All Chapters of Bound By A Borrowed Heart: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

47 Chapters

31 : THE MORNING AFTER NOTHING

GIANNAI eat a granola bar in the studio like a criminal hiding from the scene of a crime.The crime in question is a dream and the victim is my dignity. The accomplice however, is the borrowed heart, which is beating at a perfectly calm seventy-two as if it didn't spend last night throwing pornographic cinema on the inside of my eyelids and then laughing about it.I can't go to the kitchen. Sean is probably in the kitchen. Sean with his jaw and his hands and his voice that said "This heart knows me" except he didn't actually say it, my subconscious said it, which means I'm the one who thinks the heart knows him, which means I’m thinking too much.I eat the granola bar. It tastes like cardboard and shame on my tongue. At 9 AM, I hear a knock on the studio door.Sean has never knocked on this door. In five weeks of living in this house, the studio has been mine. It’s been the one room he enters only when I'm asleep, leaving photographs and tea like a ghost with good taste. The knockin

32 : CRACK IN THE DOCTOR

LAURELThe file on my desk says Maria Gutierrez, age twenty-nine, mother of two. The file doesn't say that Maria used to bring homemade cookies to her cardiac monitoring appointments because she felt bad that I was "always stuck in this sad little office." It doesn't say that her five-year-old drew me a picture of a heart with a smiley face that's still taped to my filing cabinet. It doesn't say that I sat with her for forty minutes on Tuesday night while her stats dropped and her oxygen tanked and we both knew there wasn't a donor heart coming in time.She died at 3:17 AM on Wednesday. I was holding her hand. Her husband was on the other side, and the five-year-old was asleep in the waiting room with her grandmother, and when the monitor flatlined I watched the husband's face do the thing I've seen a hundred times, first is the collapse, the slow understanding, then the moment when the person across from you becomes a body and the world rearranges itself around the absence.I went

33 : THE FOOTAGE

GIANNASean's private office is a room I've never been inside. I've walked past it on multiple occasions, I've left a sketch on the desk through the open door. But being invited in is different, it's like crossing a threshold and entering a space that belongs to the version of him nobody sees. The room is minimalist: dark wood, glass surfaces, a single desk lamp casting a warm circle on an otherwise cold room and on the desk, in a simple silver frame, is the only personal item, a photo of Peculiar.The photograph is different from the one he left me. It’s not the straw hat, not the garden. This one is closer and more private. She's looking directly at the camera with an expression that's half-smile, half-challenge. The face of a woman who knew exactly who she was.Briggs is already there, standing by the monitor on the wall with a USB drive in his hand. Sean is behind the desk and he nods me toward the chair across from him."The store footage," Briggs says, plugging in the drive. "T

34 : THE SPY’S REPORT

SONIAI wait until 1 AM. The house goes quiet around midnight. Elena leaves at ten, Mrs. Whitfield locks up at eleven, and the girl is usually asleep by twelve unless she's painting, which she does less now that the block has her stuck.Mr. Cooper paces until two or three, but his route stays in the west wing. The east corridor is empty and that means the service quarters are mine after one.I sit on my bed with the door locked and dial the number that isn't saved under a name, for obvious reasons.He picks up on the first ring. He always does when I call at this hour because he knows I bring news. Ryan Holt isn't the type to sleep through a report."Go on," he says without greeting or warmth of any kind. Ryan Holt talks like a man who considers small talk a waste of calories. Straight down to business."She's painting again. She’s not posting yet because the whole TrueCanvas thing rattled her. But she's been working behind locked doors, which is new. I can't get eyes on the canvases

35 : THE TRAP SPRINGS

GIANNAIt’s been forty-eight hours and there’s been no post from TrueCanvas.I check the account obsessively within every hour, and every thirty minutes, refreshing the page until the gesture becomes automatic. The painting I made in secret, the woman's silhouette against the storm, painted behind locked doors with the curtains drawn, has no shadow.It has no copycat and no TrueCanvas version posted two hours later with timestamps claiming it was first.For three weeks, every piece I created was mirrored within hours. But the one piece nobody in this house could see? I get nothing from the TrueCanvas account.The leak isn't digital that’s for sure. For all I know, the leak is standing in my hallway, asking if I need anything, smiling with teeth that hide something sharp underneath.I tell Sean in his office. He's behind the desk with the morning's financial briefings spread in front of him, and when I lay it all out. I explain the trap, the timing, and the confirmation but he doesn't

36 : THE EVIDENCE

GIANNABaker looks worse than he was before. He's sitting in the back booth of the diner on Atlantic Avenue wearing the same rumpled trench coat, with same heavy eyes, but thinner now, the weight dropping off him in a way that says the Jameson is replacing meals. His coffee cup is full and untouched and a manila envelope sits on the table between us like a bomb with a bow on it.Carlos dropped me at the corner and Priya is outside in the car, watching the entrance. Sean wanted to come but I told him no, since Baker trusts me, not the billionaire whose money and resources he needs to carry out proper investigations. That conversation isn't ready yet."You look terrible," I say, sitting down."You look a lot more pregnant," Baker says. "Well.. we're both stating the obvious."He slides the envelope across the table and I open it. Inside them are photocopies, bank records, corporate filings, and an affidavit on legal paper. I spread them across the table and Baker walks me through each

37 : THE HEART THAT REMEMBERS

GIANNAI come back from the diner and go straight to the studio and paint like I'm trying to kill the canvas.There was no plan, no sketch, no gentle heart-guided brushwork. Just pure rage. The palette is all darks with Prussian blue, burnt umber, alizarin crimson so deep it looks like dried blood. I load the brush and attack the canvas with strokes that splatter paint across the floor, the easel, and my arms. The image that forms is violent and shapeless, a battlefield rendered in oil, and I don't care what it looks like because I'm not painting for beauty right now. I'm painting to survive what Baker just told me.My father is innocent, Ryan's parents were murdered, Tasha's father paid for the cover-up, and the boy who destroyed my life was a puppet on strings held by the same man who destroyed his.The brush cracks against the canvas and I grab another one."Gianna."I spin around, and the brush is instinctively raised like a weapon.Sean is in the doorway. I don't know how long

38 : THE ART OF WAR

SEANWe’ve two missions and two fronts with one enemy hiding behind different masks.I haven't slept since the studio. Since the paint on her cheek and the inch of air between her mouth and mine and the phone that rang at the exact moment I was about to violate the only rule she asked for. The no-touching clause. Her clause, written in her handwriting, and even underlined twice, because the last man she trusted used touch as a weapon.I almost kissed her anyway.The thought hasn’t left me since that moment but I’ve other things to think about, so I file it deep below the quarterly reports, the merger briefs and the layers of professional discipline I've spent three decades building. It goes in the vault with the other things I can't afford to examine, the flatline, the lavender room, and the way her voice sounds when she says my name.Then I go to work.Mission one: the authentication event. I brief Harrison and the legal team at 7 AM. The plan is clean. Rent out the Mercer Gallery

39 : THE STUDIO AT MIDNIGHT

GIANNATwo nights since the almost-kiss and I've reverted to the old pattern. I check the tablet. The kitchen is empty, the library is empty. The west corridor has no footsteps pacing around. No one is moving through the house like a ghost. I avoid every room he might occupy, eat when he's gone, and paint when he's sleeping.Except I'm not painting when he's sleeping. I'm painting because I can't sleep, and the reason I can't sleep is the same reason I'm avoiding every room he might be in.The canvas I'm working on at midnight is all heat. Reds with oranges and golds layered thick, the brush moving in sweeping arcs that build shapes I'm not consciously choosing. Tangled forms of bodies or flames or both, it's hard to tell, the lines blurring the way desire blurs the line between wanting and burning. The painting is more honest than I am.I'm wearing a thin tank top and sleep shorts because the studio is warm and the pregnancy has my body temperature running a degree higher than norm

40 : THE CALM BEFORE

GIANNAOne week out and I'm already preparing for war the way my father taught me to prepare for anything: systematically, thoroughly, and with backup plans for the backup plans.Twelve paintings are selected. Each one tagged with timestamp documentation, Sean's team compiled digital metadata, process videos from my phone showing works in progress, and material receipts for every tube of paint purchased through the estate's art supply account. The evidence chain is airtight. Every canvas has a provenance trail that starts with me and ends with me and has no room for anyone else in between.Mrs. Kate coaches me in the studio, sitting in her armchair with a cup of tea and the unexpected ferocity of a woman who spent fifteen years watching Peculiar Cooper argue with parking meters and learned something from the experience."If Tasha challenges your technique, what do you say?""I explain the crosshatch layering method. I developed it at fourteen, I can demonstrate it live, and the muscl

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