His Artificial Heart Beats With Mine

My heartbeat is so steady that sometimes, I don't resemble a human being at all. The fluctuations in my heart rate are very small even though I might be sleeping, suffering from a fever, or losing too much blood.

When I'm 18 years old, the Ziegler family admits me into a rehabilitation center. My new home is now a temperature-controlled intensive unit located on the top floor.

Oh, Aiden Ziegler doesn't love me at all. It's merely because the one and only artificial heart present in this world—and also in his chest—needs to be fine-tuned with my own heartbeat as its primary frequency.

If my heartbeat is steady, he gets to live. If not, he dies.

Three months ago, a nurse accidentally took off one of the monitoring pads on my chest. Five minutes later, Aiden, who was ten thousand miles away, went through a temporary crash where his heart stopped.

The next day, the third-party medical company filed for bankruptcy. Everyone who was involved in this incident got banned by the medical world.

Because of that incident, all of the sounds get eradicated from the top floor. Even the elevator's chimes get muted when it reaches the top floor of the rehab center.

Everything changes when Aiden flies to Iropa. That's when his fiancee, Mandy Sutherland, takes over the rehab center.

As she flips through my medical bill of nine figures, she sneers at me.

"So, the Zieglers are basically sustaining a loser who does nothing but gasps for breath while lying in bed, huh?"

After that, Mandy tears off the monitoring pads and unplugs the sync line. Then, she forces me to get on a treadmill.

"That'll be a six-mile run for you. You can forget about returning to the top floor if you can't finish the run."

As I grip the handrails tightly, I can feel my heart rate turning erratic for the first time ever. It feels as though my heart is about to burst out of my chest.

As soon as the alarm goes off, Mandy turns it off immediately.

What she doesn't know is that Aiden's artificial heart has already gone crazy, just like mine, while he's stuck in a place that's 12 time zones away.

The treadmill went from a slow walk to a sprint in three seconds. Two security guards grabbed me by the arms and pinned me down against the handrails. The spots on my chest where they'd just ripped off the monitoring pads still burned.

"Turn it up," Mandy Sutherland said.

She stood outside the glass wall, her arms crossed as she watched us.

A nurse was beside her. Her face went pale, and she said, "Ms. Sutherland, she can't do intense exercise—"

"The Ziegler family spends nine figures a year to keep that heart beating. I want to see how precious it really is," Mandy said nonchalantly.

The speed jumped to ten. My knees smashed against the edge of the belt, and my vision went black around the edges.