I Took My Heart Back From the Man Who Never Loved Me

The night before my blood-bound union, my mother walked in on the man I was promised to with his hands all over the girl I called my closest friend. The shock tore through her like a blade. Her heart gave out, and only a transplant could save her.

It was a small mercy that she and I had been matched long before, blood and tissue both. I made my choice without flinching. I would give her my heart and carry on with a machine ticking in my own chest.

When I begged the man I was to marry to cover the surgeon's fee, he told me he hadn't the cash on hand. Then he turned around and bound himself in union to Gianna Falcone instead.

When I had nowhere left to turn, Lorenzo Falcone appeared. He settled every debt and held the knife himself.

When I woke, Lorenzo told me, with sorrow weighting his voice, that my mother's body had turned on the new heart. The surgery had failed. She was gone. Forever.

He pulled me into his arms while my eyes were still swollen from weeping, opened himself to me, and begged me to let him keep me safe for the rest of my life.

In the seventh year of our union, I happened to overhear him speaking with his Consigliere behind the study door:

"So it was you who cut Serafina Russo's heart out and set it into Gianna. With her own mother watching. That's cold, Lorenzo. Even for a man like you."

"There was nothing else to be done. Her heart was a match for Gianna."

"You'd already secured a clean donor heart. Gianna only had to hold on another half a day. Were you truly in that much of a hurry?"

Lorenzo let out a slow breath.

"I couldn't stand to watch Gianna suffer. I couldn't wait a single second."

...

Inside the study, just on the other side of the door, Lorenzo exhaled a slow ring of smoke, the weight in his voice impossible to hide.

"Since the world's idea of decency keeps me from binding myself to her, then the least I can do is keep Gianna safe as long as she lives."

Matteo Bianchi, his oldest confidant, wore a complicated look. He took off his reading glasses and folded them, slow and careful, the way he always did before he said the thing the Don did not want to hear.

"But Serafina carries a rare bloodline, Lorenzo. A matching heart is near impossible to find. All these years she's lived coughing blood and clutching that crushing pain in her chest. She can't even carry a child."

"Don't forget what that mechanism in her can do. It has a month of life left in it. It has to be cut out and replaced soon. Will you really put her on the table again and again for the rest of her days? Serafina loves you. Give her the heart back. You set aside more than one backup for Gianna a long time ago."

Lorenzo refused before the words had finished, his voice sharp as a drawn blade.

"No. Every spare heart is one more guarantee for Gianna's life. I will not gamble with her safety."

Matteo's composure slipped.

"And Serafina? To this day I still see her mother dying with blood and tears running down her face, full of hatred. Aren't you afraid that if Serafina ever learns the truth, she'll fight you to the death?"

Lorenzo was silent for a long moment. Then he laughed at himself, low and hollow.

"If she wants my life, she can have it. I always meant to look after her for the rest of mine anyway."

"As long as Gianna is happy, I can die with no regrets."

The veins on the back of my hand stood out where I gripped the study door handle, trembling beyond anything I could command.

After I recorded all of it on my phone, I fled back to the bedroom before Lorenzo could catch me there, then slid down to the floor, gutted.

My body had never taken to the machine in my chest. It left me weak, and I had to endure the constant torment of coughing blood and that stabbing pain beneath my ribs.

Back then, Lorenzo had told me that a heart transplant needed a living donor, and since my mother had died, the heart could never be returned to my body.

I had told myself it was all right. At least my heart would stay with my mother forever.

No wonder, when I had begged to see my mother one last time, Lorenzo had used my weakness after the surgery as the reason I couldn't leave the bed, and rushed to see to her burial himself.

So the salvation, the devotion, all of it was nothing but an altar a devil had built with his own hands. He had never operated on my mother at all.

My mother, myself, every one of us was nothing but an offering Lorenzo laid down at the feet of the woman he loved.

And so I would suspect nothing, he had even wheeled my mother into that operating room first. Made her watch with her own eyes as her daughter's heart was lowered into another woman's chest, powerless to stop any of it, dying with blood and tears streaming down her face.