Chapter 79 Marco Down
Chapter 79 Marco Down
The call came at two in the afternoon.
Nico took it in the corridor and I heard the quality of his voice change through the library door before I heard any words, that specific register shift that told me something had happened before he appeared in the doorway with his face arranged into the careful neutral of a man carrying information he did not want to deliver.
I put the book down.
"Tell me," I said.
"Marco is down," he said. "Caught in the crossfire on the second front. He is alive and being moved to a secure medical location right now."
The words landed one at a time and I stood up and walked to the window because standing still was not something my body was willing to do with that information sitting in it.
"How bad," I said.
"We don't have the complete picture yet," he said. "What we know is he went into the line of fire to pull one of the coalition men out of an exposed position. The medical team reached him within four minutes of the call going out."
"Four minutes," I said.
"That is fast," he said. "That is genuinely fast Mia."
I nodded and looked at the rose beds and the fountain and the cypress trees and breathed the way my mother taught me when I was nine years old and the world had gone very wrong and breathing was the only thing available.
Marco who arrived like weather and left rooms louder than he found them. Marco who cried at things and denied it afterward and made unauthorized parties with other people's champagne and told his brother things nobody else in the world was brave enough to say. Marco who had looked at me across a breakfast table and said try not to break him and meant every word of it.
I turned from the window and started moving.
Not toward anything specific. Just moving. The length of the library and back and then again and then again with my arms crossed and the afternoon light doing nothing useful through the tall windows and Biscuit watching me from the desk with the focused attention of a cat monitoring something that concerned him.
The radio crackled from the corridor.
Dante's voice came through it.
I stopped walking.
Every word precise and measured and delivered in the flat certain cadence of a man running an operation who had just received the worst possible personal news and had made a decision in the space of a single breath not to let it affect a single external thing. Redirecting the coalition on the second front. Calling in the reserve team to cover the gap Marco's injury had created. Asking for a status update on the secure medical location in the tone of someone asking about weather.
Completely controlled.
Completely terrifying.
Because I knew what lived underneath that control right now. I knew his voice in all its versions and this one, this particular quality of absolute steadiness, was the version that meant something enormous was being held in place by a will that had been trained for exactly this since he was twenty two years old and had never been tested quite like this before.
Marco was his brother.
The only person who had ever wanted nothing from him except a brother.
And his voice on that radio was the most controlled sound I had ever heard come out of a human being.
I started walking again.
Elena appeared in the library doorway and looked at me and looked at the window and looked at her hands and went to the kitchen without saying a word. I followed her because the kitchen was smaller and warmer and sitting alone in the library with the radio crackling and my own thoughts was not something I was willing to do.
She was at the kitchen table with her rosary when I came in.
I had not known Elena owned a rosary. She held it in both hands with her eyes closed and her lips moving slightly and her face doing something I had never seen it do before, all the careful management gone completely, just a woman at a table asking something of something larger than herself for a boy she had known before he could walk.
I sat across from her.
She did not open her eyes.
I put my hands flat on the table and looked at the garden beyond the window and thought about Marco on a floor somewhere being worked on by a medical team and Dante on a radio being the most terrifying version of calm and the operation still running on three fronts while all of this was happening simultaneously.
The radio crackled again.
Dante's voice. Same quality. Asking for compound perimeter status. Asking for the updated approach route timeline. Asking for everything except the one thing he needed to ask about and not asking about it because asking about it meant feeling it and feeling it meant the radio voice changed and the radio voice could not change.
Elena's lips moved.
I pressed my hands harder against the table.
Nico appeared in the kitchen doorway at three fifteen.
We both looked at him at exactly the same moment.
"He is out of the crossfire," Nico said. "The medical team has him. He is conscious and he is talking and they are confident he is going to be all right."
Elena opened her eyes.
She looked at Nico for a long moment and then she looked at the rosary in her hands and closed her fingers around it completely and her shoulders moved with one single breath that carried everything she had been holding since two in the afternoon.
"Talking," I said. "You said he is talking."
"Complained about the medical team's approach," Nico said. "Twice in Italian and once in a language nobody on the team could identify."
I pressed my face into my hands and the laugh that came out was wrong and wet and completely real and entirely Marco and entirely enough.
Elena stood up from the table and went to the counter and put the kettle on.
The radio crackled one more time from the corridor and Dante's voice came through it and this time the quality was fractionally different, still controlled, still operational, but underneath it something had shifted by one single degree, the specific shift of a man who had just received a piece of information and allowed himself exactly one second to feel it before he kept moving.
One second.
Then he was back.
The operation was still running and it was not over yet.