CHAPTER 68
NINA MARCHESI
“Forgive me?” Nero repeats, and I don’t feel like I have the strength to do anything—let alone answer. “Forgive me?” he says again, his hold around me tightening. “Forgive me?” he repeats, squeezing me harder and harder, rocking my body back and forth.
“Nero?” I call, but he doesn’t change. He keeps begging for forgiveness, trapping me in a suffocating grip, rocking us without stopping. “Nero? What’s happening?” His arms become so tight around me that they start to hurt, and I push against the embrace, fighting to get free.
The moment I manage to break loose, Nero’s body falls backward onto the floor. His eyes are open, but he’s shaking from head to toe, his mouth hanging open. I crawl on my knees until I reach his face, steadying it, looking for signs of a seizure—and finding none.
My hands tremble. My eyes are wet and wide.
“What’s happening, Nero? What’s happening?” I ask desperately, even more panicked when he tries to speak and his voice fails. Sweat soaks his forehead, the veins in his temples and neck standing out sharply. He keeps struggling until he finally manages to choke out an answer.
“N-nothing.”
The word launches me to my feet. I run to the window, a scream already clawing its way up my throat.
“Atlas! Apollo! Drako!” I shout, frantic. “Apollo! Drako! Atlas!”
I’m about to scream again when the sound of running footsteps reaches me and, a second later, Apollo and Drako are at the gate.
“I don’t know what’s happening! I don’t know!” I shake my head wildly and run back inside. I drop to my knees beside Nero again and see that all the color has drained from his face. He’s pale, breathing with difficulty, drenched in sweat—far more than just moments ago.
“Forgive me?” he asks one more time before passing out.
I stay there, frozen, staring at his inert body, unable to do anything. All my years of training, the hours of practice, the procedures I know I should follow—paralyzed by the fear of seeing someone I love like this.
I can’t do anything. I can’t touch him, can’t stand up, can’t even register what’s happening around me for I don’t know how long—until Apollo puts a hand on my shoulder and speaks to me.
“You need to step back, Nina. The ambulance is here.”
***
“Here,” Drako says, stopping beside me against the wall and offering me a cup of coffee. I take it.
I blink, looking at the place I come to every day and still not recognizing it. Being here as a companion doesn’t feel different only inside me—it feels different outside, too.
No one tells me what’s happening. All I want is to go to my locker, put on my uniform, and walk into the exam room where Nero is so I can follow everything closely—but they’ve already forbidden me from doing that.
And even though I rationally know I’d hinder far more than help, I can’t help resenting it.
We’ve been here half an hour, and the waiting is killing me.
There was only one other time I’d been in this position—waiting for news in a hospital—when Kael jumped out of the window. My son had just turned three and did it while I was in the shower. The despair and guilt I felt back then made me cry for nights on end even after Kael was already home, safe.
The feeling poisoning my chest today is so similar it leaves my mouth bitter and my throat dry.
“Thank you,” I murmur, still trying to understand what happened. One moment Nero was taking in everything I was consciously throwing at him—and the next… the next, he was on the floor.
“Your mom already got home. She’s with Kael. Atlas is on his way here,” Drako tells me. I nod. “I don’t know if it should be me telling you this, Nina, but I’m worried that if no one explains what’s going on, you might storm the exam room—and I don’t think your superiors would appreciate that.”
He tries to joke, as always, fulfilling his official role as tension diffuser, but I don’t have the strength to laugh. After some more silence, when he speaks again, there’s nothing playful in his tone.
“He’s been dealing with panic attacks for years, Nina.”
I turn my head so fast toward the man beside me that my neck hurts. I blink at him, eyes wide.
“W-what?”
“It took us a while to figure it out, but they started sometime after you left. Nero didn’t share or process his feelings—he hyperfocused on finding you, and it didn’t take long for that to take its toll.”
“Panic attacks…” I whisper.
“None of us were surprised that this was the way his body chose to ask for help.”
“He’s been living with this for five years?” I ask. Drako nods. “Why… why didn’t he get help? Why didn’t he get treatment?” A sad smile forms on my son’s uncle’s lips.
“Rejection is a complicated theme for the four of us, Nina. And back then, Nero was feeling it more than anything else. My guess is he simply thought he deserved it. He could blame you for everything else, but part of him blamed himself for not being enough to stop you from doing everything he thought you’d done. ”
“That’s…”
“Sad,” Drako says quietly. “I know.” He nods.
“All of us are broken in ways that are hard to explain. We deal with it differently, of course. I make jokes. Apollo lives like there’s no tomorrow.
Atlas tries to change the world. And Nero…
he hadn’t found anything worth holding on to yet. Until you came along.”
He exhales.
“We were genuinely happy, you know? We thought he’d finally see his adoptive family for what they really were—toxic.
Nero was always so focused on absolute gratitude and on his need to prove he deserved everything they supposedly gave him that he never managed to see it.
We thought building his own family—a real, healthy one—would make him see. But even that Lysandra poisoned.”
A tear slides down my cheek, and I don’t know if it’s because of the situation as a whole or because of Drako’s words. I don’t stop it. Nor the next. Nor the one after.
I wondered many times how Nero was handling my leaving. And even though for most of the last few years I believed he was married, I always liked to think that he suffered for me—if only a little.
Call me selfish, but I liked telling myself that everything he did was just an attempt to make me feel the pain he himself felt—without knowing that all he needed to do to make me suffer was exactly what he actually did: reject me.
Life is a mess.
You’re happy, then you’re disappointed, then suddenly desperate—but when you least expect it, you find a way to pull yourself together and be happy again.
The waves of events never stop, keeping us in constant motion. And I suppose that must be the grace of being alive—even though, more often than not, it feels like anything but grace.
I don’t know what to do.
I want to keep clinging to resentment, to the past, to all the pain I’ve been carrying for years. But if there’s one thing clear in my mind now, it’s that I feel light.
Life is still a mess—but inside me, everything is clean and organized. After five long years, the trash has finally been taken out.
And now I wonder: what do you do with so much space?
***
“Hi,” I say softly when Nero blinks in the dim hospital room, waiting for the haze of sedation to lift.
It’s only been a few hours, but being sedated is never a good thing.
He turns his head toward me, his eyes slowly clearing, and I see the exact moment he realizes something is wrong.
“You’re in the hospital. We brought you here after you fainted at my place, but you’re okay.
Everything’s okay. You were sedated, so you might feel a little confused. ”
I explain slowly, and Nero nods along with every sentence.
“Forgive me?” he echoes the last words he said before passing out. I set words aside.
“Are you thirsty?” I ask. He nods again, but before I can get the water, Nero starts moving in the bed, trying to sit up. I put a hand on his thigh to stop him from getting up, but he shifts against the headboard and sits.
“Forgive me?” he repeats, looking around the empty hospital room.
“I wish I’d been strong enough to hear everything you went through without ending up in a hospital room—but I was weak.
You lived through all of that while raising our son, Nina, while turning him into an incredible child.
And I… I couldn’t even handle listening. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Nero, and—”
“No.” He shakes his head and reaches for my hand.
The hard swallow tells me he really is thirsty, but he refuses to let go so I can get the water.
“I’m going to ask you this every day for the rest of our lives and it still won’t be enough.
But I need you to know, Nina, how deeply I understand that everything that happened was my fault. ”
I shake my head.
“Now isn’t the time for this.”
“It is. It is. I waited too long. I waited too long to hear you, and I will never—never again—do that, Nina. I can’t erase the past. If I could, I would, no matter what it cost me.
God knows I would. But I can’t, and it will never stop hurting.
What I can do—what I will do—is write a different present and future for the three of us.
By your side, in whatever way you allow me to be, and by our son’s side for anything and everything, at any time. ”
He exhales shakily.
“I also know my words don’t mean anything. But I’ll make them real every single day.”
I nod, accepting his promises.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“It’s not,” he replies. “But I’ll do my best to make it be.”
***
“Did you try to fly too, Daddy?” Kael asks as he bursts into the room the next morning.
The alarmed looks on Drako’s, Apollo’s, and Atlas’s faces tell me my son has already given them the context for the question.
Sitting on the bed, dressed and just waiting for the doctor to stop by so he can be discharged, Nero opens his arms to Kael, who quickly grabs his hands.
“Have you met Nurse Paola yet? She’s my favorite! She took out my stitches and it didn’t hurt at all!”
“More favorite than Mommy?” Nero teases, and Kael rolls his eyes.
“Mommy doesn’t count, Daddy! Duh! She’s Mommy, not Nurse-Mommy! Did you get stitches too, Daddy?”
“No, buddy. I didn’t.”
“Where did you get hurt?”
“In the head. Just like you.”
Kael jumps, springing upward, and Nero catches him midair. Our son wraps his arms around his father’s neck and uses his shoulders for leverage to kiss Nero’s forehead. I sigh.
“Um… we’ll be outside,” Atlas says, and without even approaching Nero, he and the others step out and close the door.
“Mom,” Kael calls to me.
“Yes?”
“Kiss Daddy’s head too. Two kisses make it go away faster, right?”
I bite my lip—happy to have watched the two of them so far, and torn about whether to accept the invitation to join in.
In the end, I walk around the bed, stopping close enough that my abdomen brushes Nero’s thigh. He looks at me as if he doesn’t know what to expect.
I lean in and place a kiss on his temple. He blinks, tears already pooling there. I hold his gaze for a few seconds, then lean in again and place another kiss in the same spot.
A tear slides down Nero’s cheek, and Kael quickly presses his little hands to his father’s face.
“Don’t cry, Daddy,” he asks, smoothing Nero’s hair. “It’ll pass. It’ll pass! And Mommy’s going to take care of you at home, right, Mommy?”
He looks at me. And without looking away from Nero’s eyes, I answer:
“I will.”