He Asked Me to Die Again, So I Named My Price novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Rather Than Live Unloved

The cardiologist came out at ten that night and said the word episode three times.

"A rhythm disturbance," she said. "It has corrected. I cannot find a cause, and I do not like that."

"Can I see her?" Yvette asked.

"She is asleep. Ten minutes."

Calla lay small in the white bed with monitors blinking green over her head.

Yvette sat beside her and held her hand and listened to the steady beep of the heart that had been hers.

She told it, silently, that she was sorry.

When she looked up, Alaric was in the doorway.

He had not left the corridor in nine hours.

"Come outside," he said, very low. "Please."

They walked to the end of the hall, to a window over the dark parking lot.

"The system did that," Alaric said.

"Yes."

"You talked to it."

"I asked it where home was." She kept her eyes on the glass. "There is no home. You were right. And there is a loan on her heart, thirty days from the day I signed. Eight left."

He did not say anything.

"It says that if I do not finish the mission by then, the heart is taken back."

"And the finish is you gone."

"Yes."

"Then we are done," Alaric said. His voice was perfectly steady. "You will not finish. We will find another way to keep her alive, and I will pay for it with everything I own."

"There is no other way."

"There is always another way."

"You do not believe that. You have been looking for seven lives."

He turned to her at last.

"I thought," he said, "that you wanted it. The ending. The door at the end. You told me so in the boathouse, and I thought, she will take it gladly, and I will have to stand there and let her."

"You thought I wanted to leave you."

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