In the quiet and white cube that the hospital room was, the only thing that could be heard was the steady beep-beep of the heart monitor. Sitting next to the bed on which Alessandro lay unconscious, I held his cold hand as hard as I could, praying for his wake-up. Chase was standing by the window, his face against the glass, his shoulders contracted as with suppressed pain.
Three days had passed since the call we got when we realized that we had to leave. Three days since, our world has been shattered all over again.
I found that I couldn’t let go of the memory of it. In the abandoned church, we had been hunched together with a map of the inevitable in front of us, desperately looking for a way to free Alessandro, when my phone rang.
The next few hours were full of fear and still root
