My Heart Keeps Him Alive 1 Chapter 01
My heartbeat had never been normal. It was too steady, too quiet, too still.
Sleep, fever, blood loss, none of it made my heart rate budge more than a fraction.
When I was eighteen, the Croftfield family brought me to Blackwood Institute and put me in the Pinnacle
Suite, a climate-controlled monitoring room on the top floor.
Not because Nathaniel Croftfield loved me, but because the artificial heart inside his chest, the only one of
its kind in the world, needed my heartbeat as its calibration source.
If I stayed steady, he lived.
If I fell apart, he died.
Three months ago, a nurse accidentally pulled off one of my biosensor patches.
Five minutes later, on the other side of the Atlantic, Nathaniel’s heart stopped for three seconds.
The next day, the contractor went bankrupt. Everyone involved was blacklisted from the industry.
After that, even the elevator chime on the top floor of Blackwood Institute was silenced.
Then Nathaniel flew to Europe, and his fiancée, Margot Sheffield, took over.
She flipped through my nine-figure annual medical bill and laughed.
“The Croftfields pay nine figures a year for you,” she said. “For what? A breathing corpse?”
She ripped off my biosensor patches, unplugged the calibration cable, and shoved me onto a treadmill.
“Six miles,” she said. “Don’t come back until you finish.”
I grabbed the handrails, and for the first time in my life, my heart started pounding so hard I thought it would
burst out of my chest.
The alarm went off. She turned it off.
She didn’t know.
Six thousand miles and an ocean away, Nathaniel’s artificial heart was already breaking down with mine.
The belt went from a slow pace to a fast sprint in three seconds.
Two security guards grabbed my arms and pinned me to the rails. My skin still burned where she’d ripped off the biosensor patch.
“Turn it up.”
Margot stood outside the glass wall, arms crossed, watching.
The nurse went pale. “Ms. Sheffield, she can’t do strenuous…”
“Nine figures a year for this heartbeat,” Margot said. “Let’s see how precious it really is.”
The speed hit ten miles per hour. My knee slammed against the belt edge. My vision went black.
The alarm screamed.
[Heart rate anomaly. Base frequency fluctuation. Remote synchronization risk increasing.]
I dug my fingers into the rails, knuckles white, my voice breaking with every breath.
“You can’t… you can’t unplug the sync line, Margot.”
Margot walked in and bent down to look at me.
“Still acting?”
A stack of annual bills hit my face.
Climate pod maintenance. Medical team salaries. Imported medication. Dedicated servers.
Every number on every page could kill a person.
She picked one up and read aloud. “A hundred and thirty million a year.”
“What value have you ever created for the Croftfields?”
“Nothing,” she answered for me. “You just lie there and breathe.”
Cold sweat ran down my temples. My heart felt like someone was squeezing it, over and over.
There was nothing wrong with my heart.
But if my heart rate fell apart, Nathaniel’s artificial heart would fall apart with it, six thousand miles away.
“Ms. Sheffield,” I said. “Stop now. You can still fix this.”
She pressed the stack of papers harshly against my face.
A sharp metallic taste filled my mouth.
The young nurse, Chloe Bennett, ran in and grabbed a spare biosensor patch. “Ivy can’t keep running!”
One look from Margot, and the guards pulled Chloe away. The patch was thrown away.
“Suspended,” Margot said. “Say one more word, and you’ll never work in healthcare again.”
Chloe froze. She didn’t move.
When the treadmill finally stopped, my legs gave out, and I collapsed to the floor.
The ache in my chest kept getting worse, but the alarm cut out.
Margot had shut off the alert screen.
The world went quiet. All I could hear was my own ruined breathing.
She looked up at the top floor where I used to stay, then smiled.
“Go search her room.”
“I want to see what the Croftfields have been paying for exactly.”
Two lawyers and a few guards went upstairs. By the time they dragged me back, the room was destroyed.
The climate pod was open. Backup meds were scattered across the floor. The safe by my bed had been pried
open.
One of the lawyers walked up to Margot with a stack of papers.
“Ms. Sheffield. We found these.”
She took them. Glanced through them. Her lips curved up slowly.
“A kickback agreement with a device supplier.”
She pulled out more pages.
“Offshore wire receipts.”
She looked at me. For the first time, there was real triumph in her eyes.
“Ivy Brennan,” she said. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
I looked at those papers and almost laughed.
They weren’t mine.
But I didn’t even have the strength to stand anymore.
Margot had already decided I was guilty.
“Colluding with medical suppliers,” she announced. “Embezzling Croftfield medical resources Falsifying a medical condition to defraud special research funds.”
Her palm stung sharply against my cheek.
“Effective immediately, Ivy Brennan’s top floor monitoring privileges are revoked.”
Transfer her to a general observation ward.”
I jerked my head up. “No.”
The sync environment on the top floor couldn’t be interrupted. Climate control, silence, servers, biosensor patches. Everything had to stay in place.
Margot thought I was finally afraid.
“What’s the matter? Can’t survive without the top floor?”
She bent down and grabbed my chin.
“Then die.”
As they dragged me out of the room, the main control screen in Blackwood Institute flashed red.
[Base frequency lost.]
[Remote artificial heart synchronization abnormal.]
[Emergency contact: Nathaniel Croftfield.]
Margot glanced at it. Her expression didn’t change. She reached out.
Slap.
She turned off the entire alert panel.
At the same moment, six thousand miles away in a European conference room.
Nathaniel was bent over a merger agreement, with a pen in his hand.
The pen tip hit the paper, then slashed sideways without warning.
A second later, the artificial heart inside his chest let out a sharp, screaming alarm.