"Leone." I don't know what I'm going to say until I say it. "He was proud of you. He told me once. Two years ago, middle of the night, I was doing rounds and he was awake and I sat with him and he said he was proud of you.”
Leone looks at me for a long time. Then he reaches out and puts his hand on the side of my neck, grips once, firm, the way Aurelio used to grip my shoulder when I did something right. He holds it and let’s go.
"One hour," he says. He walks down the corridor toward the war room. His steps are even and his back is straight and he doesn't look back.
Claudio and I stand in the corridor.
I lean against the wall and slide down until I'm sitting on the floor with my back against the concrete and my elbows on myknees and my face in my hands. Claudio sits beside me. Our shoulders touch. Neither of us speaks.
The twin bond is silent. For the first time in my life there is nothing coming through the connection, no data, no emotion, no signal. Just quiet. The two of us sitting on a cold floor outside our mentors room processing the same loss in opposite ways. Me with my face in my hands, leaking through every crack. Claudio beside me, sealed shut, absorbing it inward.
"Remember when he caught us smoking on the roof," I laugh, but it’s shaky. "We were sixteen. He took the cigarettes and smoked them himself, one after another, all six of them, and then he looked at us and said if you're going to kill yourselves, do it on the Castillos' roof."
"I remember."
"And when I crashed the car. The Mercedes. I was seventeen and the bumper was in the hedge, and he came outside and looked at the car and looked at me and didn't say a word. Just went back inside. I thought he was going to kill me. He came back out with two cups of coffee and sat on the hood and drank his coffee on top of a car I'd just destroyed."
"He made you pay for the repairs out of your cut for six months."
"Seven. He added a month for the hedge."
Claudio almost laughs. The sound gets to the edge and stops. His hand finds my knee and grips it. That's Claudio's version of ahug, and I'll take it because the real thing would break both of us right now and we can't afford that.
We sit on the floor for twenty minutes. People walk past. Soldiers who've heard, word travels through a compound faster than any comms system, and they look at us and keep walking because there's nothing to say and they know it.
Charlotte comes down the corridor at some point. She doesn't speak. She sits on the floor on Claudio's other side and puts her head on his shoulder and the three of us sit there in a row against the concrete wall like kids waiting outside the principal's office, except the principal is dead and the office is a hospital room and nobody's getting called in.
Eventually I stand. My knees pop. My face feels swollen and my head is pounding. Claudio stands too, helping Charlotte up and taking her hand.
"I'm going to the roof," I say.
"Brother..."
"I'm not going to jump off it, idiot. I just need air."
"Take your phone."
"Why?"
"Because I want to know you're alive."
I pull out my phone and hold it up. "See? Phone. I'll be alive. Go take care of Carmelo."
He nods and heads off while I head for the stairwell at the end of the corridor, up four flights, through the maintenance door, and onto the roof.
The air is cold and it bites at my skin, but the alternative is worse.
The compound is below me. Courtyard, vehicles, the floodlights on the perimeter casting shadows across the asphalt. Beyond the walls, city lights, highway lights, the distant flash of a plane. The world going about its business at four a.m. with no idea that the man who kept half of it in order just died in a room full of people who loved him.
I sit on the ledge. Not the edge, I'm reckless but I'm not suicidal, the wide concrete lip that runs around the rooftop with a three-foot wall between me and the drop. I put my elbows on my knees and look at the city and I don't think.
That's the trick with grief. Everyone tells you to feel it, process it, let it in. Nobody tells you that sometimes the best thing you can do is sit on a roof and go blank for twenty minutes and let your brain do nothing. Not think about the man. Not think about the hand you held or the words he said or the monitor going flat. Just sit, be cold, exist in the gap between losing him and figuring out what the loss means.
I don't know how long I sit there. Long enough for my fingers to go numb. Long enough for the sky to shift from black to the gray that comes before dawn. Long enough for the cold to stop being a feeling and start being a fact.
The roof door opens and I look back.
Savannah.
