Accueil / Mafia Histoires courtes / They Gave My Heart Away, Then Regretted It / Chapitre 1 - Chapitre 9

Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 1 - Chapitre 9

Chapter 1

"She wants Rafael to stay with her for a month after she's discharged, doesn't she? Fine. I agree."The room went quiet for a few seconds after I said it.Rafael reacted first.He frowned at me, like he was trying to figure out what new trick I was pulling now."You mean that?"I nodded."Of course."My mother's mouth fell open. My father instinctively took half a step forward. Even Serena forgot to cry and just stared at me with wide eyes.They probably assumed I'd do what I always did and keep fighting her.Fighting for the heart that should have been mine.Fighting for Rafael.Fighting to be the one our parents looked at with the softer, more loving eyes.But I was done fighting.My mother sat on the edge of the bed and reached out to take my hand.I pulled away on instinct.Her hand froze in midair, and her expression turned awkward.Just then, Serena shrank against Rafael's side and spoke up in a small, timid voice."But... what if Isabella changes her mind again after the month i

Chapter 2

Before I left the hospital that night, the doctor handed me a bottle of painkillers with a look of pity.Dragging my weak body, I made my way back upstairs to my bedroom.Early the next morning I woke to a familiar smell drifting up from the kitchen downstairs.Pastina.Could it be that she hadn't forgotten her promise to cook for me yesterday after all?The next moment, my door was pushed open."Isabella, you are perfectly fine. What are you doing shut in this room all day? You used to live at the range. Go out and shoot something."My mother stood at the foot of the bed with her arms crossed."How much longer are you going to keep this up?""Are you really so jealous of your sister that you can't stand to see her happy?"I opened my mouth to answer, and the cough tore out of me instead.It went on and on. By the time it stopped I was gripping the sheets, and there was no color left in my face.My mother stood there frowning at me. For a second I thought she was going to come closer a

Chapter 3

That night, Rafael came to find me. The moment he walked in, he tossed a velvet box onto the bed."This necklace. Did you say something to Serena about it?"I opened the box.The necklace was broken, though the diamonds still shone."Once she found out you were the one who picked it, she insisted on taking it off to give it back to you, but she broke it by accident."Rafael's tone was like scolding a child who didn't know any better."Isabella, she just had a heart transplant. Do you really have to make her spend her recovery feeling guilty?"I looked at him and suddenly felt exhausted.All Serena had to do was shed a tear, and I was automatically the one in the wrong.I pushed the box back toward him."Take it. I never wanted it anyway."Rafael's face darkened."What are you sulking about now?""She just came back from the dead, and even she has the decency to step aside for you. Why on earth do you keep going after her?"I nodded."You're right. I'm sorry."That was all I had left.

Chapter 4

The morning the family flew out, the first snow of the year came down over the estate. They were flying somewhere sunny.Serena had come home from the hospital the night before. My parents and Rafael were up before it was light. My mother picked out her clothes herself.My father went over the instructions with the travel doctor again and again.Rafael stood gently by her side, like a guardian who belonged only to her, while his men carried her luggage out to the cars. "You did so well, Serena." My father couldn't stop smiling at her. "You beat it. After this, there's nothing you can't beat."I stood at the other end of the hall and watched them.My mother saw me first. She hurried over and caught my arm. My head went foggy for a second."Isabella, good, you're here." She kept her voice soft. "Serena still wants to hear you say it. That you don't mind her going away with Rafael."I looked at her. Serena wasn't in the wheelchair anymore. She had on Chanel, the new winter line, heeled

Chapter 5

"Time of death, eleven forty-seven a.m.," I heard the doctor say.A nurse pulled the tubes from my body and drew a white sheet up over me. They wheeled my body out of the ER and down toward the morgue. On the way we passed the floor where Serena and I had been admitted. A few pink balloons were still tied to her door from the party. We passed my old room too. There was a new patient in it already, family gathered close around the bed.That crushing weight on my chest, the thing that had kept me from breathing, was just gone. I looked down and saw the light passing straight through me. I threw no shadow on the floor.I worked it out. I was a ghost now.So that was all dying was. Easy. Like someone who'd walked too long in the rain finally changing into dry clothes and sitting down to rest.The next moment, I was standing in the cabin of the jet with my family.The jet climbed through the clouds, up toward the light. Serena had fallen asleep on Rafael's shoulder. My father clinked glass

Chapter 6

In the two weeks after I died, no one really looked for me.They had promised Serena a quiet, peaceful holiday.On the day they were due to fly home, my mother said, "I wonder how Isabella is. The morning we left, she looked like she could barely stand."My father sat on the terrace of the island villa, paging through Serena's recovery plan, his face cold. "She just thinks that if she plays the dying girl long enough, we'll feel guilty for giving Serena the heart first."Rafael stood by the window, staring at our chat thread without a word. The last message was him telling me that Serena really liked the necklace and that he would get me a new one later. I'd answered: Fine.Scroll up from there, and from the day I signed that paper, I hadn't sent a single message on my own. He thought I was giving him the silent treatment. The paper said no approaching, no contact, no interference, and I hadn't broken one line of it.Serena took my mother's hand, her eyes red. "Is Isabella still blami

Chapter 7

The cake knife slipped out of my mother's hand and hit the floor. She stared at Rafael.His lips moved a few times before anything came out."The hospital says Isabella's body. No one's claimed it."My mother went blank, and then, somehow, she laughed. "That's impossible. She was perfectly fine."My father's face went hard. "Is this some enemy's trick to draw us out?" He raised a hand and beckoned one of his men over. "Run this number."The man came back fast, his voice shaking. "Sir... the number's the registration line for the hospital morgue."Something hit Rafael. He turned and walked straight to the front hall, to the patch of floor where the paper had fallen two weeks ago.It wasn't there. The housekeeper took it out of the drawer of the hall table, white to the lips. "I called," she said. "That morning I called every one of you. Nobody picked up." She looked at my mother. "And when you came home this afternoon I tried to tell you. But you... you said not to disturb you, because

Chapter 8

My mother thought back to the year I turned three, when I ran a fever in the night and she held me till morning without once setting me down. My father remembered the time the school called to say I'd taken a bad fall in gym class, and how he came in such a rush the don of the family had both shoes on the wrong feet. And it came back to Rafael, the day a boy in our class called my father a butcher, and how he went at him fists first.My mother lay against the drawer, crying so hard she could barely breathe. "We loved her most, once. How did it come to this?"No one could answer.Maybe it was because I had always been the healthy one. In all those years they had never once seen me lie in a hospital bed. So when I said my heart was failing too, in the same days Serena was waiting for hers, none of them believed me. They only thought I couldn't bear to watch her have something first.It had started when Serena fell ill. Her first attack, she cried until she couldn't breathe, and the who

Chapter 9

After the funeral, my father arranged for Serena to move out of the estate. He gave her a house and enough money to live on, settling the debt of all the years they'd raised her.My mother went back through everything of mine. Out of the two cardboard boxes still sitting in the north room, she dug up my childhood certificates, the little medals from my shooting days, and the stuffed rabbit Rafael had given me. Out of that whole bag of plush toys, it was the only one I'd kept.I'd kept it for seventeen years. One of its ears had come loose. Rafael sat on the floor and stitched it back, clumsy about it. He remembered how as a child I wouldn't fall asleep in a strange house unless I was holding it.But not one of them noticed that in the last weeks of my life I didn't even have it with me.My father went through every old photo album in the house. In the pictures, from the time I was small, I always stood dead center.But after Serena came to the estate, my place drifted, little by little

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