Single Heart Novels & Stories

Just her heartbeat against mine. Just this.

For a moment, I had forgotten he didn't know I wasn't deaf anymore. I looked at him with a blank expression, my voice freezing. "Are you sure your heart belongs only to me?" His face flickered with a trace of panic before he forced a smile. "And to our daughter, of course. My heart belongs to you two." Bonnie piped up from the side, "Mommy, you're not jealous of me, are you?" Before she could say more, a ringtone cut her off. Jackson stepped aside. When he returned a moment later, he seemed apologetic. "Sorry, Quinn. Something urgent came up at work. I need to handle it."

His ears were ringing. I watched him freeze as the memory of my gut-wrenching screams on the operating table finally crashed into his mind. "My other heart is inside you, Rhys!" "I only have one heart left!" And the medical report he had angrily torn to pieces... "Mother!" He snapped his head toward the former Luna. His voice cracked with desperation. "Tell me this isn't true! Tell me she's lying!" The former Luna wouldn't meet his eyes. She tried to deny it. "Son, don't listen to her nonsense! Aurora was born a freak with two hearts. We never hurt her!"

"You saved me, Mira. Not because you tried to fix me—because you saw me. All of me. The dark parts and the broken parts and the parts I thought were unlovable. And you stayed." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small velvet box. "I've given you rings before. Contracts, promises, symbols of things we were still figuring out. But this one is different." He opened the box. Inside was a simple band—platinum, unadorned, engraved on the inside with words too small to read.

“Last time you hit 140 you spotted. Dr. Hewitt said—” “Dr. Hewitt said it’s normal,” I said. Sat up. “She said twins make your heart work harder. She said walking to the bathroom isn’t a medical emergency.” He didn’t answer. He was looking at the monitor in the nursery. Alex. 98 BPM. Sleeping. Then at mine. 112 BPM. Awake. Annoyed. Then at his phone. His own. 167 BPM. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack,” I said.

I tell her I will be done soon. I dry my hands. I walk into the OR. The team is ready. The lights are bright. Lily is on the table, her chest open, her heart exposed. It is small, no larger than my fist, but it is fighting. The left ventricle strains, the walls thick, the rhythm uneven. I look at the narrowing. It is worse than the scans showed. The aorta is pinched to a thread. The blood struggles to pass. The heart is working twice as hard as it should.

He clearly had the financial means to seek me out, so perhaps his issue was something internal and longstanding. “Now we are alone,” Chase said. “Just how I like it.” Was he trying to flirt with me? I fully ignored it. “Tell me what brought you in today, Chase,” I said. He seemed somewhat surprised for a moment. Perhaps because his charms didn’t work? But he recovered quick enough. “I have a rare heart condition,” he said. “It doesn’t really bother me often, but I have been told it will affect my lifespan. Someday I’m just going to…” He made a pop sound, then dropped a hand from vertical to horizontal.

"And the adult repairs? Endless, Howard—three in a row, all complex arrhythmias, but we ablated every one, no complications. Saved real lives today: this guy in his sixties, crashing from an aortic dissection when they wheeled him in, hypotensive and ripping apart, but we stented and stabilized him, and by evening he's sitting up, cracking jokes with his wife. Miracles like that? That's why I do this." Her hazel eyes sparkled with unfiltered excitement, her nose crinkling as she leaned forward, barely noticing the city lights blurring past. "Tomorrow's the big one—Max's surgery. That poor 9-year-old kid has a heart defect so rare they consulted three specialists just for the mapping. No fami

"Wait, I see one heartbeat there." "So she's having only one?" Adom asked. "I'm not sure just yet." She answered. "I can see a flutter on the left as well. Heartbeats are strong, which is good. I see only one; well, it's rare for an omega to carry one child; many times they carry more than two children, and sometimes only two." She took more pictures of the baby. "I thought a baby would be the size of a grain of rice; he or she looks bigger than that," Allen says, looking at Monika.