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.

Even with my heart gone, the pain in my chest was beyond anything I could bear, and I coughed up a mouthful of blood onto the white silk sheets of the Falcone estate.

"Serafina?"

I didn't know when Lorenzo had appeared in the doorway. Seeing me bring up blood again, he crossed the room and gathered me onto the bed, wiping the blood from the corner of my mouth, aching with worry.

"I'm sorry, Serafina. I didn't take good enough care of you. Don't worry, I've already arranged the best mechanism the Family's surgeons can build. We'll replace it in a few days."

His eyes were rimmed red with guilt, exactly the way they always were whenever he saw me suffer. The Golden Blade, the man whose hands the whole city feared, kneeling at the side of his dying wife.

I used to think it was because he loved me, and I'd even put on a brave face and tell him it was all right, to comfort him.

Looking back now, I was a fool.

"Lorenzo, all these years it's hurt me so much. Can I stop relying on this machine inside me?"

Haven't you already reserved a dozen donor hearts for Gianna, kept off the Family's books? So could you give my heart back to me?

Lorenzo was silent for only a second, then smiled and stroked my hair.

"Serafina, don't talk nonsense. You don't have a matching donor heart. Without the mechanism, do you want me to watch you die? You may as well put a bullet in me first."

Don't have one?

But the heart beating inside Gianna's chest was mine.

The blood in my body turned cold all at once. I pressed my flat palm to the center of my chest, the old habit, checking that the thing beneath my ribs still answered. I managed a faint smile.

"You're right. I was being foolish."

On the pretext of drawing Lorenzo's bath, I poured a whole bottle of sleep-inducing oil into the water.

When he came back, it wasn't long before he sank into a deep sleep.

Maybe he was dreaming of the one he longed for day and night, because he started to talk in his sleep.

"Gianna, I'll protect you, even if it costs me my life."

Looking at this husband I had given my whole heart to for seven years, my tears finally slipped free, beyond my control.

I called the one doctor who answered to no Family, my oldest friend, just returned from across the water.

"I'd like you to do a surgery for me, Dottoressa."

"Yes, I'm sure. See you in three days."

What is there to be afraid of in death?

A life worse than death is the real agony.

I set down my phone, quietly picked up Lorenzo's, and walked to the study. The corridor was silent but for the soft tread of a soldier somewhere below, making his rounds of the grounds.

Just as I expected, the passcode was Gianna's birthday.

I had never known Lorenzo kept a hidden account, a tribute fund of words rather than cash, off every ledger the Family ever touched.

He'd probably forgotten to switch back. The profile was two words in fancy lettering: Love Gianna.

A wish that plain, that simple.

I opened his feed. It was nothing but photos of Gianna, and every line beneath them was Lorenzo's love for her, hidden and flaunting all at once.

"My first day in the Falcone house, I met Gianna, and suddenly understood what it meant for a heart to stir."

"Gianna was married off in an alliance, and I was insane with jealousy. I wanted to tuck her inside my body, where she'd belong to me alone."

"Took Serafina three times today. I know her body can't handle it, but I couldn't help it. I want Gianna so badly that all I can do is call her name over and over in my head, as if that could turn the one beneath me into her…"

And there was more: the lavish jewelry, the laundered tribute spent like water on her.

He'd even bought a small heart-shaped island across the sea, held under a fronted name so no one could ever trace it back, and put it in her hands.

And in all these years, the only thing Lorenzo ever gave me was that machine in my chest that brought me endless torment and pain.

While I was breaking apart with grief over my mother's death, enduring the misery of coughing up blood, Gianna was already lying prettily on the soft sand of that island, soaking up the sun.

The hand holding the phone wouldn't stop trembling. Nausea swept through me, into every organ, and I lunged to the side and heaved.

I knocked into the bookshelf by accident, and a volume slid free and fell.

When I picked it up, I realized it wasn't a book at all but a box made to look like one.

Inside were several "voluntary heart donation" forms and a thick stack of wire-transfer receipts.

Every month Lorenzo wired generous tribute to the families of those donors, kept them comfortable, kept them quiet.

There was only one condition: their blood could never be promised to anyone else. If Gianna ever needed a heart, they had to be ready to surrender it on demand, no questions, no refusals. That was Family law beneath the charity.

And the last form in that box was mine, except the recipient had been changed from my mother to Gianna.

Back then Lorenzo had me sign a stack of papers, said it was just paperwork the clinic required. All I could think about was getting my mother onto the table as fast as possible, so I never read any of it closely.

That form must have been slipped in somewhere along the way, and my mother's form had probably been burned long ago, the way the Family disposes of anything inconvenient.

Lorenzo. For Gianna, you really did think of everything.

After I printed the renunciation of the union, I sat on the couch, hollowed out.

The bleakness filled me, and I didn't sleep all night.

The next morning Lorenzo only assumed I'd risen early, and suspected nothing.

Maybe because I'd coughed up blood again the night before, he cooked himself, those surgeon's hands laying out a careful, well-balanced breakfast, the cuffs of his shirt buttoned neat at the wrist.

When I didn't touch a bite, a flicker of concern crossed his face.

"Serafina, why aren't you eating? Are you upset about something?"

"It's nothing. I just miss my mom."

He sighed.

"Serafina, it isn't only you. I think about her all the time too. She was such a kind, gentle woman, and it was my failure that I couldn't save her. I still remember her holding my hand, telling us we had to be happy together."

If my mother still had the strength to lift that hand, she'd probably want to wrap it around his throat.

Watching him perform that hollow grief, something sour twisted in me.

I was about to bring up the renunciation when Lorenzo spoke first, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.

"Serafina, you've been low for a while now. Gianna's flying back today, and it's her saint's day. The old estate is holding a Family banquet. Why don't we go too, get out a little? It might lift your mood."

"I know that because of your mother you've never wanted to see her. But it's been so many years, and Gianna never meant for it to happen. We're blood, after all. She's always been sensitive. If we don't go, I'm afraid it'll wound her."

So this was what the morning had been building toward. All those careful words spent, just so he could go see the woman he loved.

I cut him off.

"Whatever you want."

Lorenzo smiled.

"I knew my Serafina was the most understanding."

The moment we walked through the gates of the old estate, soldiers straightening along the drive, there was Gianna, dressed like a high-born princess of the bloodline, hanging off Donna Abbatelli's arm and playing the spoiled darling.

The old Donna laughed and let her carry on, feeding her sliced fruit by hand.

Doted on in every possible way.

Gianna spotted me at once, her fingers drifting to the pendant at her throat, toying with it as she said to the old Donna, voice dripping with mockery,

"Nonna~ you've fed me so much I'm getting fat. Look, the little aunt's here. I don't want these last few pieces, so just give them to her. She doesn't have a mother, after all."

Donna Abbatelli saw me too. She looked me up and down, took in my shabby clothes, and her face curled with contempt. The heavy mourning ring on her finger began to turn, slow, and the soldiers nearest the doorway went still.

"Who told a sickly thing like you to come? Do you want to rub your poor, wretched bad luck off on this house too?"

"This is the Falcone bloodline, a line that has always healed and ruled. You go around dressed like a beggar every day, dragging my son's name through the dirt before the whole Family. Blood-bound to him for years now, and not only can't you give him an heir, you haven't even got the sense the Lord gave a stone. Did that dead mother of yours never teach you what respect is?"

Lorenzo wasn't blood to Gianna's father. He was the boy his stepmother had brought into the Family.

Afraid her stepson would be overlooked among the made men, she'd always wanted Lorenzo blood-bound to a woman of matching standing, someone whose name could lift his own.

Later, Gianna's father died in a car that left the road, and Lorenzo, on his own merit, rose to become the feared "Golden Blade" the whole syndicate spoke of in hushed tones, earning his father-in-law's trust, until the entire Family was placed in his hands.

Only then did Donna Abbatelli hold her nose and allow Lorenzo to be bound to me.