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.

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.

Because my blood had never given the Family an heir, and the Old Donna wanted a grandchild to carry the Falcone name, she had only grown more displeased with me.

Before, Lorenzo would have spoken up for me, said a word or two in my defense. Now his eyes held nothing but Gianna, and a longing he couldn't quite hide.

Gianna bounced up to him, hooked her arm through his, and cooed,

"Uncle Lorenzo, did you bring Gianna a present?"

He pinched her cheek, indulgent.

"Of course I did."

Twenty-eight couture gowns were wheeled into the great hall of the old estate, each paired with a set of jewelry worth more than most made men saw in a lifetime.

Twenty-eight. Gianna's age, this saint's day.

She kissed him happily on the cheek.

"Wow, Uncle Lorenzo really does love me best. All this jewelry is limited edition~ You're spending way too much, Uncle Lorenzo. What if certain people get upset?"

Her fingers drifted to the pendant at her throat, toying with it, a small triumphant caress.

Only then did Lorenzo seem to remember I was standing there. Beside those gowns, my plain dress looked more out of place than ever, a poor relation in a room built on laundered tribute.

In all these years, Lorenzo had never once remembered my birthday, let alone given me anything like a couture gown or a string of stones.

He looked at me, a little awkward, and took my hand, wanting to explain.

"Serafina, don't read too much into it. I'm Gianna's uncle, I just"

Gianna suddenly clutched her chest, over the place where the scar lay, her brows knitting.

"Uncle Lorenzo, my heart feels strange, I don't know if my heart condition is acting up again"

Lorenzo let go of me at once, turning to pull her into his arms, his face all alarm. The Golden Blade, the only hands in the city feared for both healing and killing, and they trembled now for her.

"Why would your chest suddenly feel like that? Does it hurt? No, I have to examine you right now."

And with that, in front of every relative and made man there, he swept Gianna up into his arms and carried her up the wide staircase without looking back.

The guests watched me with mocking eyes. The room seemed to close around me, the talk dropping to that low syndicate murmur that travels faster than any shout.

"No wonder the Don would rather drape Gianna in silk and stones than spare her even one. A woman of such low birth doesn't belong as a Falcone wife, let alone to own fine things."

"If Lorenzo weren't bound by being Gianna's uncle, why would he ever have taken this one into a blood-bound union? Maybe back then she used her own mother's death to pressure him into it. Shameless creature, climbing into the Family over her own mother's corpse."

The murmuring grew louder. The Old Donna felt the whole syndicate watching her shame, and her hand went to the heavy mourning ring on her finger. She began to turn it, slow and repeated, and snapped at me,

"You disgraceful thing, what are you still standing here for? Get yourself upstairs. Haven't you brought enough shame on this house already?"

"It was that dead mother of yours' good fortune that my son ever laid a blade to her at all. She wasn't strong enough and died, and what does that have to do with my son? You don't even have the decency to be grateful, and you still have the nerve to bleed us for tribute. You'll get what's coming to you, sooner or later."

Under my sleeve my fist clenched tight. I gave a weak smile. Yes. Knowing Lorenzo was the punishment coming to me.

I thought of the renunciation papers folded inside my bag, the ones that would dissolve a blood-bound union no Don's wife had ever walked away from. I said nothing, only turned and climbed the stairs to find him.

And there, on the second-floor loggia, where the sea wind came in off the harbor, I caught him and Gianna in each other's arms.

Gianna leaned back against the iron railing, her arms looped around his neck.

"Lorenzo, listen, tell me, is Gianna's heart still racing?"

"Gianna, we can't"

He fought to keep his voice steady, the low measured voice that ended sit-downs and ordered men into the ground, but it cracked on the edges now.

Gianna kissed him first, her voice soft and coaxing.

"Don't you want Gianna? I know there's only Gianna in your heart, and you're in mine too. Even if you took someone else for the sake of how the Family sees you, your body belongs to me. Just let us indulge ourselves this once"

At last Lorenzo couldn't hold back. He caught the back of her head and kissed her, hungry and deep.

The sound of fabric tearing, threaded through with whimpers no one should have to hear. I pressed my flat palm hard against the center of my own chest, checking, the way you check a wound, that the heart inside was still beating at all.

Listening to Lorenzo pour out those sickeningly tender words from behind the balcony doors, the tears spilled over before I could stop them, and I clamped a hand over my mouth and fled the estate.

I don't know how long I sat there by the service door, beneath the cold eyes of a soldier who pretended not to see me, before a bowl of scalding broth hit me square in the chest, the heat sharp enough to make me flinch.

Gianna had changed her clothes at some point, and she came out into the courtyard swinging a bottle of aged liquor by the neck.

"Serafina, did you like the sounds we were making just now? That sorry little back of yours, scurrying off. You really did look like a dog."

So she'd seen me.

"I hear your body can't handle the mechanism in your chest. Coughing up blood every day, that ache where your heart should be. It must be awful. You can't even enjoy a man's love properly. Me, I'm different." Her fingers drifted up to the pendant at her throat, stroking the small ridge of scar beneath it. "We can try the rougher things and it's no trouble at all. You may be useless, but that heart of yours works just fine. I felt very good just now."

"And you actually dared to marry my uncle? Thought you could steal a piece of his affection for yourself? Keep dreaming. I'm the only one in his heart. You were nothing but a culture dish I used to grow a heart."

"Oh, and here's the thing." She let the pendant fall and smiled. "That day wasn't actually the first time your mother caught me and your betrothed together. The old hag had the nerve to call me shameless, so I made a point of having her dragged over, and I took your betrothed right in front of her. Worked her up until her heart gave out. And when it came time to give her your heart, I pretended my chest hurt. Sure enough, my uncle couldn't bear it. He wouldn't wait a single second. He gave your heart to me instead."

"Oh, that's right. You were unconscious at the time, so you probably didn't see your mother's face. She had her arm stretched out so far, eyes bulging, like she wanted to strangle the both of us. Pity. All she could do was watch, and in the end she died of pure rage. Serves her right. She cursed me, so I took her life!"

I stared, my eyes wide in disbelief, unable to fathom that this was the truth of how my mother's heart had failed.

The courtyard went very still. Even the soldier at the wall had stopped pretending. My body wouldn't stop shaking. How could these people murder my mother and then speak of it as though it were nothing more than tribute owed?

I raised my hand high, but Gianna got there first, dumping the liquor over her own head and breaking into a scream.

The next second, someone shoved me hard to the ground.

Lorenzo held Gianna against his chest and turned to roar at me:

"Serafina, what do you think you're doing?!"

Gianna spoke through her sobs:

"Uncle, I just saw that my aunt hadn't eaten, so I wanted to bring her something to eat and drink. But she said I'd worked her mother to death, knocked the food out of my hands, and threw liquor all over me. If you'd come any later, she would have killed me."

"I made that broth and brought that bottle with my own hands. I know it isn't anything fine enough for a feast like this, but it came from the heart. I even burned my hand on the boiling water..."

Lorenzo's face went dark in an instant. His sleeves were still rolled to the forearm, those surgeon's hands bare in the cold light, and not one man in the courtyard moved.

"Serafina, your mother's heart gave out because she couldn't take the strain. She had no business meddling in her children's affairs. Before a union, it's perfectly normal for one side to have a change of heart. Gianna felt the dishonor of you going unfed. Fine, you don't appreciate it. But how can you pin the blame on her?!"

I listened to him say these unthinkable things, disbelieving.

"Lorenzo, tell me. How did my mother really die? Did you truly give my heart to her?"

Lorenzo frowned.

"Of course. Didn't I already tell you? Your mother had a rejection after the surgery. Cutting a heart from one chest and setting it in another carries risk. That's the simplest truth there is. You don't even grasp that much, and now you'd insult Gianna's sincerity in front of the whole house. Apologize to her. Now."

A laugh came out of me, and with it, tears.

So this was the man I'd loved for seven years. The Golden Blade, who could read a body better than any priest could read a soul, and he wouldn't give me even one honest word.

As if to punish myself, I picked up the toppled bottle beside me, and never minding the shattered rim, I poured every drop that was left into my mouth, letting the glass cut my lips.

The moment the burning liquor went down my throat, the violent pain in my chest left me swaying on my feet.

Lorenzo's eyes flew wide. He shouted, frantic,

"Serafina, your body can't take liquor. Stop, now!"

I dropped the bottle on the marble and smiled at him.

"You're right, Lorenzo. How could anyone throw someone's true feelings back in their face? So I drank down your precious darling's little gift. Satisfied?"

And with that I turned and walked away without a second's hesitation, past the soldiers who stiffened along the wall and lowered their eyes, men who had learned long ago when not to look at the Don's wife.

Lorenzo moved to grab me, but Gianna caught his arm at once. Her free hand drifted to the pendant at her throat, fingers stroking the place where the scar slept.

"Uncle Lorenzo, my chest is hurting again. I don't know, maybe it's because Auntie just frightened me so badly"

Lorenzo watched me go, hesitated a few seconds, and in the end didn't come after me.

He didn't come back to the estate that night.

And I gathered up everything that belonged to me and burned it all to ash.

He didn't call until the next day.

"Serafina, yesterday was my fault. I know your mother's death is a wound in your heart. I shouldn't have said those things."

"But Gianna's heart is weak, and I was afraid something would happen to her. I wouldn't be able to face her mother or the rest of the Family. She's blood. I have to look after her."

I said flatly,

"It's fine. I lost my temper yesterday. Go take good care of her."

"You drank yesterday, so your chest must be hurting. Tomorrow I'll fit you with a new mechanism. Get some rest tonight, and I'll come for you in the morning."

"All right."

The next morning, Lorenzo didn't come back.

Just as well. Not every goodbye needs to happen face to face.

I left the renunciation papers on the table and went out.

At the gates of the Family clinic, Lorenzo called, his tone apologetic.

"Sorry, Serafina. There's a man who won't last the hour without my hands on him. I have to finish him first. We'll do your new heart tonight instead. I'll send one of my men to bring you in."

"Tomorrow's our seventh anniversary. Once it's done, I'll take you somewhere worthy of it."

A perfectly legitimate reason. Perfect for a lie.

What Lorenzo didn't know was that Gianna had already sent word to me.

Because "I" had splashed liquor on one of her gowns yesterday and ruined it, Lorenzo was making it up to her. Right now he was at a private auction with her, about to take the final lot for her: a pink-diamond necklace, the only one of its kind in the world, the kind of thing the Family bought with laundered tribute and never blinked.

It was the first time he'd remembered our anniversary. And he'd remembered it to spend the day with another woman.

"Sure. As it happens, I'd like to give you a gift too."

"Really? I can't wait~"

I hung up, took one last look at the clear blue sky over the harbor, and pressed my flat palm against the center of my chest. The mechanism inside it beat on, patient, borrowed. Then I walked into the clinic without looking back.

Goodbye, Lorenzo.

Meanwhile, after Lorenzo took the necklace for Gianna without a hitch, he carried her off to a candlelit table on neutral ground, then drove her to the clinic himself.

Only when they arrived did he learn that Serafina still hadn't come.

He glanced at the time. 00:00.

Why wasn't Serafina here yet?

He reached for his phone to ask when one of his men came running up the corridor, holding a box.

"Don Falcone, your wife isn't at the estate. Someone left this at the gate. They said it's a gift. From her. To you."