.
Atlas didn’t argue. He shifted closer instead, leaning against the wall beside me like he’d decided this was where he would stand until I broke—or didn’t.
“Is that thing taken care of?” I asked finally.
I didn’t look up when I spoke. The word had lodged itself in my mouth the moment I’d seen what was left of Samira by the riverbank.
He didn’t deserve a name. Didn’t deserve the dignity of a title.
He wasn’t her husband. He wasn’t anything she had chosen.
He was a wound that walked and breathed and thought it owned her.
“Yes,” Atlas said.
One word. Calm. Certain.
I believed him without question. When Atlas stated something was handled, it stayed handled. Permanently. There were no loose ends in his world—only buried ones.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he added.
The police had swarmed the location the minute the medics confirmed the body in the water.
Procedures. Statements. Containment. Atlas had stepped into all of it without hesitation, the way he always did—with a natural authority and ruthless efficiency.
I hadn’t asked for details. I didn’t want them.
All I cared about was that Samira would never feel that man’s shadow again.
Atlas followed my gaze back to the bed.
“She means a lot to you.”
It was a statement more than a question.
My jaw tightened. I exhaled slowly through my nose, careful to keep my breathing even. “Yes.”
He nodded once, as though confirming something he’d already known. “More than you expected.”
I didn’t answer that. Some truths didn’t need sound.
“I pushed you,” Atlas continued, his voice lower now. “Too hard.”
I turned then, and really looked at him.
Atlas didn’t regret much. He lived with his choices like he lived with everything else—forward-facing, unflinching. So when I saw the weight in his eyes, it landed.
“I was drowning in my own self-destruction.” Even I could admit to that. “You did what you had to do.”
There’s a short silence before he speaks again.
“She’s not from our world,” he pointed out. “And you forgot that.”
The words weren’t an accusation. They were an observation, and they were precise.
“She’s not built for our madness,” he went on. “Not for secrets layered on secrets. Not for decisions made for her ‘for her own good.’”
My chest tightened.
“I know.”
“You didn’t mean to hurt her,” Atlas remarked. “But intention doesn’t matter when the outcome’s the same.”
I looked back at Samira. At the bruises faintly visible beneath the edge of the blanket. At the IV taped to her arm. At the way her fingers twitched sometimes, like her body hadn’t figured out yet that it was allowed to rest.
“She’s survived things that would’ve broken most people. That doesn’t mean she can survive everything. Especially not us.”
The word landed harder than anything else he’d said.
Us.
“You don’t get to protect her the way we protect each other,” he continued. “You don’t get to harden her. Or shape her. Or decide what she can handle.”
“I wasn’t trying to do that,” I explained.
“I know,” Atlas replied immediately. “That’s the problem.”
I swallowed.
“She needs choice. Even when it scares you. Especially then. If you keep her, Marcello—if she stays—you treat her with the dignity and respect she deserves. Not something you’re afraid to lose.”
I let my forehead drop briefly, my fingers still wrapped around Samira’s hand.
“I almost did,” I reminded him. “Lose her.”
Atlas’s silence was heavy. Respectful.
“You didn’t. But you came close enough to learn something from it.”
I nodded once.
“She’ll wake up different,” Atlas added. “Not weaker. Different. And she gets to decide who she is after this—not you.”
I looked at my brother then, really looked at him.
“I don’t want to cage her,” I said.
“Good,” Atlas replied. “Then don’t.”
He straightened, rolling his shoulders like the weight was shifting back into place.
“I’ll handle the fallout,” he told me. “The police. The paperwork. The things you shouldn’t be touching right now.”
“Thank you.”
Atlas paused at the door.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, not turning around, “I’m glad you found her.”
I closed my eyes.
“So am I.”