Chapter 3
MARCO
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
I leaned back in the stiff chair and slammed my eyes shut tight. The nurses whispered about something—probably weekend plans or office gossip. Whatever it was, it was better their chatter than my thoughts.
Somewhere in the distance, a name was called out.
It wasn’t mine.
I opened my eyes and stared at the walls again. Beige this time, not black. My brain didn’t care about paint colors—it always found a way to make everything darker; drag me back to places I’d rather forget.
The thumping in my chest wasn’t real. Not in the way it felt.
I glanced at the clock on the wall.
Ten minutes.
Maybe fifteen.
Not quite long enough to lose control, but long enough for everything to start feeling hazy in my peripheral, as if the world were tipping sideways and I was the only one noticing. Usually took twenty before things got worse.
So I still had five minutes.
Five minutes to pretend I had things handled.
Someone coughed a few chairs over. Another patient shifting in his seat, probably counting his own breaths, his own seconds.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I didn’t pull it out. I already knew who it was.
Remy.
The name would be glowing onscreen, insistent, just like the man himself.
He’d call again. He always did.
Another name echoed down the hallway. Still not mine.
I rubbed the ache in my left shoulder, the joint relentlessly stiff no matter how I moved. It wasn’t the worst pain I’d felt. Hell, it barely registered most days. But lately, it had been harder to ignore.
The phone buzzed again. Still, I didn’t answer.
“Grey?”
I glanced up to see a nurse standing in the doorway, her clear clipboard tucked against her chest.
“Marco Grey?” She smiled at me. “Room three,” she said when I nodded. “You can follow me.”
The exam room smelled sterile. It always did. It clung to my clothes, crawled up my nose, and sank into my skin. Years of it had conditioned me to loathe this place, and yet here I was again, walking the same damn halls, enduring the same damn routine.
The knee was acting up worse than usual. Felt like a hot knife stabbing into the joint every time I took a step. Not that I was going to complain. Complaints didn’t fix anything. They just made you sound weak.
I moved stiffly down the hallway ignoring sympathetic glances from the staff. I knew what they saw when they looked at me. I was a busted-up vet who didn’t know when to quit. Maybe they thought they saw some kind of hero, some tragic figure worth pitying.
They were wrong. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t anything worth their looks or their concern.
The VA wasn’t a place where you came to get better. It was a place where men like me came to manage what was left.
The exam room was the same as last time. Tiny and suffocating. Then the door opened, and she stepped in.
Dr. Savannah Carter. She was young. Her brown hair was pulled back in a bun that had seen better hours, and her lab coat hung a little too loose, as if it were made for someone else.
She glanced up and smiled. “Mr. Grey, it’s good to see you. Have a seat.”
The paper beneath me crinkled as I settled in. I hated the sound of it. It felt too fragile. Too thin.
“How’s the knee?”
“Hurts,” I said simply. “Like always.”
“And the shoulder?”
“Still attached.”
Her lips quirked in response as she stepped closer, setting the chart down on the counter.
She lifted my leg. Pain flared when she pressed her fingers into the swollen joint. I didn’t move. She glanced up at me, her brow arching like she was testing me as much as my knee.
“Swelling’s worse,” she said to herself.
“I noticed.”
“Physical therapy?”
I shook my head. “Haven’t had time.”
She stepped closer to my shoulder. “Well, you need to start. Start small,” she continued, her voice quieter now. “PT, stretching, therapy—whatever you’re willing to try. Just try something. Because this?” She gestured to my arm. “This is not sustainable.”
She continued moving my arm. Every time she rotated it I felt pain tugging at the scar tissue. It was like she was doing it on purpose. The damn woman was trying to teach me a lesson for not following her orders.
If she was trying to prove something, I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction. But damn, did it hurt.
“You’re a tough one, I’ll give you that. But tough doesn’t mean invincible.”
I didn’t answer.
She scribbled something in my chart, the pen scratching against the paper. “I’m upping your anti-inflammatories. And if you don’t start physical therapy, I’ll know.”
“You’ll know?”
“You’ll be back here, and I’ll be able to tell. It’s your body, Mr. Grey, but it’s my job to make sure you don’t break it any more than it already is.”
She had no idea how close to breaking I already felt.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do more than think. Thinking doesn’t fix anything.”
“Neither does complaining.”
“You’re stubborn,” she argued.
“You’re pushy.”
“You’re not big on doctors.”
“No.”
“You know, my uncle was the same,” she began.
“He lost a leg on a deployment. Used to complain all the time about how the doctors didn’t know what they were talking about.
He was hell-bent and so convinced he knew better than the people who were trying to help him.
Said they were all just trying to coddle him, make him feel like a baby.
Make him feel like he couldn’t handle life on his own.
Then, one day, he tried to climb onto the roof to fix a leak and ended up falling off and breaking his other leg. ”
I raised an eyebrow.
“He realized after that, maybe the doctors weren’t so clueless after all. Maybe they actually knew a thing or two about how to keep him from falling apart.”
“So what’s the moral of your story—don’t go climbing any roofs?”
She grinned. “Exactly. And maybe stay out of war zones.”
“A little late for that.”
“Yeah, maybe it is,” she said. “But there’s more than one kind of war zone, Mr. Grey.”
“Is there?”
“The ones you carry around with you—the kind that don’t show up on an X-ray.”
“I’ve heard the speeches before, Doc. I’m fine.”
Dr. Carter’s gaze hardened. She was good at this—at letting the silence work for her, filling the gaps with something I couldn’t see but could damn well feel.
“I’m not giving you a speech. I’m just saying what I see.”
“And what’s that?”
“A man who’s running on fumes. Someone who doesn’t trust the ground under his feet but keeps walking anyway.”
I wasn’t about to let her dig deeper. This wasn’t her job. She was here to poke at my knee and my shoulder, not at the parts of me that couldn’t be patched up with surgery or pills.
“I appreciate your concern,” I said, standing from the exam table. My knee protested, but I ignored it. “But I’ll stick to the basics. PT, the meds. Nothing else.”
Dr. Carter stepped aside, staring up at me. “Take care of yourself,” she said, her voice warm. “And if you climb any roofs, make sure you’ve got a really good ladder.”
That got a half-assed smirk out of me. “I’ll be sure to remember that.”
The door clicked shut behind me, and I walked back down the hallway, past the pale walls and the floors marked up from too many boots like mine.
Pushing through the lobby doors, I stepped outside. The parking lot was mostly empty, with just a few beat-up cars scattered around and a dusty pickup truck parked crooked, as if even parking straight was too much effort.
When I finally reached my car, I dropped into the seat and slammed the door shut behind me. It didn’t take long for the silence to creep in, loud enough to make my ears ring. It was strange how silence always felt louder after leaving a place like that.
Quiet wasn’t always peaceful. Sometimes it gave my thoughts room to get louder. Too much quiet let certain things creep in—things better left forgotten.
When I dug into my pocket for my phone, the screen lit up with a notification.
Missed Call: Remy.
Five missed calls.
Two voice mails.
All from Remy.
The first had been yesterday morning, then again in the afternoon. Three more had followed today, the last one just a half hour ago. No messages, just a string of unanswered rings I’d been too tired—or too stubborn—to deal with.
I should’ve ignored it again. I should’ve shoved the phone back in my pocket and driven off like I hadn’t seen it. But instead I tapped his name, bringing up his contact info. The photo next to his number was one I hadn’t changed in years.
It rang once, twice, then Remy picked up halfway through the third.
“Marco.” He said my name with a demand. “About damn time you picked up your phone.”
“What do you want?”
“A ‘hello’ would be nice,” he shot back. “But listen, I need your help.”
“You’ve got another lawyer,” I said flatly. “Use him.”
We’d been down this road too many times. Last month he’d dragged me into his mess with the Outfit—again. I’d never liked working for them, not even from a distance, but Remy had a way of turning every one of his problems into mine, and every single time, I said it’d be the last.
“You said that last time. I just cleaned up your mess in New York. I’m not eager to clean up another.”
“I know, Marco,” he said quickly, scrambling for his words. “But it’s different now. It’s important.”
With Remy, it was always different. It was always important. And it always ended the same way: me caught in the middle, left stitching things up before they fell apart completely. With the Callahans, the Romanos, and even the Clarkes.
“I can’t keep doing this, Remy,” I told him bluntly. “I’m done getting dragged into your problems with these people.”
He hesitated. “Please. I’m not asking because I want to. I’m asking because it’s you, Marco. It has to be you.”
“Where are you?” I finally asked, already hating myself for giving in.
“New York.”
Of course. It had to be New York. The one city I swore I wouldn’t set foot in again, especially after last month’s disaster.
I hated the city. It wasn’t just the endless noise or the crush of bodies or how the city never seemed to sleep.
It was the reflections—my own. They were everywhere.
In windows, puddles, subway cars. No matter where I turned, I saw warped glimpses of a version of myself I couldn’t stand to face.
“Can you be here?” he asked carefully.
“Yeah,” I said despite myself. “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
I wasn’t happy about it, but I never knew when to say no to Remy.
It had been that way since we were kids.
Two boys crammed into a small room in a foster home that smelled like mildew and bad decisions.
Remy had been smaller than me back then, with his wiry limbs and thick glasses.
He still had a quick mouth that got him in trouble as often as it got him out of it.
We weren’t brothers—not really—but the title felt close enough when we’d spent years surviving the same house, dodging the same fists, and stealing the same stale bread from the kitchen after the others had gone to bed.
Remy had this way of making me feel like I belonged, like the world wasn’t so dark when he was around. He could talk his way through anything—even my walls.
And he got lucky.
I still remember the day the social worker came for him.
She stood in the doorway of our room, clipboard in hand, talking about how some family had picked him out.
A real family. One with money and soft beds and parents who weren’t in it for the checks.
Remy had looked at me, his face caught somewhere between excitement and guilt, and for the first time since I’d known him, he didn’t have anything to say.
I told him I didn’t care. Told him to take the chance and run with it. But the truth was, it felt like he was leaving me behind.
Everyone always left me behind—I just didn’t think he would too. When he did, something in me cracked. I stopped talking as much. Stopped caring about whether I belonged anywhere.
By the time we saw each other again, years had passed.
He’d been adopted into a family of lawyers, the kind of people who wore pressed suits and smiled with their teeth.
He looked different, cleaner, but he still talked like the kid I’d known, full of fast words and faster excuses.
We stayed in touch after that, but it was never the same.
I didn’t get rehomed. No one came for me. I aged out of the system and joined the military.
That was the thing about the military—it didn’t care who you were before you put on the uniform. It didn’t care if you were broken. And I was good at it. Too good.
I didn’t just serve; I went all the way. Special operations. Hostage rescues. The kind of work that turned men into ghosts. There was a part of me that liked it—liked the silence, the way everything boiled down to a single objective. No emotions, no distractions, just do the job and move on.
But nothing lasts forever. I blew out my knee a few years in.
Remy got me into law. It was different, and I hated every second of it.
I returned to the field once I’d healed, determined not to be trapped behind a desk.
Then came the shoulder injury. That one finally sidelined me.
It landed me on desk duty, pushing papers and filling out reports, while the rest of my team moved on without me.
Remy was the only one who didn’t look at me like I’d been benched. He called not long after, telling me about some legal trouble with one of his clients. Said he needed someone who could “handle things quietly.” I had no reason to say no.
So I said yes. And when that job was done, there was another. And another.
I didn’t like being a lawyer, especially not in New York. The city felt like a punch to the ribs every time I set foot in it—loud, crowded, and full of memories I didn’t want.
But now I was sitting here with a knee that screamed every time I moved, it felt like an easy choice again. Not because I wanted to help Remy, but because staying here meant facing things I wasn’t ready to deal with. The VA. The therapy. The questions about what came next from the colonel.
Different desks, same suffocating feeling.
I should’ve said no. I should’ve blocked Remy’s number, thrown my phone out the damn window.
But saying no wasn’t something I was good at—not when it came to him.
Remy had a way of pulling me back even after years of leaving me behind.
He forgot my name when things were good, but when things went south, suddenly, I was the only one he knew how to call.
And no matter how many times he forgot me—no matter how many times he chose everyone else first—I always showed up. Always. And it was my biggest fault.