All Chapters of Bound By A Borrowed Heart: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

75 Chapters

ONE: THE ANNIVERSARY GIFT

GIANNAThe pain in my chest is a dull and rhythmic throb, it feels like a bruised fist squeezing my heart every few seconds. The things we do for love right?I press my palm flat against the silk of my red dress and force a breath through my teeth. I cannot ruin tonight. I refuse to let my failing body ruin the one night that actually matters.The dining room smells of rosemary and roasted garlic, the scent is thick and heavy in the air. I spent four hours in the kitchen, my legs shaking and my vision blurring at the edges, just to get the glaze on the lamb chops perfect. The candles in the center of the table are burning low, the wax dripping down the sides in slow and clear tears. It is perfect. It has to be perfect because today is the day everything changes.I walk to the mirror in the hallway and check my reflection. My skin is pale, almost translucent under the warm hallway light, but the red lipstick hides the blue tint of my lips. I look alive. I look like a wife who is ready

TWO: THE DEVIL’S CONFESSION

GIANNAThe world outside the window is a kaleidoscope of red and blue lights. They flash against the wet pavement, reflecting off the puddles that are forming rapidly in the sudden downpour. It is raining. The sky is weeping for my mother because I cannot. I’m frozen like a statue carved out of ice and horror.I see the paramedics moving too slowly. Or maybe they’re not moving at all. One of them, a man with broad shoulders and a yellow vest, stands up from the figure lying on the asphalt. He shakes his head and he pulls a white sheet over the body.The sheet turns transparent in the rain, clinging to the small, frail form underneath.Mom."No," the word falls from my lips like a stone. "No. She’s just sleeping. She just fell."A sharp, piercing sound cuts through the fog in my brain. Beep. Beep. Beep.It is coming from my chest. My pacemaker, the device that keeps my broken heart pumping, is sending a warning signal. My pulse is too high. My blood pressure is crashing. The pain is

THREE: A WEEK AND ANOTHER

GIANNAThe dust in the air tastes like abandonment. It coats my tongue, dry and bitter, a flavor that matches the rest of my life. I am sitting on the floor of my parents' old estate, not the manor we lived in, but the dilapidated townhouse on the edge of the city that Dad was meaning to renovate before... well before everything.There is no furniture, just a wooden chair that has seen better days. There’s no heat, it’s just me, a thin blanket I stole from a shelter, and the relentless, mechanical whirring in my chest.Whir. Click. Whir. Click.My artificial heart. The machine that keeps me alive while the man who has my real heart inside his chest lives in a mansion with my cousin.I cough, the sound rattling in the empty room. It has been a week since the anniversary. A week of hell. A week since I watched them bury my mother in a closed casket because the truck left nothing recognizable. A week since I stood over my father in the charity ward, watching a machine breathe for him be

FOUR: THE LAVENDER ROOM

SEANThe smell of lavender is supposed to be calming. It is supposed to soothe the nerves, to bring peace, to remind me of spring meadows and sunlight. But to me, it smells like death.The scent is thick in the air, pumped through the vents of the private suite on the top floor of Mount Sinai. It chokes me. It masks the antiseptic sting of the hospital, but it cannot mask the underlying stench of decay.I stand by the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out at the New York skyline. From here, the city looks like a circuit board of gold and steel. I own half the buildings in my line of sight. I can crumble companies with a phone call, and I can ruin men’s lives with a signature.I am Sean Cooper, but the press calls me the “God of War”. They say I have ice in my veins and a calculator for a heart. But right now, I am powerless. All the money in the world but I can’t.."Sean." The voice is a whisper, dry like autumn leaves scraping against pavement.I turn. The movement is stiff. My muscl

FIVE: A HEART FOR A HEART

GIANNAThe vibration of the phone against the wooden floorboards sounds like a drill in the silence of the empty house. It jolts me awake. My hand flies to my chest instinctively, checking the machine, checking the wires.Whir. Click.It’s still working, still keeping me alive, barely. I snatch the phone. The screen is cracked, a spiderweb of glass over the glowing light.Dr. Laurel: We have a heart Gi, please come now. Do not wait. My breath hitches. A heart means a chance. A second chance at life, and that means time. More time to live, and more time to rise and kick those who kicked me down.I don't think. I just move, grab my purse, ignoring the dizziness that sways the room like a ship in a storm. I don't have a coat or an umbrella uni, I just have the desperation of a mother fighting for her unborn child.I run out the door and the storm hits me the moment I step off the porch. It isn't just rain; it is a fucking downpour. The wind howls, tearing at my dress, soaking me to the

SIX : WITH A NEW HEART

GIANNAThe first thing I notice is the smell of sweet and clean lavender everywhere, filling the room like someone planted a garden in the walls while I was unconscious. I don't know where it's coming from, I don't know where I am, and I don't know what day it is or how long I've been under or whether the baby is still alive inside me. All I know is the strong scent of lavender, the sound of beeping and something hammering behind my ribs that I don't recognize. My hand moves to my chest before my brain catches up.There's a bandage and a thick gauze surgical tape stretching from my collarbone to below my breast, and underneath it is a heartbeat. Not the weak, wet flutter I was born with that gave out when I was nineteen, and not the mechanical click-whir of the LVAD that kept me alive for eight months like a wind-up toy running out of spring. This one is real with muscle, valve and blood pushing through chambers with a force that feels almost angry, like the heart is furious about

SEVEN : GRIEVING ALONE

SEANThe photograph was taken two years ago sometime in June. The rooftop garden at the brownstone in Park Slope, the one she refused to sell even after I bought her the penthouse on the Upper East Side."I don't need marble floors, Sean. I need soil under my fingernails." That was my mother. Fifty-seven years of choosing dirt over diamonds, and the world loved her for it, and I loved her most.She's standing between two rows of lavender bushes she planted herself, wearing a yellow sundress and that ridiculous straw hat she found at a flea market in Brooklyn, and she's laughing at something I said even though I don't remember what. I've been trying to remember everything about her for three days. I can hear the loud and unfiltered laughter, the kind that made strangers smile on the subway but the words that caused it are gone. Another thing the universe took from me that I can't get back.I set the frame down on my desk and it lands harder than I intended. The sound echoes through t

EIGHT : LAVENDERS AND LAWS

GIANNAI spend four hours preparing for a man I've met just once. Laurel helps me sit up properly, not the half-slumped posture of a patient waiting for meds, but upright, spine straight, shoulders back. She adjusts the pillows, raises the bed, and when I ask her to fix my hair, she doesn't question it she just finds a brush in the bedside drawer and works through the tangles with a patience that belongs in a salon, not a cardiac ward. My hair is a disaster, three days of unconscious sweating and surgical prep have turned it into something that looks like it survived a natural disaster, which I suppose it did."Can you find me something that isn't a hospital gown?" I ask.She raises an eyebrow. "You had major cardiac surgery just seventy-two hours ago.""And I'm about to have a legal negotiation with a billionaire. I'm not doing that in a gown with my back hanging out."Laurel disappears for ten minutes and returns with a cardigan from her own locker, a soft, grey, thick oversized s

NINE : THE MONSTER YOU MARRIED

RYANThe sheets still smell like her. Not Tasha, Tasha smells like whatever perfume she finds in Gianna's bathroom cabinet, the one she sprays on like she's trying to drown herself in someone else's identity. The sheets smell like Gianna, vanilla with turpentine and the faint medicinal tang of whatever pills she was swallowing to keep that pathetic machine in her chest running for another day. I've slept in these sheets for a week and I can't get her out of the fabric. I can't get her out of the house. Every corner has a trace of her, a bobby pin in the bathroom drawer, a paint smudge on the hallway baseboard, a pair of reading glasses she left on the kitchen counter that her blind father used to wear.I should throw all of it away and gut this house the way I gutted her life and rebuild it in my own image, but I haven't and I don't examine why.Tasha is beside me, propped against the headboard, scrolling through her phone with the glazed expression of someone who confuses shopping

TEN : THE FINE PRINT

GIANNAThe townhouse is exactly as I left it. Which is to say it’s still falling apart. The wallpaper in the hallway is peeling at the seams where the leak from the upstairs bathroom has been creeping down the walls for years. Why did I ever reject the idea of reconstructing this house? “It’s not THAT bad,” I had said when mom brought up the idea of making the house look better. In my wildest imagination I’d never thought we’d lose our properties to a wolf in sheep’s clothing.The kitchen ceiling has a water stain shaped like the state of Florida. Three of the living room windows don't close properly, so there's always a draft, always a whistle, always the feeling that the house is breathing through broken teeth. My father's coat is still on the hook by the front door. My mother's reading glasses are still on the kitchen counter next to a half-finished crossword puzzle she'll never complete.I stand in the entryway with my hospital bag on my shoulder and let the silence settle arou

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