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.
