Free Web NovelChapter 492: Heart Transplant
Ever since I came back, I hadn’t been able to find my footing. Something had shifted inside me , a restlessness I couldn’t name and couldn’t shake. Vito noticed. He always noticed. He moved me to a safer location without explanation, just efficiency and care, the way he had always done things, and I let him. I didn’t have the energy to argue.
The new place had a terrace that looked out over the city, and I spent most of my time there, watching the skyline hold its shape against the fading light. I wasn’t thinking about anything specific. I was thinking about everything at once, which felt the same as thinking about nothing.
"What’s on your mind?"
His voice pulled me out of it so sharply I actually flinched. "Vito , when did you get here?"
He reached over and ruffled my hair the way he had since I was small, easy and familiar. "Something’s bothering you."
It wasn’t a question. It never was with him. He had raised me. He knew the difference between my silences, knew which ones meant I was fine and which ones meant I was unraveling quietly. I bit my lip, turning the words over before I let them out. "Vito, I miss home. Can you just let me,"
"No." He said it before I could finish. Quiet, final, no room left in it.
I grabbed his wrist before he could pull away. The grip surprised even me. "Wisteria took my name. That’s what she was doing, wasn’t it? She’s going to go back to the Sanders in my place. Take everything that was supposed to be mine."
Vito went very still.
"Anna,"
"Just tell me." My voice cracked on the edges. "If you keep it from me, it will eat me alive. I’d rather know."
For a long moment he didn’t speak. I could feel the tension in his arm, the weight of everything he had been carrying alone for years. Then he exhaled slowly and let his shoulders drop. "She still has other things to deal with first. It won’t happen for at least another year, maybe two. The Sanders are safe for now."
A year. Maybe two.
I repeated it to myself the way you repeat something when you’re trying to make it feel real. For years I had prayed that day would never arrive. Now it felt like watching a timer I couldn’t stop, its numbers bleeding away no matter how hard I stared.
"Be good," he said softly. "If your family knew about your condition, they would want you to take care of yourself first. Wouldn’t they?"
He was right, and I hated that he was. I needed the surgery. I had to survive. If I was gone, there would be no one left to protect them , no one who even knew what was coming. I nodded and didn’t say anything else.
After that, I cooperated. I took the medication, followed the schedule, answered the doctors’ questions without making it difficult. I waited. And when the morning of the surgery came, Vito tied a strip of cloth over my eyes before we got into the car.
"Vito, where are we going?"
"To the surgery. We’re almost there." His hand rested briefly on my shoulder. "Don’t be afraid."
But the blindfold made something old wake up in me. I was five again, being led somewhere I didn’t understand, the smell of antiseptic and fear, the sounds that didn’t match anything I had words for at the time. An operating room I was never supposed to see. A transaction that had no clean name. I had spent years assembling that memory into something I could look at directly, and what I had built was not a comfortable picture.
I had grown up inside a pack that ran on loyalty and unspoken rules, and somewhere in the gaps between those rules, I had started to understand that not everything Vito did was sanctioned. Some of it lived in shadow. Some of it moved through channels that left no trail.
And now there was a heart waiting for me somewhere ahead, and I needed to know where it came from.
"Vito." My voice came out low. "This heart , did it come from,"
Something pressed against the side of my neck, and then nothing.
The pain was the first thing I felt when I came back. A deep, pressurized ache in my chest, like my ribs were being held together by something new and not yet trusted. My stomach rolled. My head was thick and slow. I blinked at the ceiling for a long time before I understood where I was.
"Anna." Vito’s face appeared above me, his eyes searching mine. "How do you feel? Does anything hurt?"
I worked through it slowly. The surgery. The car. The blindfold. The way he had cut me off before I could finish asking. "It’s over?" I managed.
"It’s over. It went well. As long as your body doesn’t reject it, you’ll adjust."
I lay there listening to the new rhythm in my chest, steady and foreign, beating with a life I hadn’t chosen. "Vito." I kept my voice even. "Whose heart is this?"
"It doesn’t matter anymore."
He said it like it was kindness. Like sparing me the answer was the same as sparing me the weight of it. But I looked at him , really looked , and felt something cold move through me that had nothing to do with the surgery. I didn’t recognize the person sitting beside me. Or maybe I did, and that was exactly the problem. Maybe I had always known what he was capable of, and I had just never let myself land on it before.
He had done this for me. I understood that. And still, somewhere beneath the gratitude, something was wrong. Something had been wrong for a long time. The Sanders had a year, maybe two, before Wisteria moved. Before whatever Vito had been building reached its end. And I was lying here with someone else’s heart, bought through means I was afraid to name, recovering in a room I hadn’t chosen, in a life that felt less and less like mine.
I made my face soft. I let my eyes fill. "Vito," I whispered, "it hurts so much."
He leaned forward immediately, concern pulling at every line of his face. Good. Let him think I was fragile. Let him think the surgery had taken the fight out of me.
I needed him calm. I needed him to stop watching so closely.
Because the moment I was strong enough to stand on my own, I was going to leave.
