Chapter 51 Standing Down

• 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.