Dante Vitiello POV
The electronic lock on the morgue door engaged with a final, hollow click.
In the suffocating silence that followed, it was the loudest sound in the world.
I stood frozen, my gaze anchored to the jagged scar running down the center of Elena's chest. It wasn't the clean, precise line of a heart transplant. It was messy. It was old.
Dr. Aris didn't wait for a nod. He moved his scalpel lower, past the sternum, to her abdomen. With clinical detachment, he made a small incision on her flank.
There was nothing there.
"The right kidney is absent," Aris announced, his voice bouncing off the sterile tile walls. "Surgically removed. The scar tissue indicates the procedure was done approximately three years ago."
*Three years ago.*
The room tilted violently. I had to grip the edge of the steel table until my knuckles turned white to keep from hitting the floor.
Three years ago, I lay in the ICU. I had been shot in an ambush. My kidneys were failing. I was rotting from the inside out. I spent two weeks in a coma, waiting for a donor match that the doctors said was one in a million.
When I woke up, Sofia was sitting by my bed. She held my hand. She looked me in the eye and told me she was the match. She told me she had saved me.
I looked at Sofia now.
She was plastered against the locked door, her face the color of wet ash. She wasn't crying anymore. She was hyperventilating, her chest heaving in sharp, shallow gasps.
"It's not what it looks like," she shrilled, her voice cracking. "Dante, listen to me. The doctor is lying. He's working for the Rossis!"
I didn't look at her. I looked at Aris.
"The heart," I rasped, the words feeling like broken glass in my throat. "Why did she have the machine?"
Aris peeled back the skin over Elena's chest. He exposed the device, the mechanical pump that had been keeping her alive while I forced her to crawl over burning coals.
"Her heart was pristine three years ago, Dante," Aris said quietly. "I treated her for a flu back then. She was perfect."
He pointed to the damage around the organ.
"The nephrectomy... the kidney removal... it was hard on her body. She suffered an adverse reaction to the anesthesia during the donation surgery. It weakened her heart muscle. Over the last three years, it degraded into congestive heart failure."
The air left my lungs as if I’d been punched.
She didn't just give me a kidney. She had traded her life for mine.
Every beat of my heart, every breath I had taken for the last three years, was bought with her pain.
I remembered the day I woke up from my coma. I asked where Elena was. Sofia told me Elena had gone to Paris with a lover. She said Elena didn't care that I was dying.
I believed her.
I spent three years hating the woman who was slowly dying so I could live.
"Dante," Sofia whispered. "Please."
I turned my head slowly. The tendons in my neck popped.
"You have two kidneys, Sofia," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded like gravel grinding against bone.
"I... I..."
"Check her," I commanded.
"No!" Sofia screamed. She tried to scramble away, but there was nowhere to go.
Aris didn't need to cut her. He just walked over and lifted her silk shirt. Her skin was flawless. Smooth. Unmarked.
There was no scar. No white line. Nothing.
The rage didn't ignite like a fire. It came like a blackout. A void that swallowed everything—the light, the sound, the last shreds of humanity left in me.
I looked back at the table. At Elena.
I had called her a whore. I had made her kneel. I had drained her blood yesterday to give to this healthy, lying rat.
"I killed her," I whispered into the void.
The words hung in the cold air.
I moved to the table like a dead man walking. I reached out and touched Elena's face. It was so cold.
"Elena," I said. "Elena, wake up. I know now. I know."
She didn't move. She would never move again.
A sound tore out of my throat. It wasn't a word. It was a raw, animalistic howl of absolute ruin that shattered the sterile silence of the room. I fell to my knees beside the metal table, pressing my forehead against her cold hand, screaming until I tasted blood.
